DRUG WAR TURNS U.N. FROM PEACEKEEPER TO WARMAKER

Dear Letters Editor:

While President Clinton was recently addressing a special session of the
U.N. General Assembly in an effort to gain support for internationalizing
our country's failed drug war, a letter was delivered to Secretary-General
Kofi Annan stating that the global war against drugs is causing more harm
than drug abuse itself.

The letter was signed by over 500 well respected and prominent world
citizens including former U.N. secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar,
the former United States secretary of state George Shultz, the Costa Rican
Nobel peace laureate Oscar Arias, the former CBS television anchorman
Walter Cronkite, South African human rights activist Helen Suzman and two
former U.S. senators, Claiborne Pell (RI) and Alan Cranston (CA). In part,
the letter said, "Persisting in our current policies will only result in
more abuse, more empowerment of drug markets and criminals and more disease
and suffering."

Particularly with regard to marijuana, it has become compellingly apparent
that, like Alcohol Prohibition before it, criminalizing marijuana has
created far more harm than the use of that substance ever could.

Both the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization
have concluded that marijuana is one of the least dangerous drugs, legal or
otherwise and creates less of a public health danger than either alcohol or
tobacco. Additionally, more than a dozen commissions in the U.S. and abroad
have determined that the dangers of marijuana have been exaggerated and
that moderate use is rarely harmful. Even the DEA's own administrative law
Judge, Francis Young said in 1988, "Marijuana is one of the safest
therapeutically active substances known to man."

At the same time we are being forced to release violent felons for lack of
available prison space, it is absurd that our President and other
politicians would continue to propose policies that would put more
marijuana users in jail for longer terms. How much better and effective it
would be for our society if the President and the rest of the drug warrior
bureaucracy focused on education and treatment, the only true answers to
substance abuse, rather than pushing the politically expedient proposition
that we can incarcerate our way out of the problem of drug abuse.

Sincerely,

Richard D. Elrick, Esq.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski