Bryan Denson at the Oregonian—the award-winning Bryan Denson—had a huge piece in Tuesday's paper about heroic efforts to eradicate illegal Mexican "marijuana plantations" on public lands. It's the usual drug war stenography/stupid fucking credulous hackery: only "authorities" are quoted, no comments are sought from anyone on the other side, and nowhere in Denson's 1200-word, 28-paragraph piece—not in one paragraph, not in one sentence, parenthetical, or subordinate clause—is anyone allowed to question the efficacy of America's Never Ending War On Drugs. The authorities are out there tearing up pot plants and chasing down illegal immigrants at great expense to the public and, hey, that's pretty much all the public needs to know. Is any of this shit working? Is pot any harder to find? Is it more expensive? Has a dent been made in demand? How much do all those "helicopter flyovers" cost anyway?Denson isn't telling. But Denson allows some doubt—or pretends to allow some doubt—to creep in at the end:

It might seem wasteful to spend scarce public resources seizing pot plants, especially in a state that tolerates the drug.

Yeah, this war on pot might seem wasteful—particularly when you consider that we've been waging this war for forty-odd years and pot is cheaper, stronger, and more widely available than it has ever been, all points Denson goes out of his way to avoid considering. But while the war on pot might seem wasteful to an informed Oregonian reader—a reader who got informed elsewhere—we must keep fighting the war on pot because "government authorities here" tell Denson that profits from "West Coast marijuana plantations" fund violent Mexican drug gangs. (Kind of like profits from the illegal gin trade once funded violent American gangs in the 1920s?) And gangs are bad. And illegal grows are bad. And violence is bad. Legalizing and regulating and taxing pot would end the violence, put the drug gangs out of business, and stop illegal grows, but Denson doesn't go there. The Oregonian's readers do:

We could just legalize pot so American farmers can grow it without fear, and without trashing the environment while doing so. We can tax that to help close budget gaps, and we could reduce state costs by not incarcerating people who grow it. Seems too easy though...

This progressive defers to the late leading Conservative William F. Buckley and his eloquent argument for the legalization of marijuana. Look it up. A Conservative we can believe in.

Taxing and regulating marijuana would eliminate the blackmarket thereby pushing the cartels out of the massive market, just like alcohol production and distribution were no longer handled by bootleggers & the mafia when alcohol prohibition was repealed. This war has been a collosal 40+ year failure and it has led to countless instances of our freedoms being trampled upon and our tax $ squandered.

If you want to get both sides of the story on the War On Drugs—and there are two sides to this story, despite all the stupid fucking credulous hackery—you have to delve into the comments. Pro-legalization arguments are all over the comment threads when a daily paper writes up a pot bust. Why can't they ever appear in the stories themselves?