Whenever they have someone in charge of drug enforcement in the government, they always call him a “drug Czar.” Why? The title Czar basically means king, emperor, lord, so we’re basically calling the guy a drug lord. When I hear “drug Czar” I think of someone sitting on a throne in a lavish palace surrounded by bales of cocaine and armed guards, not some governmental anti-drug official.
It all started with the energy czar in 1973, and ever since whenever the executive branch appoints someone to oversee government activity in a particular realm they inevitably become known as the “x” czar. Here’s a column from the Christian Science Monitor regarding the word’s usage.
For the record, the formal title of the U.S. “drug czar” is Director of the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy.
So drug czars are the opposite of drug lords and drug kingpins.
A drug kingpin is a big producer or whosesaler, a drug lord is a distributor, and a pusher is a retailer.
And a drug czar is a bureaucrat.
Kinda takes the glamour out of the descriptions.
(Do I have the kingpin and lord descriptions correctly, or reversed?)
[nitpick]
Keys of coke, not bales.
[/nitpick]
Kilos.
Check out the Doonesbury cartoons from 1973, when he satirized the first use of the word by picturing Bill Simon’s reign as energy czar with truly imperial trappings.
We discussed this briefly last year in [thread=269273]this thread.[/thread].