Thanks to all of the people who took the time to respond to last week’s column, &uot;Where did all the bones come from?&uot;

The most unexpected response came from a 14-year-old boy in Texas named Drew who pretty much took religion to task for failing to produce any tangible evidence of an omniscient supreme being.

Drew acknowledges the existence of one or more higher beings, but is more convinced of the existence of dinosaurs than the Son of God.

The best response came from M. Hart, who called me out for baiting my audience into a set of facts that are challengeable themselves, primarily the assumption that dinosaurs and mankind co-existed.

Thanks for all of your responses; you guys are great.

Now, the moment I have been waiting years for.

I present to you, my ‘Beef Bacon’ theory.

Growing up, my father never allowed us to eat pork.

So I grew accustomed to searching for beef bacon whenever I wanted to add some traditional symmetry to my breakfast meals.

If you live in a part of the country where is there is a significant Jewish or Muslim population, then finding non-pork products is not too difficult of a task.

More often than not, rural areas of the country, especially in the south and Midwest, would not stock beef bacon on their shelves.

It’s the ‘supply and demand’ theory; if there is no demand, why bother keeping a supply.

Fast forward to 2002 when I was a shift supervisor at a hot dog manufacturing plant.

I witnessed first hand the distribution network necessary to facilitate our company making the beef related specialty products we produced and the multitude of individuals needed to make that distribution work.

Consider that right now, all over the country, there are restaurants, schools, prisons, airplanes, hotels, street vendors, hospitals and supermarkets that are delivering hamburgers, steaks, hot dogs and ground beef to consumers upon demand.

Can you imagine the manpower needed for that type of effort in the U.S. alone?

Let alone the entire globe.

In 2005, the US imported nearly four billion pounds of beef.

In order for a steak to make it to your dinner table it takes farmers, truck drivers, slaughterers, more truck drivers, manufacturing plants, more truck drivers, USDA agents, Federal import and export agents, cargo ships, dock workers, supermarket employees and advertising companies.

Still, it is still not economically feasible to put beef bacon on most supermarket shelves.

Yet, I have never been anywhere in the United States of America where there weren’t crack dealers.

Now explain to me how if all the aforementioned labor force cannot manage to get beef bacon into the majority of US markets, the government would have me believe that &uot;Pookie&uot; and &uot;Junebug&uot; managed to get crack to infiltrate the entire nation?

The U.S. is always talking about a war on drugs; really, where?

There is no war on drugs; there is a war over drugs.

I could spend four pages detailing Afghanistan, the Taliban and their connection in the international drug trade, but I’ll digress because that story leads right back to the White House and I know that you would rather hear about the great job we are doing in Iraq.

The amount of cocaine that comes into this country would boggle your mind.

That’s why when I hear about four law enforcement officers (minimum combined salary $80,000) recovering three grams of crack (maximum sale value $60), I don’t jump up and down and say whoopee.

The United States judicial system is profiting off of the drug trade like Budweiser at a ‘tractor pull’.

The system of Border Control, DEA, local task forces, beat officers, sheriffs and deputies, district attorneys, defense attorneys, probation officers, rehab specialists, drug treatment clinics, D.A.R.E. program officials and whoever else that has specialized careers that focus on controlled substances is a self perpetuating cash cow.

The system ‘re-ups’ with probation fees, bond fees, court costs, lawyer fees, confiscated vehicles and property seizures.

The system keeps its primary labor force through mandatory sentencing, specialized appointments of heavy handed black judges and believe it or not, Black Entertainment Television.

Everybody is getting rich off the backs of young black males in the ghetto.

Sort of like slavery huh?

Now don’t get me wrong, breaking the law is breaking the law.

But when the methodology of enforcing any law allows for officials to create a police state in the part of the equation that is on the low end of the economic pie of the industry, you have to wonder who decides to not pursue the ‘big dogs’ of the drug trade?

Do American citizens actually think that the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent on drugs in this country only come from ‘the hood’ where the annual income for a family of four is less than $18,000 per year?

So here is your word problem for the class ‘War on Drugs 101’.

If it takes 10,000 people and 500 government officials to put beef bacon in 35% of the country; how many people and government officials does it take to put cocaine in 100% of the same country?

Here’s another one.

Since the courts have deemed that cigarettes are addictive, occasionally fatal and purposely made to be that way, then why don’t we have a war on tobacco?

Last time I looked, it was growing and being picked and harvested in fields all around me, just like drug dealers.

Holla back curly.morris@r-cnews.com