Our high school science teacher, ironically named Mr White, affected some roguish behavior so as to be noticed. Just like one of us. And one of his principles was in assigning blame for cheating.

During a test, I’m casually admiring the handwriting of near-neighbor Cathy, and Mr White suddenly asks, ‘Cathy, do you have your paper covered?’ She shook her head from side to side, like an honest idiot. He said, "That’s five points off."

His idea was to punish the enabler, which seemed strange. After all, I was the one cheating. But Mr White’s policy was the way of the world.

I’ve been wondering just when it will be that someone comes around to the obvious guilt in such matters as drugs. If the raging speed freak in the boardroom or the crack addict in the dorm were to just stop it, then the Taliban would dissolve for lack of funds and Columbia and Mexico would simply fail.

Of course, pop music would be all Barry Manilow all the time, but we have to take the bad with the bad.

In the silly farce "Traffic," drug czar Wakefield asks his Mexican counterpart, General Salazar (of course a major trafficker), how his country treats addicts. There is a meandering reply meant to telegraph insensitivity, but it’s a foolish question. Addiction is an American franchise.

But they are voters, or customers, or kin, all this vast army of quivering victims, they must be treated with respect in a free and open society. So we spend billions eradicating crops in other lands and paying others to kill and be killed in their jungles and on their streets just so they don’t bring their murderous mayhem to our shores. Meanwhile, the party continues.

Addiction is a disease, we are informed, and you don’t deal harshly with sufferers of yaws and pellagra, do you? So let us gently abide these poor children and their appetites, and continue to fund great wars against foreign phantoms who feed them. It’s the American way.

Unless he’s a prominent politician, it’s the hooker busted, not the john. Suits have been filed against fast food joints for making the obese fat, and bartenders are arrested for selling drinks to drunks. The great tragedy known as Bungle-O-Bush –

Hey, Bungle-O-Bush,
Who did you push?
(You fell on your tush)

– was due to southern saps and plains proles mindlessly voting for the guy they’d most like to have a beer with. If the sucker is there, someone will always come along to take advantage of it.

Let’s assign blame where it’s due. For starters, let’s go back to high school and give Cathy her five points back.