TO THE EDITOR:

Mark Woodward's "Legalizing Marijuana Won't Help" ("Your Views," March
18) can be countered with "Prohibition of Marijuana Won't Help."

Prohibition means no control or regulation. Prohibition creates a black
market where business disputes are tried by street justice keynoted with
violence and corruption. A majority of black market vendors are
children.

A white powder dealer will sell marijuana and then insist that the
buyer try a free line where the real profits are. That is the largest
gateway to hard drugs. By replacing black marketeers with licensed
adults to sell with accountability, the gate would be closed.

The documented findings of several government-sponsored programs in the
Netherlands show that the separation of the marijuana marketplace and
the medicalization of hard drugs has caused a decline in marijuana use
by teen-agers to half that in the United States and a steep decline in
the number of hard addicts and street violence. Because of Dutch
tolerence to drugs, these research studies obtain verifiable data. U.S.
data, at best, is guesswork.

Woodward's statement that "the Netherlands is tightening these laws
because of measurable increases in drug-related crimes" is false.
Individual sales are being reduced from 1 ounce to 5 grams because of
the political pressure of the United States on the European Community's
drug policies.

No pharmacologist has ever found the lethal doses of marijuana. There
is no neural chemical or physical damage to the brain. Smoked marijuana
does not cause cancer of the lungs. Drivers under the influence of
marijuana tend to overestimate the adverse effects of the drug on their
driving quality and compensate when they can; drivers under the
influence of alcohol tend to underestimate the adverse effects on their
driving quality and do not invest compensatory effort.

It's clear that prohibition policies don't work. Sooner or later,
politicians will have to stop running scared and address the evidence:
canabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further
underground may well be.

MICHEAL PEARSON,
director, Oklahoma NORML