You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these days. It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer.

Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets the media hype and campaign trail rhetoric.

Railing against recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be locked away is so '90s.

But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news cameras and photo-ops, still chewing up federal and state resources and casting criminal sanctions over entire neighborhoods. Some four or so decades into an intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug use, billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of criminals, many of them foreigners, have been enriched; and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been imprisoned. And the use of illegal substances continues unabated.

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