Pubdate: Sat, 5 Feb 2011 Source: Post and Courier, The (Charleston, SC) Copyright: 2011 Evening Post Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.charleston.net/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/567 Referenced: Ravenel's OPED http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n073/a01.html Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Thomas+Ravenel Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) Bookmark: http://www.drugsense.org/cms/geoview/n-us-sc (South Carolina) RAVENEL PLAYS THE VICTIM William F. Buckley, conservative icon, warned 16 years ago: "The War on Drugs is lost." Since then, increasing numbers of Americans across a wide ideological range have raised practical and constitutional objections to the flawed law-enforcement approach to the problem of illegal drugs. So it's hardly a surprise to see a man elected to statewide office in South Carolina as a self-billed conservative Republican in 2006 joining the chorus against the drug war. But while Thomas Ravenel offers some persuasive -- and some not so persuasive -- points on that issue in a column on today's Commentary page, he's the wrong spokesman for this particular cause. That's not because of the arguments he put in his column. It's because of these facts he left out: Less than a year after becoming state treasurer, Mr. Ravenel resigned while facing drug charges. He eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy with intent to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison. So when Mr. Ravenel decries drug "prohibition" as "a violation of our civil rights," he sounds as if he's playing the victim. Yet Americans have no constitutional right to pick and choose which laws they will obey. And Mr. Ravenel's self-serving pitch about how heroin, alcohol and tobacco inflict many more fatalities than cocaine sounds as if he's minimizing that drug's insidious dangers. Growing ranks of Americans rightly agree that more treatment and less jail time is in order on the illegal-drug front. But that doesn't mean many of them favor legalizing cocaine. As the plague of drug addiction shows, Mr. Ravenel's nostalgia for the good old 19th century days when "drugs were legal and could be bought in grocery stores and pharmacies" is misplaced. And as a candidate for drug-law reformer, Mr. Ravenel is clearly miscast. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake