SHOULD COCAINE CARRY HARSHER PENALTY THAN BOOZE?

It was nice to see 13 year old Renee Frank is interested enough in
the goings ons in Madison to write a letter to the editor Feb. 6, "Ax
drug-using firefighters".

Unfortunately, despite the lack of DARE drug "misinformation" classes
in Madison schools, she still has yet to grasp the larger forces at
work here.

Her letter fails to mention if she has given any thought as to why
the cocaine the firefighters used is illegal but the alcohol they
consumed was not. Does she know that legal drugs like alcohol and
tobacco and even prescription drugs kill hundreds of thousands per
year, while cocaine deaths are estimated to be in the low hundreds,
and marijuana has never caused a death by overdose?

Has she considered how she might feel if she were the child of one of
the firefighters, or worse, of one of the Jocko's bartenders
sentenced to mandatory minimums for the crime of supplying a demand
little different from the one they normally engaged in, dispensing a
drug, alcohol, to consenting adults? Would she feel that it was okay
that her family was torn apart because a parent chose a safer illegal
substance over a more dangerous and violence-inducing legal one?

Our nation's drug policies should reflect the actual harm potential
of substances, not decades of lies that criminalize some drugs, yet
allows more harmful ones to be marketed to the American public
because the makers of those drugs have purchased the silence of the
people we elect to represent us.

I hope that the writer will continue to study this problem. A good
jumping off place is the website of The Media Awareness Project at
www.mapinc.org.

The younger generation is inheriting the failed policies of their
elders, and unless the nation adopts rational and humane drug
policies based on truth, the days of America as even a nominally free
country are limited.