Editor, Times-Dispatch:

I couldn't count the number of times someone has told me how to "win"
the drug war. "Just do what they did in China," has been said so many
times.

What China did was brazenly to execute all the drug users it could
round up in the highly publicized climax of the Opium War around the
turn of the century. It still does a lot of that, and now I am reading
it still has a serious drug problem ["U.S., China Cooperate," June
20].

The last time I saw this conventional wisdom in print was only a few
years ago when no less than Newt Gingrich suggested that we could beat
the drug problem with an all-out assault, China style.

If this technique is so successful, then why is U.S. Drug Czar Barry
McCaffrey in China for talks on how to deal with their 800,000
"registered" drug addicts?

Could it be that the enemy in the drug war is as basic as human
nature? Can we win a war on being human?

Early Bender-Werth,
Crewe.