WAR ON DRUGS DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD

Dear Editor, After 92 straight years of failure, it is amazing that
the Topsail Voice still thinks there is some virtue in a lunatic drug
crusade. Rather than making communities more "family friendly," the
drug war exposes children to a dangerous criminal black market that
functions in the shadows of Surf City

Banning drug paraphernalia is merely a panicked extension of
hypocritical drug war thinking that has made drug crimes and
overdoses commonplace where they never existed before.

No one was robbing, whoring and murdering to get drugs when addicts
could buy all of the heroin, morphine, cocaine and anything else they
wanted cheaply and legally at the corner pharmacy. A legal heroin
habit cost less than tobacco addiction (25c per week) and "drug
crime" was unknown. The term drug crime is an invention of
prohibitionists trying to cover the effects of their failed drug policy.

Unintentional opiate overdose deaths were extremely rare before drugs
were outlawed. Most drug deaths before the Harrison Narcotic Act were
suicides. Nowadays, Drug Czar John Walters tells us there are more
than 30,000 accidental drug deaths every year.

Proof that hard line American style drug prohibition causes drug
deaths and drug crime comes from the Swiss Heroin Maintenance Program
where addicts are supplied with cheap, pure heroin and cocaine.
Overdose deaths and injection-transmitted diseases (HIV/AIDS, Hep C
etc) are now a rarity in Switzerland . The Swiss have not had a
single overdose death in the program. Crime among Swiss addicts has
dropped 97-percent and the criminal drug black market has vanished
since the Swiss began providing addicts with cheap legal drugs. Swiss
policy has resulted in an 82-percent decrease in heroin addiction since 1990.

Using jail cells to treat addicts has not achieved similar success in
Surf City or anywhere in the United States in the past 92 years.
Anyone who is truly concerned about the victims of drugs, will work
to end an immoral drug crusade that murders more than 30,000 people
every year and spawns a multitude of criminal activity.

DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.HTM