DRUG WAR BENEFITS GOVERNMENT

To the editor:

Another great editorial from The Monitor. ("Decriminalization," July 9).
Keeping marijuana illegal benefits the government!

The War on Drugs today is mostly about marijuana. Marijuana arrests,
convictions, incarcerations and property seizures constitute the great
majority of "drug-war incidents."

Without marijuana prohibition, the War on Drugs and its bloated budgets
would simply not be justifiable, nor the DEA, nor foreign intervention, nor
political anti-drug posturing. Without marijuana prohibition, the whole War
on Drugs would soon fall apart.

In the case of medical uses of marijuana, pharmaceutical houses stand to
lose significant revenue if marijuana were approved as an alternative for
even a few of its potential applications, such as anti-nausea and glaucoma
therapy. If marijuana, as is likely, should become an even occasional
substitute for some big-selling anti-depressives and tranquilizers or
sleeping remedies, analgesics, pre-menstrual syndrome remedies and other
applications, major losses for pharmaceutical houses would result.
Marijuana, of course, is unpatentable, cheap and easy to produce, and not
even taxable to a significant extent.

Drug prohibition is a mechanism of social control, a fanatical pursuit to
cleanse America of its "un-American" elements and dissidents. It takes
seriously the proposition that those who resist the dictates of power —
whether or not such resistance is framed as "political" in the conventional
sense — are enemies and are undermining production, public order and
rationality.

We are to comply with the norms of the powerful without asking questions,
and to accept the right of the state and corporate power to hold our bodies
captive.

Larry Seguin,

Lisbon, N.Y.

STOP JAILING CANNABIS USERS

To the editor:

Thank you for the editorial "Time to recognize marijuana's medical uses,"
published July 9.

It is way overdue to quit caging humans for using cannabis. That includes
sending probationers to jail and parolees back to jail for failing a drug
test over casual cannabis use, which may occur after work instead of
drinking a beer.

This one single step may help relieve the over-incarceration of American
citizens, which is about as high as it gets in the world. Isn't
over-incarceration among the reasons the U.S.A. has lost its seats on the
United Nations Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Narcotics Board?

Accept cannabis for what it is as described on the first page of the Bible.
If God gave us cannabis, who gives us cannabis prohibition?

Stan White,

Dillon, Colo.