IN THE early 1960s, as a young newsman I rode with police officers as they went about the business of serving and protecting in Rosenberg.

Chief Dan “Chick” Manges was one of the best officers I’ve ever known. He was very personable and a veritable treasure trove of information, which was extremely useful in crafting interesting news stories.

Chick allowed me to ride with him and various officers on patrols and see the troubles they encountered in just routine rounds. I watched traffic control and stops, arrests of drunks, fighters, burglars and even the officer-related shooting of a man who’d just stabbed another man to death.

THE CHIEF could, as one contemporary put it, smell dope a mile away.

Chick understood dope and its seductive and addictive powers to both the distributors and the users. This understanding enabled him to be prophetic.

We became friends and he allowed me access to information and conversations that, while they could not be used in a story, were great background. Chick was trying to nail the “big boss” of a ring bringing marijuana from Mexico, breaking it up into small packages to sell in nearby Houston. This big boss, the chief said, was a former law enforcement officer, then served in elective office. Many thought he was beyond reproach.

Chick had a connection that was a direct pipeline into the big boss’s operation. He allowed me to listen to phone calls from his informant, a beautiful young prostitute who was the big boss’s girlfriend. She’d given birth to his child, still an infant at the time she gave Chick information.

That info led to a raid in which I accompanied the chief and his officers. They seized about a hundred pounds of marijuana (a huge haul then) and arrested a half dozen people, but narrowly missed the big boss who escaped just ahead of the raid.

Several months later, the young prostitute, herself a drug user, took a bed sheet and tied her baby around her waist, walked off into the Brazos River, drowning herself and the child.

DURING THIS process of educating me about tracking drugs, Chick prophesied the growth of the illicit drug trade in this country. He told me that because it was addictive and illegal and there was so much money in it that it would grow into something so enormous that the U.S. would be almost powerless to combat it.

I lost track of Chick many years back so I don’t know if he’s still with us or not, but I’m sure it saddened him to see his prophecy come true. He’d probably shake his head at the War on Drugs and its seeming inability to make much of a dent in the drug business.

There are and have been some pretty well-known names associated with a movement to legalize drugs, which many claim would do away with the huge drug cartels because it would eliminate the need to smuggle and peddle illicit drugs. It is suggested that the prohibition of drugs has had the same effect as the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s and early 1930s. That created an enormous criminal enterprise of smuggling alcoholic beverages into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico. We see headlines daily about the criminal activity and terror generated by the huge drug cartels.

THE LATE conservative leader, William F. Buckley, Jr., made statements suggesting the legalization of drugs, as did the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Other prominent names making such statements include George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

Most prominent among law enforcement figures endorsing the legalization of drugs is Jack A. Cole, a 26-year veteran of the New Jersey state police. Cole spent 12 of those years as an undercover narcotics officer. In 2002 he formed LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (www.leap.cc).

I don’t know where I stand yet on legalizing drugs. I know that more than half of our burgeoning Texas prison population is in for drug offenses connected to use and addiction.

I do believe it is a subject the nation should be seriously discussing.

Willis Webb is a retired community newspaper editor-publisher. He can be reached by email at wwebb@wildblue.net.