THE U.S. NEEDS A DRUG POLICY THAT WORKS MUCH BETTER

Obfuscation is the name of the game for Joseph Califano and William
Bennett.

The Netherlands has about half the marijuana use we do and, with no
marketing link to cocaine, about one-eighth our cocaine use, according
to a World Health Organization survey. Marijuana use is up 30% here in
the past 20 years, and we have over a million teenage drug sellers in
our schools. Legal drugs would be more available? Impossible! A
federal government-sponsored report says that "marijuana has been
almost universally available to American 12th graders over the past 31
years."

The pending bill in Congress would simply allow states to decide about
marijuana. We used to call this approach the laboratory of democracy,
but this pair prefers Chicken Little rhetoric to facts.

According to the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey
published July 2002: "Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and
is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent
user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than
countries with liberal ones."

Jerry Epstein

Houston