It is difficult to imagine the long-term impact of what the drug war
is doing to our country.

As many as 2.5 million American children now have at least one parent in
prison, and that number grows as we add 1,200 people each week to the
inmate population. Instead of looking at what could have been, perhaps we
should look at what could have NOT been. [Note: the NOT was italicized
rather than capitalized.] My grandfather was an immigrant who came to this
country with little more than the clothes on his back. He worked in a shoe
factory outside of Boston where he and his wife raised two children in a
small single-family house.

He has seven grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren who were and/or
are mostly productive members of society, including at least one
doctor, educator, engineer, lawyer, military officer, and politician.
His descendents have served our country in time of war and paid
millions of dollars in taxes.

During the alcohol prohibition era of the 1920s, my grandfather had
some sort of a small grain press that he shared with a neighbor.

They used it to make alcoholic beverages, which was against the law.
For that era, it was the equivalent of growing your own pot or cooking
up methamphetamine. Imagine the impact on his family if today's drug
penalties were in effect at that time. What would have happened if my
grandfather had been sent to prison, his house confiscated, and my
mother had been thrown out on the street when she was 8 years old?
What if, instead of building universities, our country had spent the
money on prisons?

What if my grandmother, instead of saving up money for her children's
education, had spent everything on bus tickets to visit her husband in
a faraway prison?

What would that have done to our country two or three generations
later -- which is now? I don't know if it's possible for you to
visualize such devastation, to imagine the effect on your own life if
your parents had been raised in poverty because vicious busybodies
didn't like what your grandpa ate or drank -- and to imagine the
cumulative effect on the nation.

We are destroying peoples' lives to protect them from themselves, and
in the process we are also destroying our country.

Millions of Americans are living this nightmare every day in every
city across our country.

More are entering it every day. The pace is accelerating, and the
effect on the underlying medical problem is negligible. I am working
to reform our drug laws. This damage must stop. We've got to find
another way to deal with this problem.

Bob Ramsey, board of directors Drug Policy Forum of Texas Fort Worth,
Texas