HISTORY LESSON

I'm writing about "Soros blasts Hastert over drug allegations" (Aug.
31). If anybody is receiving money from the drug cartels, it would be
politicians like House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who advocate the
continuation of our current counterproductive policies of drug
criminalization.

Our drug criminalization policies make easy-to-grow weeds and
easy-to-produce chemicals more valuable than pure gold. When Coca-Cola
contained cocaine instead of caffeine and sold for 5 cents a bottle,
drug users didn't have to rob, steal or commit acts of prostitution to
obtain their drugs of choice.

When pure pharmaceutical-grade Bayer heroin was legally available in
local pharmacies for about the same price as Bayer aspirin, the term
"drug-related crime" didn't exist. Neither did drug lords, drug
cartels or even drug dealers as we know them today. And deaths from
recreational drugs were very rare.

That's because the drugs were of known quality, known purity and known
potency. That is just the opposite of the black-market drugs of today.

Re-legalizing recreational drugs would put the drug cartels out of the
drug business in a heartbeat. The same way that the alcohol cartels
were put out of business when we re-legalized alcohol in 1933.

Kirk Muse

Mesa, Ariz.