policy

I can see that Joseph Filko has taught political science and, therefore,
must be a scholar of drug policy, civil liberties and related issues. I
would like to pose two simple questions to Mr. Filko:

One: How would you explain the fact that even the people who wrote the
original federal drug prohibition laws (the Harrison Tax Act and the
Marijuana Tax Act) agreed that the federal government was constitutionally
prohibited from enacting any law to prohibit the personal use of drugs?

Two: I have collected the full text of most of the major studies of drugs
and drug policy over the last 100 years, from around the world. Mr. Filko
can find that collection on the Internet at www.druglibrary.org/schaffer.

As anyone can readily see, the short summation of the world's serious
research on this issue is that this drug policy is a bad idea and
always has been -- regardless of what you might think about the civil
liberties issue.

I ask Mr. Filko -- as the scholar of these issues that he is -- to
supply me with the name of any significant study of drug policy in the
last 100 years that he thinks supports our current drug policy --
particularly with respect to marijuana. I have been searching for 10
years, and I can't find one.

Clifford A. Schaffer
Canyon Country, Calif.

The writer is director or the DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy,
which can be viewed at http://www.druglibrary.org.