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.