The most urgent war on drugs has nothing to do with marijuana.

The rise of pathogenic bacterial resistance to antibiotic drugs is equal parts appalling and fascinating.  Our relationship with bacterial diseases is cyclic:  microbes infect our bodies and transmit themselves among us, we drive them back with medicine, a few unique bacteria survive and repopulate their own robust kind, and we must then find a new weapon against them.  As in war or espionage, both opponents adapt to attack and exploit each other’s weaknesses.  As bacteria evolve in response to the drugs we deploy, their strengths and weaknesses change; their strength manifests as resistance to the last drug treatment they endured – or else they wouldn’t be alive in the first place. Their weaknesses could be any of several things, but our job as worthy opponents is to exploit them.