DRUG DEBATE IN POTSDAM FEATURES RECONSIDER, POLICE

Peter Christ spent 20 years in a police uniform in Tonawanda, retiring as a
police captain in 1989. Now he wears a T-shirt sporting the words
ReconsiDer, a group advocating the legalization of drugs.

Christ explained the organization's mission before a packed room at Clarkson
University's Cheel Campus Center last night. He was one of three panelists
debating the decriminalization of drugs.

"The two words...that I think are important are reconsider and policy," he
told the audience.

Of those two, policy was the one he stressed the most.

"We all deal with policy. Policy drives us. It makes decisions for us. We
fall back on policy," he said. "We have a drug policy in America. We call
it the war on drugs," which he said was unpatriotic.

He also called it something else, a word that hasn't been a part of U.S.
vocabulary since the early 1900s.

"The policy has another very clearly defined name. The name of the policy
we have in this county is prohibition," Christ said. That's the argument he
uses for legalization of drugs.

"Prohibition has never, ever, ever worked, not once," he said.

As and example, he cited the first case of prohibition in man's history, the
Garden of Eden, when Eve was forbidden to eat the apple, but did so anyway.

"Who was the cop? God. And it failed, We got kicked out of the garden," he
said. "Prohibition always fails."

He said that laws against drugs only make the situation worse.

"If something doesn't work and causes more problems than exist if you don't
have it, you have to get rid of it. Eighty-five percent of violence is
associated with the drug marketplace. That is a product of prohibition,"
Christ said.

"Prohibition causes more problems, What we have to do is accept one thing.
We cannot make drugs go away. But we can make the problem smaller through
legalization."

He told the audience that they had three choices under prohibition: "Let
the mob control it, let the government control it or let private enterprise
control it. Those are your only three choices. And if you want the
government to control it, you have to legalize it."

Responding to a question about how legalization would affect drug abuse
instruction in schools, Christ said, "What we need in our schools is drug
education. What we have is abstinence education. I would like to see
honest drug education."

Christ had one supporter in his corner last night, Dr. Gene Tinelli, a
retired naval officer and an addiction psychiatrist who specializes in
treating addicts, Tinelli advocates the legalization of drugs, with some
regulation.

"I'm in favor of regulating some very strictly and not regulating some
others at all," he said.

Tinelli spoke about the wars waged within the United States.

He said that, since the second week of December 1942, the United States had
only declared war twice, and not against another country. "In the 60s, it
was a war on poverty. It was a war against something that couldn't be
eliminated" Tinelli said. "War is destructive, and it just goes on and on."
The war on drugs according to the doctor, is likewise a futile one. "Drugs
have always been a part of history, always have been and always will be.'
Tinelli said. "I don't think it does any good to arrest anyone for a small
amount of anything and lock them up. Legalization is a way of regulating
things, moderately or strictly." He said that use of marijuana is "not
associated with a lot of harms. If you look at public health affects,
they're fairly low. There shouldn't be a strong need to regulate that."

Tinelli said that legalization would place it in the same category as
alcohol and tobacco. "A drug is a drug," he said.

Potsdam Village Police Lt. John Kaplan was one panelist who opposed the
legalization of drugs, as well as use of the term 'war on drugs.' "I can
state, personally, that none of us feels as if we are soldiers who have been
recruited for a war," Kaplan said. "I really take exception to that."

He said that current laws don't represent prohibition, but rather
proscription, in which police are trying to uphold laws that benefit
society.

"As a result of strict laws, there's been a significant reduction in alcohol
and drug related deaths on the highways," Kaplan said.

He said that legalized drugs such as alcohol present problems in society.

"Alcohol still continues to be a big problem with families. It's a drug
that's abused," he said.

Legalizing drugs would only compound the problem, the lieutenant said, and
he noted, believed that the best policy was the current policy.

"I still maintain that it's valid and serves a useful purpose in society,"
he said.

A fourth panelist wasn't able to attend the Cheel debate last night. St.
Lawrence County District Attorney Jerome Richards had a grand jury
commitment which kept him from participating.