WAR ON DRUGS GOES ON WITH NO APPARENT END

To the Editor:

Katherine Cummings '06 ("Taking their eyes off the ball," Nov. 1) wants to
talk about drugs. I do, too. I write as scholar and translator, citizen
activist, Brown doctorate, and as mother, grandmother and longtime member
of the academic/artistic community.

Political campaigning, adapted to relatively "safe" and "popular"
assertions, slogans and opportunistic insults, tends to avoid basic
questions about where money comes from and how it's really spent. Even the
gross national product omits lucrative illegal drug-dealing - as I was
surprised to learn years ago on a visit to the New York Stock Exchange, at
a time when marijuana was the second-largest cash-crop of California. This
year, according to an article on the front page of USA Today, Afghanistan
has had a bumper crop of poppies, its largest production of heroin ever.

Only a small proportion of its cash value (which is in the tens of
billions) will remain in Afghanistan; most of the crop is destined for
Europe. I haven't checked out the latest on cocaine. Study of the annual
New York Times Index of headlines over recent decades reveals the
escalation of bulk quantities of illegal drugs seized and of their dollar
value - though not necessarily what happens to the seized goods or their
dollar value.

Cummings writes about a "war" that puts too many of the young, poor and
dark-skinned in jail; but I am concerned about how that war enters schools
that oppress the young, diagnose rich and poor with ADD and other ailments
I never heard about when I was young and medicate these children legally -
while some are already finding their own consciousness-altering substances
to imbibe, ingest, inhale and inject. Just as one can get an education in
prison, so too one can be locked up (and locked away) in school.

All middle schools in Providence, for instance, are defined as failing
schools. It is no surprise if the lively and enterprising young shut up in
them find mind-altering excitement on their own. I see groups defined as
"students" straggling to nearby Hope High in the very late morning, on
their way not to learn, but to eat lunch; others arrive on time, true, but
I have smelled pot smoke in the building's corridors.

As for job performance: drugs may at times impede it, at times enhance it,
but often it's drugs that make the job tolerable. Too bad Cummings did not
bring her questions to the attention of New York University law professor
Derrick Bell, who was quoted in the same issue of The Herald. The "new
answers" she calls for will, it seems, have to come from her generation.

Blossom Kirschenbaum, Ph.D. '76