---

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. — Albert Einstein

---

Like many of you, I’ve been following this summer’s Keystone Kops marathon, aided and abetted by regular, hefty doses of my drugs of choice (caffeine and alcohol in various flavors).

I used to enjoy nicotine, too, but managed to shake that habit without the ham-handed persuasion of the AMA, FDA, DoJ, USADA, WADA, the French gendarmes or the Spanish Guardia Civil. All it took was a vicious upper-respiratory bug that was on a first-name basis with double pneumonia. I had trouble just breathing air for a couple weeks, and by the time I was well again (thanks to some more drugs), the faintest whiff of tobacco smoke made me queasy.

Twenty-some-odd years later, I’m equally sick of something else — this endless, hopeless, swirling black hole for legal tender in quantity euphemistically called the War on Drugs. It would make a Tony Montana of the fabled soigneur and dope pusher Mary Poppins:

In ev'ry job that must be done
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game

And ev'ry task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree!
It's very clear to me that

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

Yes, indeedy. That metaphorical "spoonful of sugar" makes the actual "medicine" we all must take go down like Paris Hilton in an NFL locker room after a couple Cosmopolitans and a fistful of ecstasy. Some of us settle for the legal drugs, even come to prefer them to the other sort (fewer unhappy conversations with lawmen, judges and cellmates). And some of us don’t (see Willie Nelson. I’m serious. See him before some overzealous prosecutor puts him away. The old stoner still has what it takes).

But who decided that whisky was good and marijuana bad? Lidocaine, si, cocaine, no? EPO is the Devil’s Strawberry Jam Jar, but just about anything else, from salbutamol to corticosteroids, is just dandy as long as you have a note?

In a word: Bullshit. And expensive bullshit, too. Incarceration has become a growth industry, thanks in part to mandatory sentencing guidelines ordered by the field generals in the Drug Wars. And next month the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) will take up the question of its budget for 2007 — its $23 million budget. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is in line for $8.4 million. You cut me in for a taste of that and I’ll fight anyone or anything you want, from Joe Frazier to a medium tank. "Make Dick Pound stop!" some cycling fans squeal. Would you? Man, I’d be on TV pitching so hard and fast, the Mets would dream about firing their entire bullpen and hiring me.

Some outraged cycling fans will argue that the issue here isn’t recreational drug use, but proscribed performance enhancement (though I notice the occasional blunt-burning snowboarder finds himself tarred with the same scarlet brush as a blood-boosting cyclist). And I will concede that this has been the big sticking point for me, for many long years.

Personally, I don’t care what kind of drugs you enjoy, as long as you’re not operating heavy machinery in my vicinity, or botching a vein shot at the next barstool over and squirting a jet of corpuscles into my pint. But I loathe cheating in sport, which is supposed to be a purer thing than other human endeavors, say, business or politics, assuming you can separate the two (try a giant centrifuge).

Indeed, the first definition of "sport" in Webster’s New World College Dictionary is:

1 any activity or experience that gives enjoyment or recreation; pastime; diversion

The third definition is as follows:

3 fun or play

Where it all went to hell can be found in definition No. 2:

2 such an activity, esp. when competitive, requiring more or less vigorous bodily exertion and carried on, sometimes as a profession, according to some traditional form or set of rules. . . .

Consulting our Webster’s once again for the definition of "professional," and discarding all the lofty chin music about high standards, we come up with the following:

3 earning one’s living from an activity, such as a sport, not normally thought of as an occupation

Now, try to keep up here. Our sport, cycling, is topped by an elite layer of professionals earning their livings from a competitive activity that demands vigorous bodily exertion, and a sizable percentage of this crème de la crème has decided, as have so many of us, that dope helps. According to the current set of rules, this is deemed cheating.

But why should we place legal, ethical and moral roadblocks in the path of grown men and women who simply want to put human growth hormone, insulin, cortisone, testosterone and other people’s blood into their bodies in order to put food on the table? It’s restraint of trade, by God, shameless, pointless interference with the free market. What are we, Democrats?

More important, why should we even care if these yo-yos load up on eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog until their hematocrits hit six figures and life-threatening injuries sustained in high-speed crashes heal in seconds, with even severed limbs regenerating like time-lapse photos of roses blooming?

Pro cycling is not and never has been a pastime or diversion — not for the participants, anyway — and thus is not a sport, by Webster’s definition. It is a business for the athletes and entertainment for the rest of us. And frankly, I no longer find this endless police report entertaining. I want action.

So I say, let ’em eat, drink, shoot or snort whatever they want. What I want is to see pro cyclists mutating into thunder-thighed velociraptors whose superhuman speed leaves colorful, blurry trails in the air, like The Flash. Given the proper blend of man and medicine, the ascent of L’Alpe d’Huez should take no more than a few seconds, which will free up valuable airtime for commercials hawking watery lager and little blue weenie-stiffeners. I want to see those 21 hairpins rising and falling under the passage of the peloton, like the looping desert highways in the Road Runner’s wake. Who needs a three-week Tour de France? Not me. Three days is more like it. I have things to do.

Did you care whether John Belushi was doing speedballs during "Animal House" or Richard Pryor was free-basing when he recorded "Is It Something I Said?" If you did, I’ll bet you laughed anyway. Is "Revolver" somehow less spectacular because the Beatles were into psychedelics? Wine-addled Charlie Parker blowing mad horn on 52nd Street, Don Marquis pecking out "archy and mehitabel" with a Scotch bottle in the desk drawer at The New York Evening Sun, Poe and Coleridge smoking opium, Ray Charles shooting smack — dopers have given us plenty of things to enjoy over the years, and if a lot of them have died as a consequence, well, nobody gets out of this world alive, as the Alabama philosopher Hank Williams once noted. But while we’re here, damn it, we require entertainment, and plenty of it. That "spoonful of sugar," don’t you know.

So let’s quit pretending we give a fat rat’s ass about all this nonsense. Fire the sanctimonious narcs, legalize the drugs, and then look the other way until the starter’s pistol fires.

Hell, most of these dope-swilling, Lycra-wearing sissies are still alive. I don’t think we're getting our money's worth.

---

Did O'Grady make you mad enough to eat an Irish baby, or has he demonstrated once again that he's none too Swift? Take a great big hit of whatever gets you all cranked up and send that stream-of-consciousness e-mail to webletters@insideinc.com. Don't forget to include your ... uh .... include your ... uh ... oh, yeah, your full name, city and state or nation.