by A.M. Rosenthal

About the author: A.M. Rosenthal is a columnist for the New York Times.

“It’s nice to think that in another five or ten years maybe the right over one’s consciousness, the right to possess and consume drugs, may be as powerfully and as widely understood as the other rights of Americans are.”

If that thought strikes you too as nice, you don’t have to do much. Just lean back and enjoy the successes of Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, who said it in 1993, and other executives of well-financed “drug reform” foundations.

Maybe he is a little optimistic about his timing. But he and others who would like now-illegal drugs to be a right certainly have made political headway since his pronouncement at the...