Remember when Presidential candidates thought the drug war didn’t exist?

For a number of Presidential campaign cycles, the drug war got about as much coverage as philately. Other than the Granite Staters’ tireless work questioning candidates about medical marijuana and the obligatory “Did you ever smoke pot” debate question with all the candidates lying about whether they did/whether they did successfully/whether they enjoyed it, the drug war was absent.
These days, however, the topic is even more popular among the candidates than numismatics.
Now we’ve got John Edwards criticizing the war on drugs.

America needs to reconsider its punitive approach to “the so-called war on drugs,” presidential candidate John Edwards said here today.
“We’re not going to build enough prisons to solve this problem,” he told a crowd of about 800 at Grinnell College.

And Hillary Clinton even traveled an almost perceptible distance away from the extremes of wishy-washy-ness.

She also supports using U.S. funding to support proven harm reduction efforts – including needle exchange – to help hard-to-reach populations, and will continue to support new evidence-based prevention methods as additional scientific research helps us understand how to best address this epidemic.

It’s almost as though some politicians are starting to get the idea that supporting the drug war as it currently exists doesn’t really help them.