LETTER OF THE WEEK

NO PROHIBITION

By Curt Wagoner

To the editor:

It seems contradictory for the same people who claim to be
'anti-crime fighters' to support the prohibitionist drug policies
that create the crime in the first place.

Substance prohibition hasn't worked since Adam and Eve took a bite of
the forbidden fruit. In 1500 Greece the penalty for coffee
possession was death. Prohibition has always caused a rise in
property crime, violence, corruption, gangs, disease and death.

Albert Einstein wrote regarding alcohol prohibition in 1921, "The
prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by
the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for
the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot
be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase in
crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Thanks to the prohibitionist, the United States now has the largest
prison system on the planet. We're filling those prisons at a rate
faster than any nation on earth and at a cost that is absolutely mind-boggling.

The group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, ( L.E.A.P. ), with
nearly ten thousand members, sees the drug war for what it is --
Prohibition. According to their website ( www.leap.cc ), the U.S.
spends $69 billion a year fighting the drug war.

$1.3 billion every week and for what? We build brand new state of the
art prisons like the one in Madras, dubbed 'The Drug User
Concentration Camp', while our outdated schools are literally
crumbling apart. That's $5.75 billion a month for a policy that has
a history of failure and for creating crime and violence.

Police Captain Peter Christ ( ret. ), L.E.A.P. cofounder, "Drug
legalization is not to be construed as an approach to our drug
problem. Drug legalization is about our crime and violence problem.
Once we legalize drugs we've got to then buckle down and start
dealing with our drug problem, and that's not going to be easy but,
it's something we can do. Fifty per cent of the adult cigarette
smokers in this society have quit in the past ten years. That's an
amazing success story when you talk about the most addictive drug we
know of -- nicotine. How did we accomplish this amazing success
story? Through education."

Supporting prohibition and calling oneself anti-crime is a
contradiction. A true anti-crime fighter would be an
anti-prohibitionist. Honestly, just because drugs are bad it doesn't
mean prohibition is good.

Curt Wagoner

Mosier

Pubdate: Thu, 23 Oct 2008

Source: Dalles Chronicle, The (OR)