U.S. DRUG LAWS HARMFUL, NEED THOROUGH REFORM

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