"You should've been a copywriter."
"I can't write worth shit."
"Everything has been calculated, Clarissa said quietly. Its up to someone to put the plan into action." There was a note of acceptance in her tone.
"How long did you know, Julian Fairfax?" I was hoping to be able to gather to gather all the loose threads together and provide the FBI with a plausible story, one that would end in a dead end. Our position was untenable. I had to give the FBI enough so that they would cool their jets.
"For many many years. He owns real estate in Santa Barbara. Owned. We met at a celebrity tennis-match at Marina del Ray about six or seven years ago and hit it off?"
"Sack time?"
"No. Besides, Althea was usually with him, not that I would have been interested. Besides, he was devoted to Althea."
"And she to him?"
"I'm sure."
"Why are you so interested in who is sleeping with who?"
"Shouldn't that be whom?"
"Who cares? I am an entomologist not a grammarian."
"It helps to identify the dynamics of the game, that's all."
"Making drugs illegal adds to the lure."
"It also provides a de facto value-added tax. Traffickers collect that tax in the form of higher prices. It provides a barrier to entry."
"So what you're saying is that, legalization would reduce the cost of the drugs that are now illicit. It would thus significantly reduce the number of crimes committed to buy drugs. Is that what you're saying?"
"It will never happen. It's simply not politically correct in the eyes of those who are in power or who aspire to power."
"What ever happened to the principle that the primary objective of drug policy should be to minimize the harm that drug abusers do to others?"
"Good luck," I said. "The problem with that premise is that it is eminently sensible."
"You're a cynic."
"Name one ex-cop who's not."
"I'm afraid that you are the only ex-cop, I've ever encountered."
"The situation is fraught with difficulties, impossibilities and imponderables. When the politicians get a hold of it they make decisions that are totally inane, if not insane, at least lethal in their impact."
"For example," Clarissa said. "You have physicians being busted for prescribing marijuana for terminally ill cancer patients or for those suffering from glaucoma who can't get relief from synthetic derivatives."
"And you have patients dying in agony when an injection of heroin would make their passing tolerable. That's another kettle of fish."
"And you have," said Clarissa, "adulterants found in street samples of cocaine that are far more harmful than the cocaine itself."
"The bathtub gin of the nineties."
Among the most dangerous consequence of current drug laws is the harm that stems from the unregulated nature of illicit drug production and sale. Emergency room physicians speculate that many of the toxicological syndromes associated with cocaine abuse may be the result of adulterants, which are found in most street samples of cocaine. Society's moral condemnation of some substances and not of others amounts to little more than a prejudice rooted in the demonization that has accompanied all drug wars.
Clarissa Woo began slowly. "I think my approach is a fitting response to the disguised agenda of the Communists and other revolutionaries who wish to bring this country down. I think Fidel's younger brother, Raoul, said it best not long after the revolution. Drugs will be a decisive weapon in disrupting the fabric of Western democracies."
"Similar opinions or desires were voiced by Mao, Khrushchev and Chou En-lai."
"Legalizing narcotics would be to sign the death warrants of those who for want of a better term should be considered under privileged. Anyone who wants to legalize crack advocates anarchy and maybe even genocide."
"What about nicotine and alcohol?"