Dear FRONTLINE,

I have been working on national anti-drug policy since 1979, including nine
years as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.

I was delighted to be asked to contribute to FRONTLINE'S latest report on
the drug wars. However, I was frustrated when I was interviewed, because
the producer wasn't interested in what I had learned after more than twenty
years of in-depth, high-level work in the field. He had one idea for what I
would contribute to the story: what happened in Congress in August 1986 in
the making of the mandatory minimum sentences. The failure to have hearings
and the hasty drafting of the mandatory minimums was an anomaly for the
Crime Subcommittee.

But the fundamental political anti-drug routine in 1986 was standard
operating procedure, if compressed. Making hysterical claims about an
insidious, dangerous new drug, grandstanding about cracking down, acting
with indifference to the consequences of more arrests and imprisonment,
disregarding the economics of prohibition, ignoring the racially
discriminatory enforcement practices of the war on drugs, and looking to
score political points off the other party has been the bread and butter of
Congressional anti-drug activity since 1910. My direct experience since
1979 is filled with these episodes: look-alike drugs in 1982, designer
drugs in 1984, ice in 1988, etc. I was in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia
and Jamaica early as 1983, and what we see now is NOTHING NEW.

I was dismayed with your producers' disregard of what I learned since 1979
about the role of prohibition in driving all of the dramatic and tragic
failures of policy that your report so vividly documented.

I suspect that the story of the making of the documentary -- the story of
the behind the scene politics -- would itself be a fascinating follow-up.

I'm sure the overall tone of the documentary reflected what your reporting
led to. When you found riveting footage of the aerial interdiction team of
the Mexican Federal Police being killed by a unit of the Mexican Army while
protecting a planeload of cartel cocaine, that was going to be in the
story. When you've got a top Mexican law enforcement official saying that
the heads of Mexican anti-drug organizations along the U.S. border have to
pay $200,000 per month to their superiors in Mexico City, that's going to
be in the story.

The conclusion of the four hours is that leading drug "warriors" have come
to conclude that the war on drugs is a failure, and that, they say, we need
a "new approach." Unfortunately, the "new approach" is the old approach of
1970-72 of much more treatment.

Unstated throughout the four hours is that the shocking stuff that you
document -- the unstoppable flow of drugs, the unstoppable production of
drugs, the unstoppable corruption, the unstoppable violence, the unending
imprisonment, and the unstoppable wealth -- all flow from the unexamined
paradigm of prohibition.

At the end of the four hours I felt like I had gone to an interesting
action adventure movie, but the last reel was missing – I don't know that
the hero gets home or how.

There is no question that hundreds of thousands of drug addicts are
desperate for treatment they need but never get. But even if everyone in
America who has a drug problem gets treatment, even if every kid gets the
most effective anti-drug education, there will still be millions of drug
users in the U.S. This will include millions of drug users who have no drug
problem, and who like and want and will risk using drugs like marijuana,
LSD, ecstasy, cocaine, and opiates.

The global drug trade, as long as it is illegal, is going to corrupt entire
nations, and subvert global economic institutions. We can't enforce our way
into a drug-free world, and we can't treat our way into a drug-free world.
Of course we can't legislate ourselves into a corruption-free world or a
crime-free world. But we sure can be a lot more effective when we abandon
prohibition and the hallucination that we can keep people from using drugs
by force.

FRONTLINE's producers are bright and public-spirited, and I am confident
that you will continue to report about this problem in a good faith effort
to help reduce its seriousness, and that soon you will analyze this problem
from the standpoint of the prohibition policy that drives it.

Eric Sterling, Washington, DC

Dear FRONTLINE,

I enjoyed watching your "Drug Wars" presentation. The information you
presented was valuable and timely. Unfortunately, there are a couple of
concerns which cause me to question the depth of your analysis and reporting.

First, your report neglected to discuss the heroin warlords of Southeast
Asia. The Golden Triangle region has for years been a major supplier of
heroin to the US, and a significant source of corruption throughout SE
Asian. Yet, instead your report focused on the stories that grabbed
headlines for the DEA during the 1980s and 1990s, specifically Mexico and
Colombia.

Second, rather than use an objective medical or scientific source to
discuss the harms of crack and cocaine, you used former DEA agent Bob
Stuttman and a former crack dealer. In so doing, you perpetuated the hype
and hysteria around crack which you rather otherwise skewered during the
program.

The reality is crack is cocaine, thus cocaine is just as dangerous as crack
- -- the difference is that one is smoked and powder is usually snorted (or
injected). Indeed, the main differences between the freebase cocaine of the
1970s and the crack cocaine of the 1980s and 1990s are the method of
production and the fact that crack is broken up and sold in cheap,
single-dose units. What makes smoking crack more dangerous than snorting
powder is the fact that smoking a drug is a quicker, more intense high. The
notion that crack was some sort of super-drug is a false notion that could
lead to the perception that powder cocaine is benign by comparison. The
fact that declining numbers of young people view cocaine as dangerous, as
reported in the newest Household Survey, tends to support my contention.

I hope that sometime in the future Frontline will devote its resources to a
fuller analysis of US drug policy. Though "Drug Wars" was interesting, it
was ultimately the story of the DEA and a few of their foes. Interesting
video, but not as substantive as I'd hoped, especially coming from Frontline.

Doug McVay, Falls Church, VA

Dear FRONTLINE,

When the DEA head under Reagan says 20 years of total waste, we had BETTER
reevaluate.

Before PROHIBITION we had a small drug problem with heroin and cocaine that
was growing smaller. These drugs were primarily medicines, they were not
available to children, and they were occasionally abused. Prohibition
created the drug lords whose profits depended on them making the drug
problem worse, and they did that very well indeed. They converted medicines
into killers, brought the drugs to children, who they also involved in
sales, and turned a handful of addicts from ordinary people with a medical
problem that was generally less severe than an alcohol addiction, into a
societal plague. They became the most wealthy and powerful criminals in the
world and spread crime, violence and corruption around the globe. Naturally
this required a huge new law enforcement centered set of bureaucracies to
deal with the drug lord problem we ourselves had created. The erosion of
traditional rights and values and the abuses of power that followed was
like the opening of Pandora's Box.

When we repeal modern prohibition, we will return to a small, adult, drug
problem that will diminish as it is dealt with by appropriate public health
and medical measures.

Jerry Epstein, Houston , TX

Dear FRONTLINE,

As a volunteer editor for the Media Awareness Project of DrugSense, I've
surveyed the print media's coverage of drug policy issues over the past few
years. By far the best journalism on America's war on drugs I've found is a
recent thirteen-part series published in the Ottawa Citizen by Dan Gardner
called "Losing the War on Drugs." This can be read at
http://www.mapinc.org/authors/Dan+Gardner.

My basic criticism of Frontline's coverage is that it failed to question
the basic premises of prohibition. The mythology of drug abuse, i.e. that
cannabis is a seriously harmful drug of abuse like heroin, was largely
taken for granted.

Any serious examination of the problem we're facing (prohibition-related
corruption and violence) must trace the insanity back to the preposterous
lies about drugs and drug users that were told to get drug laws passed in
the first place. How can viewers fully understand modern racial profiling
without knowing the racist arguments originally used to criminalize certain
drugs in the 1920s and '30s?

Far more edifying is the Frontline symposium featuring Eric Sterling and
Sam Dash.

Like our drug policy, Frontline could do with more science and fewer police.

Larry Stevens, Springfield, IL

PBS Frontline Series Follow Up by Tom O'Connell, Kevin Zeese, Doug McVay,
and Eric Sterling:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n170.html#sec1

Campaign for the Restoration & Regulation of Hemp's HempTV website has the
full, two part, total of almost 4 hours of video of the PBS Frontline "Drug
Wars" available on the web for free video streaming using the Real Player 8.

To watch Part one of Drug Wars, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars1.html

To see part 2, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars2.html

Click this link for an index to this series:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1551.a01.html