LEGALIZE DRUGS

In case Christine Siler Haus didn't understand, justice flew out the window
the day America criminalized the vice of drug taking. That Draconian
sentences are the norm is supported by the public, which voted for the
politicians who promised to save America from the evil scourge of drugs.

What Americans do not seem to understand is that there is an even more vile
and evil than drugs. The Founding Fathers would be horrified that the
natural rights Thomas Jefferson told us are inalienable in the Declaration
of Independence have been circumvented by abuse of the interstate commerce
laws to enact drug prohibition.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are
injurious to others," said Jefferson several times in many different
writings. Vices are not crimes.

The drug war, because it seeks to make a crime of things that are not
crimes, has perverted American justice to the point that many innocent
lives have been destroyed. The pleas of Christine Siler Haus for justice in
the case of her brother will resonate about as much as the screams of
witches on the pyre resonated with the righteous when religion instead of
medicine was the instrument of oppression in America.

Restore our natural right to drugs. Ceremonial drug use is as old as
mankind is itself; it is an amoral idea to try and stamp it out. Corruption
of the police, the courts and of justice itself would not be possible if
the sage advice of Jefferson and the fathers had been adhered to.

CHRIS BUORS Winnipeg, Manitoba