WHY HE WRITES ABOUT DRUG WAR

To the editor:

Mable Cowgill's letter ("Pro-legalization letter writers don't live here"
(May 1), certainly misses my reasons for writing newspapers about America's
war on drugs.

I urge reform of drug laws because they have made my Land of the Free the
largest prison system on Earth. The U.S. has more prisoners than Russia or
China.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. had 2,131,180 women,
children and men behind bars last year, a 2.3 percent rise over 2003. Our
rate of incarceration is 726 per 100,000 Americans, seven to 10 times as
many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000;
for France, 91; for Japan, 58.

And it's racist to its core. 12.6 percent of black American men in their
late 20s are behind bars. The comparable rate for Hispanic men is 3.6
percent; 1.7 percent for whites. Our war on drugs is a human rights
catastrophe comparable to South Africa's apartheid.

The war on drugs is a nightmarish war without end. Mable Cowgill shouts
amen, and DEA Special Agent Will R. Glaspy, whose career (like Elliot
Ness's in our war on beer) would end without it, writes "The drug war is
working fine" (April 24).

Wars have foreign enemies. But this perverse war's enemies are our sons,
daughters, mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers and neighbors. Our
victory has bought us three generations of inner-city minority children
growing up without one or both parents -- POWs of the drug war.

While I was a soldier during the Vietnam War, I often wondered why I was
serving. Now, 35 years later, I am horrified, ashamed and disgusted at this
reason why I did not agree to serve my country: the war on drugs, its new
American gulag, and its new Jim Crow.

Robert Merkin

Northampton, Mass.