Required Reading

The Longest War We Lost and Recalling a Small Boat in tie Big One

It's the longest war in American history, and Ait has been lost. That is the thesis of DrugWar Politics: The Price of Denial, a new book by Swarthmore College political scientist Ken Sharpe '66 and three co-authors. The assumption that drug users are morally weak and that drug use is criminal behavior has prevented Americans from seeing drug abuse for what it truly is—a serious public health problem, say the authors. In the process the "War on Drugs" has become one of the sacred cows of American politics, trapping Congress and successive administrations into out-toughing each other to avoid seeming "soft on crime."

Drug War Politics does not argue for legalization. Rather, Sharpe and his colleagues propose a "public-health paradigm" under which the government would abandon its unrer alistic zero-tolerance policy and shift resources to education, prevention, and treatment. The aim would not be more punishment but better health, and the measure of success would no longer be tons seized but lives saved.

DickKeresey '38 commanded a PTboat in a squadron that included Kennedy's famous 109. In PT 105 Keresey's memory is sharp for dramatic incidents, and his sense of humor belies the life-or-death situations that he and his crew and his fellow captains faced nightly. He was once assigned as a decoy to lure out of base a squadron ofjapanese Zeros that regularly preyed on the PT boats. The plan was to test the capability of a newly designed American fighter plane. The new plane never showed up; the Zeros did.