DRUG LAWS CAUSE DISASTER

Editor: Letter writer Jackie Heninger piously says about marijuana
prisoners, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." However,
like all other drug crusaders Ms. Heninger neglects to supply any
reasons why marijuana should be illegal in the first place. She
provides no justification for the 20-year to life sentences given to
marijuana growers and sellers.

Heninger's health accusations are entirely false because marijuana
use does not cause brain damage or injure the body in any way.
Marijuana does not cause lung cancer because to date the Centers for
Disease Control have yet to trace the first case of cancer of any
kind to marijuana use. (See: "Large Study Finds No Link between
Marijuana and Lung Cancer,"
www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002491F-755F-1473-B55F83414B7F0000,
and "Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection,"
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729_pf.html

As for conditions when heroin and cocaine were legal, Heninger
neglects to mention that there were no outlaw drug cartels, no
violent drug gangs and so such thing as "drug crime" in any form. All
of the crime, disease and death surrounding illegal drugs began after
they were prohibited, not before. The only reason violent drug
cartels are running wild in Mexico is because the drug war guarantees
huge profits. Without the drug prohibition subsidy that makes drug
dealing the most profitable business on Earth, the drug cartels would
vanish very quickly.

When addicts could buy all of the heroin, morphine, cocaine and
anything else they wanted cheaply and legally, there was no such
thing as a societal "drug problem." When addicts could get their
drugs from the corner pharmacy they held regular jobs, raised decent
families and were indistinguishable from teetotalers. Now we have
hundreds of thousands of shattered families and the drug warriors
have filled our prisons with nonviolent drug users without ever
achieving a single declared goal. (See The Consumers Union Report on
Licit and Illicit Drugs,
www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cu5.html )

The prohibitionists must accept responsibility for the disaster they
have created with 100 years of hysterical drug laws. And yet Heninger
is not satisfied. Heninger wants even more people in prison even
though her drug crusade is costing California (and some other states)
more for incarceration than for higher education.

Before recommending drug prohibition as a path to higher moral
standards, Heninger should consider the thievery, corruption,
violence and murder caused by a lunatic drug crusade. Those of us
with working memories remember that the alcohol prohibitionists made
the same empty moral promises while causing a disaster in the 1920s and '30s.

It is worth remembering that Eliot Ness never put the bootleggers out
of business. Repeal and a regulated market for alcohol did that in
short order. Since 1933, we have not had a bombing or a shootout over
a beer route.

Redford Givens, Webmaster

Schaffer Library of Drug Policy

San Francisco