AMERICA ADDICTED TO A FAILED POLICY ON DRUGS

Thank you for publishing the stories on heroin addiction in the June
11 & 12 issues of the Connecticut Post. Drug policy is one of the
most important and misunderstood issues of our time, and your
well-researched articles have shed some light on one of its most
significant aspects - the fact that heroin addicts are not 'dope
fiends' but people who need help. A special thanks Maria Melendez and
others who are out there on the streets every day, trying to help one
human being at a time.

It is a common belief that because drugs themselves are such a
destructive force in our society, any measures we might take to combat
them are sensible and justified. We forget that the War On Drugs is a
War On People who use them, and we fail to question whether we might
be making the problem worse.

It is easy to see the destruction that drugs can cause, but not so
easy to separate the consequences of drugs from the consequences of
prohibition.

The basic strategy behind our drug policy is to make drugs more
dangerous, expensive, and inconvenient in order to discourage their
use. Every individual act of drug use is made more dangerous by
prohibition, both deliberately and inadvertently. But as your stories
clearly showed, heroin is devastating enough on its own, without any
help from us.

We deliberately strive to raise the street price of heroin, in the
hope that the more it costs, the fewer people will buy it. As a
result, those who become addicted must pay exorbitant prices, for
which many resort to crime; and drug dealers can make enough profits
to buy big guns and shoot each other over territory, with innocent
victims sometimes caught in the crossfire. Yet we justify continued
prohibition by declaring that heroin addicts commit crimes to support
their habits and that drug trafficking causes violence, ignoring the
fact that these effects are created or exacerbated by
prohibition.

We deliberately strive to reduce the purity of street heroin, in the
hope that drugs of lesser purity will be less addictive and impairing.
As a result, street heroin is cut with unknown quantities of unknown
substances, resulting in an increased likelihood of poisoning and
accidental overdose.

Yet we justify continued prohibition by declaring that drugs are
unsafe, ignoring the fact that they are made more dangerous when
smuggled in swallowed condoms, defecated, and mixed with God knows
what.

But with the prices coming down, the purity rising, and the number of
heroin users at 2.3 million, how can we not question the effectiveness
of our strategy? Yet we justify escalated prohibition by declaring
that stronger measures will meet our goals, ignoring the fact that so
far, they haven't.

Obviously, heroin is a terrible drug, and we should do whatever we can
to dissuade our citizens from ever trying it. Send former heroin
addicts with their own personal horror stories into the schools to
talk to kids. Tell our children the truth about drugs, don't pretend
that marijuana is just as bad as cocaine, or that cocaine is just as
bad as heroin. The truth about heroin speaks for itself, and it says
"Bad Choice."

But for those addicted to heroin, our current policy makes its
devastation so much worse with dangerous associations, inflated
prices, and unpredictable purity. And several of the addicts in your
stories sought treatment, only to be turned away for lack of space;
while our federal drug control budget includes twice as much for law
enforcement as it does for treatment.

Addiction has been described as the continuation of a behavior despite
its damaging consequences. Will we ever break the cycle of addiction
to a clearly failed policy?