“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

That’s what new White House Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said in an interview a few weeks ago. (See here for full write-up in The Wall Street Journal.) And he’s right. How can you fight a war on a thing. Once you declare war on a ‘product,’ you carry it to the people involved in the product, and if you want to prosecute the war well, you end up doing things such as raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states in which the people at large have voted to approve it. (This is another area in which social conservatives and small government and libertarian conservatives clash — What happened to the principle of federalism? the latter ask the former.)

Kerlikowske ran the police force in Seattle, a city that has pursued lenient drug policies for years. In 2003, for instance, voters approved an initiative to set the enforcement of marijuana violations low on the priority list, although Kerlikowske opposed it. While he doesn’t advocate legalization of drugs, however, he does seem to be a pragmatist about balancing public health issues, available resources, and plain old human nature. He favors needle exchange programs, and he understands that “arrests won’t fix matters” (those are _The Wall Street Journal’_s words, not his own).

Only one senator voted against Kerlikowske’s appointment, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Coburn fears that Kerlikowske simply has too lax an attitude about marijuana, an attitude that should instead make people all the more optimistic about Obama’s choice. And if they wish to consult the thinking of the other side, the pessimism about Kerlikowske, the Journal article concludes with a statement by James Pasco, head of the Fraternal Order of Police, that acknowledges alternatives to incarceration, but ends with the same ol’, same ol’ rigidity:

“While I don’t necessarily disagree with Gil’s focus on treatment and demand reduction, I don’t want to see it at the expense of law enforcement. People need to understand that when they violate the law there are consequences.”

The Journal also includes charts on drug use and federal seizures. Seizures of marijuana are up in the last year or two, but they’re down for cocaine, while heroin and methamphetamine are flat. But in spite of all the money pumped into this government program, usage of drugs remains steady, with pretty much no change in the last decade.