MESSAGE RECEIVED?

In today's political environment, drug courts are preferred to
incarceration. Almost no one - even Gov. Gary Johnson, I suspect - disagrees
with that.

The fact that you, according to your July 11 editorial, consider drug courts
and the governor's proposals to be mutually exclusive tells me you do not
understand the governor.

The public has been conditioned to not distinguish the danger of the drug
from the danger of its illegality. But there is a huge difference.

Our most striking example is the national prohibition of alcohol in the
1920s. Before Prohibition, we had alcoholism and saloons, with their
attendant social ills. During Prohibition, we had alcoholism, the
proliferation of speakeasies and increased teen-age drinking. We also had
hundreds of thousands of deaths, blindings and paralyses from adulterated
alcohol, rampant official corruption and lethal turf battles.

Our grandparents, who remembered life before Prohibition, decided the cure
was worse than the disease and abandoned Prohibition. Not in the past 67
years has there been a serious proposal to return to national prohibition.

We need drug courts to ameliorate the abusive sentences, human waste and
financial burden of the present system. We also need to understand that
these drug courts are made necessary not by drugs themselves, but by our
outlawing of them.

There is no popular substance so destructive that it cannot be made more so
by outlawing it. That is the governor's message.

John Chase, Palm Harbor, Fla.