Those concerned about the latest homicide in Durham and
other "drugrelated" killings should ask whether these
killings were due to the use of drugs or instead to the
trade in illegal drugs.

Drug use and the drug trade are two radically different
concepts, though many in the government, the media and the
public at large do not seem to grasp the distinction.

Virtually all the homicides involving alcohol result
from the use of alcohol (drug use); virtually all the
homicides associated with illegal drugs are due to the drug
trade. Whenever drugs are made illegal, they are turned
from cheap goods into extraordinarily valuable economic
commodities.

When alcohol was illegal, the levels of crime and
violence were such that Americans abandoned Prohibition,
and when Prohibition ended, the violence associated with
the alcohol trade ended. When our government gives up its
fantasy that it can legislate drugs out of existence and
incarcerate its way out of the drug problem, and instead
starts to regulate and truly control drugs, there will be a
similar end to all this "drugrelated" crime. What fact or
stretch of logic would suggest otherwise?

In the meantime, blacks should get used to the fact that
they have borne and will continue to bear a
disproportionately high burden, both in lives and dollars,
for our drug policies, policies which have been, from their
inception throughout their execution, thoroughly racist.

Bruce Burchett

Durham