WAR ON DRUGS CAUSES PAIN, TOO

Editor, Times-Dispatch: Thomas Sowell's excellent column, "Program Marks
Painful Anniversary," notes the major social disasters that continue to
plague us today quite clearly began in the 1960s. I would like to cite a
much larger social and health disaster that was started almost 100 years
ago by the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914.

Originally the law was intended to ensure the orderly marketing of
narcotics. It was, however, quickly converted into a law prohibiting the
supply of narcotics to addicts even by physicians. The specious
governmental bureaucratic interpretation bringing all this about? Addiction
was not a disease; therefore addicts were not patients and could not be
supplied their much-needed drugs.

By 1924, Congress tightened up the Harrison Act and prohibited the
importation of certain drugs altogether.

Before the Harrison Act, one never heard of crimes related to addictive
drugs, and people didn't die from diseases such as AIDS, or from poisoning,
which they do today because these drugs are now produced illegally. Also,
when people can obtain legally produced drugs, they can function quite well
for many years, with much less damage to their organs than from a legal
product called alcohol. Need I mention what Prohibition did both to health
and for organized crime?

The same plus more is true about the ridiculous war on drugs in which we
have invested trillions of dollars, built and filled more prisons than any
other country in the civilized world, and inadvertently helped finance
terrorism.

When are the people of this country going to get over Puritanism, wake up
to the facts, and demand an end to this fiasco?

Barbara J. Theisen. mechanicsville.