DRUGS A POLITICAL SCARE TACTIC

Editor, The Observer:

Although I love the Observer, subscibe to it and wish it well, there's
something in the "Editor's Notebook" for June 25th that I have to disagree with.

You say that legalizing drugs would wreak further havoc on black inner-city
ghettos, and you describe the libertarians as false friends for advocating
this. I agree with you about the libertarians, but there is a very good
argument for decriminalizing drugs (at least some: they're hardly all the
same) and that is that banning them is what makes them so profitable that
the trade continues. Therefore we must take the profit out of them.

Doesn't anybody remember what Prohibition did to our country? We got
organized crime from that experiment. Now we have decriminalized alcohol and
we treat alcoholism as a medical problem, not a moral one. When are we going
to treat drug addiciton the same way and make some sensible distinctions,
i.e. dangerous, and that marijuana is less dnagerous than tobacco or alcohol.

The "war against drugs" has increased arbitrary police powers, made prisons
into a growth industry and messed up the economics and politics of quite a
few South American countries. Maybe I'm cynical but I think "drugs"(again
without distinctions being made) are dear to those who make a career of
scaring the American people, among whom I would number many politicians.
They can no longer scare us with "world Communism", a favorite for decades,
and now thy've found a substitute.

Joanna Russ Tucson, Az.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett