WASHINGTON -- Let's consider the stance of George W. Bush as lock-'em-all-up tough guy. And let's apply his implacable hostility to possessors and users of cocaine to a really bad guy.
Like Sherlock Holmes.
Oh, I know he never existed and was written into turn-of-the-century London when the stuff was legal (here, too, by the way). But the alleged wisdom of the governor's no-exceptions sternness has to be apparent in all cases, hypothetical and retroactive, or it makes no sense. Holmes is an appropriate subject, not to excuse drug use but to understand it; using Sigmund Freud, by contrast, would tax Governor Bush's reasoning powers unfairly.
So imagine Bush landing like a ton of bricks on a modern incarnation of the greatest of all detectives, whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed as a guy with something of a habit that affected no one but himself and was indulged regularly but not constantly. Remember, you could find millions of Americans who do or have done that, often when they were making ''mistakes'' as young people.
Through Dr. John Watson's narration, we learn that Holmes was a user when he was in between cases. In the early story ''A Scandal in Bohemia,'' Doyle's Watson refers to Holmes's ''cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind ... the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.''
But he also said that in his down time, Holmes was holed up on Baker Street, ''alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.''
A bit later, in ''The Yellow Face,'' a disapproving Dr. Watson said of the great man: ''Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.''
The only ominous description begins ''The Sign of the Four,'' when Watson comes upon Holmes shooting up, which the doctor says he has been doing three times a day for many months in this period.
Morphine or cocaine? he asks. The latter, replies Holmes, offering some to Dr. Watson, calling it ''a seven percent solution'' (hence the title of the second-rate movie decades later).
Watson berates himself for not ojecting more strenuously but makes his point, which Holmes takes.
''I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one,'' he says. ''I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter or small moment.''
''But consider the cost,'' argues Dr. Watson.... Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?''
Holmes counters that it's no big deal, because when his mind is attacking difficult problems, ''I can dispense with artificial stimulation.''
So should our modern Holmes be locked up for felony possession? Or should Doyle's works be banned from school and public libraries as dangerous propaganda? Should tolerance in British detective yarns be limited to Agatha Christie, who in ''The Labors of Hercule '' is more careful to note that in addition to exhilaration, ''take too much of it and you get violent mental excitement, delusions and delirium''?
Of course not, and I'd bet Bush would agree.
And there's the rub.
Felony possession, in practice, is not a charge aimed at the discreet or at well-off, well-connected young people making mistakes. It's a bullet aimed at poor kids on the street, more often black or Hispanic kids; in practice the bullet's purpose is to force users to give up suppliers, but that doesn't blot out the fact that by the thousands people languish in prison who have never posed any threat to any law-abiding citizen. Many of them need help and want desparately to stop using, but jail cells outnumber treatment program slots.
Bush's weird behavior to date has nothing to do with his qualifications to be president no matter what he did 'twixt 18 and 28, any more than Holmes's admitted using of cocaine affected his ability to be a brilliant problem-solver. But Bush's selective claims and selective silence knock the legs out from under his ability to discuss an extremely serious problem in this country without evoking legitimate snickers. And hypocrisy lurks in the shadows.
Elementary.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
