KEEP CHESS OUT OF DRUG WAR

Words cannot express my disappointment at your decision to give Barry
McCaffrey's drug war screed a featured position in Chess Life. General
McCaffrey's has championed a vicious "War on Drugs" that has done nothing
except result in higher profits for drug traders and increased availability
of ever more potent drugs in the U.S. Zealots like McCaffrey are the
ultimate patzers -- once they decide on a strategy, no amount of defeat is
sufficient to make them reconsider its wisdom.

McCaffrey has led the effort to make America -- once the Land of the Free
- -- the country with the greatest percentage of its people incarcerated. His
bizarre and totally unsupported assertion that drug tests are appropriate
for tournament chess players would be laughable were it not so consistent
with his vision for a militarized police-state society in which civil
liberties are forgotten and men like McCaffrey are "Czars" over us.

As a longtime Life Member I have long noted with dismay USCF's sad rush to
embrace the Drug War rhetoric and troll for dollars by selling chess as a
way to reduce drug abuse. ("Push pawns not drugs" being only the lamest of
the slogans invented to curry favor with the McCaffreys of the world.)
Since McCaffrey's office has received so much attention lately for [its
Stalinist efforts to use -- deleted in published version] taxpayer dollars
to control television scripts, the question must be asked: Why did Chess
Life let itself be used by a non-chess-playing government propagandist
without even finding an opposing point of view from a chess player? In the
future, let us reserve Chess Life and the game of chess as a sanctuary from
politics, especially the politics of repression that McCaffrey seeks to
impose on all of us.

Sincerely,

John Gear,
East Lansing Michigan