Politics & Power Quote by Larry Elder

Elder frames drug policy as a foreign quagmire fought on domestic soil, and the metaphor is doing almost all the political work. Calling it a "war" isn’t new; what’s sharp here is the prediction of an American public that, once properly informed, will react the way it supposedly reacts to Vietnam or Iraq: with moral revulsion and kitchen-table pragmatism. "Bring the troops home" recasts police, prosecutors, and prisons as an occupying force, implying the state has been deployed against its own citizens with the same mission-creep logic as any doomed intervention.

The phrase "Once brave politicians" is a quiet indictment. The obstacle isn’t evidence; it’s cowardice. Elder suggests the costs are already known but politically unsayable because the drug war has long been insulated by fear: fear of being labeled soft, fear of crime panic, fear of the racial and class anxieties that have historically made punitive policy an easy applause line. His subtext is that the consensus is manufactured and maintained by incentives, not by outcomes.

Context matters: Elder is a conservative commentator who often argues from individual responsibility, yet here he adopts a reformer’s playbook: shift the frame from morality and punishment to triage and public health. That pivot signals strategic intent as much as compassion. By moving drugs into the health column, he also moves the debate into a domain where cost-benefit scrutiny (overdose deaths, incarceration budgets, broken families, black markets) looks damning and where "cease-fire" sounds like common sense rather than leniency. The line isn’t just persuasion; it’s a dare to political leadership to stop treating punishment as a substitute for solving the problem.