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Parents Say The Darndest Things

Here's ONDCP's Bertha Madras from an online debate over student drug testing:

Newsweek: Is there a risk that kids who test positive for drugs will be stigmatized?

Madras: The thing that I have heard is that everyone knows who's using drugs; there are no surprises amongst the kids. Kids know who are the users, their friends know, so when a kid is not engaged in sports for one game, nobody is surprised. I've been a parent all my life, and I knew which one of the kids I didn't want my kids near.

This level of incoherence is an ONDCP specialty. Leaving aside the matter of whether Madras already had kids when she was born, there's still a lot of good stuff here.

Madras claims to know which kids use drugs, which basically undermines her whole point throughout the debate. If this information is widely available, who needs a urine collection program? Why waste precious educational resources to confirm what super-mom Bertha Madras already knows?

Obviously, she delights in stigma rather than refuting it. She admits to having a very negative impression of certain kids, and encourages her children to avoid them rather than offer support. Her statement is an endorsement of stigma and an unambiguous admission that singling out students is part of her agenda.

What a coward. Bertha Madras is as yellow as the urine she wants to collect from innocent children.

Winning at Whack-A-Mole

Here's Robert J. Caldwell at Human Events gloating over our extradition of 11 major drug traffickers from Mexico:

A counter-narcotics war popularly disparaged as a chronic loser, yet vital to the national interests of both Mexico and the United States, is producing its biggest victories ever.

Heck, let's give it to him. Biggest drug war victory ever! If there's such a thing, this has got to be it. We've made "an enormous leap forward" Karen Tandy proudly exclaimed from atop the first rung of her towering ladder to the moon.

This glowing triumph will provide a great opportunity to see if the drug war actually works. Maybe the Biggest Victory Ever will lead to a rock shortage down on crack street. But if it doesn't (and it so totally won't), then this grand achievement will serve only to illustrate that top priorities of the international drug war still don't bring us a day closer to the fairytale ending our drug warriors daydream about.

Indeed, the black market is a dragon with a thousand heads that regenerate if you cut one off. We can battle it for generations, but the beast will only grow stronger until we stop feeding it.