DOING TIME

Jeff Goodman [Commentary, Dec. 30] chillingly described ''what a
prison sentence really means.'' As a proponent of drug reform, I hear
regularly of nonviolent offenders imprisoned under brutal
circumstances for longer sentences than killers and rapists because
they've run afoul of the nation's arbitrary drug abstinence code.

This severity is meant to make citizens invulnerable to drug-abuse
related problems by making America ''drug free.'' But the punishments
against abstinence violators are wildly disproportionate to the
tangible harm that is or even could be caused by drug use. Therefore,
this severity is unjust.

In ''Escape from Evil'' (1975, Free Press) Pulitzer-Prize winning
social critic Ernest Becker explained how a society's effort to make
itself radically invulnerable to some evil threat, real or imagined,
can lead that society to perpetrate far greater evils while defending
itself. This was the pattern in the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem
witch-burnings, the Holocaust and in Jim Crow Dixieland.

The same pattern holds true for modern America's treatment of
drug-abstinence violators. The evils promulgated in apprehending and
punishing nonabstainers far exceed the evils of drug abuse.

To assure yourself that Goodman's prison experience is not some rare
exception, read the book ''Shattered Lives: Portraits from America's
Drug War'' by Conrad, Resner and Norris (1998, Creative Xpressions) or
visit the November Coalition Web site that's meant to help families
destroyed by the antidrug pogrom (www.november.org).

- -- Paul M. Bischke, St. Paul.