GET TOUGH ON DRUG USERS

John Kanelis was right when he said "doing drugs is a profoundly bad
lifestyle choice" (July 16 column, "Drug legalization isn't cost-free").

The cost in lives lost from drug-users driving automobiles and
supporting their families and drug-damaged children would be
intolerable. It would bankrupt our nation. It would be like opening a
thousand Pandora's boxes; releasing wild animals from the zoos. We
would be "transform(ing) ourselves into beasts."

It isn't the atom bomb we need to worry about; it is the modern
advanced drugs that will take us back to the days of fighting with
clubs, to the death of civilization. How many more generations must we
sacrifice to the drug pushers before we take action to protect our
children?

On the other hand, the "drug war" hasn't worked. Our doctors tell us
that antibiotics are not working as our bodies have been protected too
much and are incapable of defending themselves. The weak are being
reproduced. The law of survival of the fittest has been abridged.

We might think about making drugs legal and free, letting them kill
the weak, and letting the strong, who do not use drugs, survive. But
history tells us that will not work either. And the cost, as stated
above, would bankrupt our nation.

Let's look at history. Has any system worked? Yes, in China. The
Chinese wiped out their opium dens in just a few years. Anyone caught
selling opium was given the death penalty with no appeals. Addicts
were sent to rehab centers. If they relapsed, they got the death penalty.

You say, "That's too brutal."

It worked.

OSCAR G. GARNER
Amarillo