DRUG WAR VICTIMS

Regarding your thoughtful April 25 editorial, the deaths of two innocent
members of an American missionary family in Peru should serve as a wake-up
call. Autocratic former president Alberto Fujimori practiced a
scorched-earth campaign against Peru's Shining Path guerilla movement, a
movement financed by black-market coca profits. Allegations of corruption,
rampant human rights violations and civilian deaths are remarkably similar
to the current situation in Colombia.

How many innocent Peruvians have been sacrificed at the altar of America's
drug war?

As Peruvian coca production has gone down, Colombian coca production and
domestic methamphetamine production have both gone up, along with the U.S.
incarceration rate, now the highest in the world. When will the champions
of the free market in the U.S. Congress acknowledge that immutable laws of
supply and demand render the drug war a costly exercise in futility? Right
now, kids have an easier time buying pot than beer. Drug policy reform may
send the wrong message to children, but I like to think the children are
more important than the message. Opportunistic "tough on drugs" politicians
would no doubt disagree.

Robert Sharpe, M.P.A.

Program Officer, The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, Washington, D.C.