MISPLACED LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES

Dear Editor:

Our government, whose most important obligation is to protect Americans
from threats, both foreign and domestic, has failed our citizens miserably.
The CIA, whose sordid history is synonymous with drugs, created the heroin
market that fuels these terrorists today, while supporting these same
persons during the Afghani/Russian conflict.

The very policies our government uses to outlaw these substances causes the
majority of the problems blamed on these drugs. Does anyone honestly
believe that these worthless powders would be more valuable than gold, if
these failed policies were not in place?

While declaring war against inanimate objects like illegal plants and
substances and the citizens who choose to use them, they've allowed our
most dangerous enemies to enter our country at will. In light of this
current disaster, somehow, marijuana, which has never caused one death in
the history of mankind, provides a whole new meaning for the word benign.
Yet we spend tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars annually pursuing
this plant around the globe. Wouldn't these resources be more wisely spent
actually protecting our lives, instead of promoting a few people's idea of
morality? Pot enforcers could painlessly be trained to become sky marshals,
saving incredible amounts of wasted taxpayers' assets, and doubtfully
anyone would be the worse for it, The difference here is: terrorists shoot
back, while marijuana users go passively.

As elected and appointed officials strive to disarm the American citizen,
they allow our enemies to arm themselves with all manner of explosives,
deadly chemicals and biological agents, nuclear weapons, and a cornucopia
of military hardware manufactured by U.S. companies. Never has the phrase,
"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" rung so true.

Government agents have committed hundreds of atrocities against our men,
women and children, for the flimsiest of justifications in this disastrous
drug war; all the while, our real enemies go unnoticed as they lurk in the
shadows of the most criminal of underworlds, right here within our borders.

Will you sleep more soundly tonight, knowing that the drug war has raged
for decades without one clear victory, while our most violent of enemies
are probably just waiting for the next opportunity to strike, barely
impeded by such a fallacious waste of taxpayers' resources, which has
focused on illegal substances and ignored America's most dangerous threat,
terrorism? I won't, and I doubt most middle-class Americans will, either.

If they [the government] can't protect us from them [terrorists], how did
they ever think they can protect us from ourselves? They can't, and, by
now, they're bound to know it.

Our government failed us again, and so it goes.

Mike Plylar
Kremmling, Co.