I have a hard time understanding how the facts presented in your
editorial support a continued press of the "war" against drugs
instead of an end to the war. The dollar amounts indicated ($759
million) for law enforcement, courts, jails, prisons and property
destruction for county taxpayers, producing virtually nil results
in drug use, actually support the argument to end prohibition and
spend these funds on drug and alcohol treatment and
rehabilitation.

Prohibition did not work for alcohol, a substance of large weight
and volume - and it certainly is not working for the other
substances which are much easier to contraband throughout
society. Why do we draw the distinction between these different
substances when the harms done by drug prohibition in terms of
violence, prison time, forfeiture laws, trampling of Fourth
Amendment rights and illicit funds seem to far outweigh the harms
caused by the substances themselves. And even if one argues that
drug use is bad (I do), under our Constitution, where does the
government get the right to control what individuals do to their
own bodies so long as they don't get behind the wheel of a car
and injure others?

In the early 1900s, it took a Constitutional amendment to
institute prohibition of alcohol, yet we have acquiesced to
allowing this existing drug prohibition and its harmful results
to happen without a whimper. Treat drugs as the medical issue
they are (as we did for the first 200 years of this nation), and
most of the so-called drug-related "problems" will vanish. Not to
mention putting all the drug lords out of business - just as
happened to the bootleggers when alcohol prohibition ended.

David C. Brezic
San Diego, CA