DRUG ILLUSIONS

Two articles in your Aug. 27 paper touted renewed efforts by North
Carolina law enforcement to reduce drug-related crime and violence.
Those efforts will be rewarded with a short-term illusion of
improvement. The criminal justice system, however, is not the place
where our society can come to terms with the existence of drugs. Many
people try drugs. Only a few ever abuse them.

If, tomorrow, all drugs became legal and available, I doubt anyone
reading this letter would jump up, shouting in joy, "Finally, I can
try heroin!" Nope.

And so what if people do drugs? If their drug use harms no one else,
it's no one else's business. If their drug use is harming themselves,
we can change many of those behaviors with a public health approach.
It's worked with teen smoking and teen pregnancy; we could at least
try with the issue of drug abuse. It's for sure that what we are
doing now does not work.

We can't keep spending billions on a drug war that doesn't achieve
its stated goals. But we do. And it's time to stop.

David S. Brannon

Raleigh

(The writer is an attorney.)