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disagree with that,' Kerlikowske said. We would like to do more in that direction.' Fifteen years ago, when the govemment began telling doctors to ask their patients about their drug use during routine medical exams, it described the program as one of the most proven ways to intervene early with would -be addicts. "Nothing happens overnight," Kerlikowske said. Until 100 years ago, drugs were simply a commodity. Then Western cultural shifts made them immoral and deviant, according to London School of Economics professor Fernanda Mena. Religious movements led the crusades against drugs: In 1904, an Episcopal bishop returning from a mission in the Far East argued for banning opium after observing "the natives' moral degeneration.' In 1914, The New York Times reported that cocaine caused blacks to commit 'violent cdmes,' and that it made them resistant to police bullets. In the decades that followed, Mena said, drugs became synonymous with evil. Nixon drew on those emotions when he pressed for his War on Drugs. "Narcotics addiction is a problem which afflicts both the body and the soul of America,' he said in a special 1971 message to Congress. "It comes quietly into homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods and breaks the fiber of community which makes neighbors. We must try to better understand the confusion and disillusion and despair that bring people, particularly young people, to the use of narcotics and dangerous drugs' Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young users, a teenager smoking pot and trying 'a little blow when you could afford it,' as he wrote in "Dreams From My Father." When asked during his campaign if he had inhaled the pot, he replied:' that was the point' So why persist with costly programs that don't work? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, silting down with the AP at the LtS Embassy in Mexico City, paused for a moment at the question. "Look," she says, starting slowly. 'This is something that is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody's life, a young child's life, a teenager's life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult. "If you think about it in those terms, that they are fighting for lives — and in Mexico they are literally lighting for lives as well from the violence standpoint — you realize the stakes are too high to let go "