MUMPOWER'S HOMEWORK LACKING IN SCOPE

I read the reply of Vice Mayor Carl Mumpower to my friend Officer Howard J.
Wooldridge of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [Letters, June 23], with
interest, after spending much of the past 10 years researching the topic of
drug policy.

Mumpower says, "We've done our homework and followed models that do work
across the country."

No, he hasn't; there are none. Prohibition is a rain dance; it addresses a
serious problem and does nothing to stop it, other than to delude the
public - a la Mumpower - into thinking that something beyond frantic
activity and wasted tax dollars is going on. Check your community with
care. I very much doubt it is any different from the norm, where some 75
percent of the young have used an illegal drug by age 22, and prohibited
marijuana is easier to get than alcohol, and other illegal drugs are easier
to get than prescription drugs. Prohibition is the greatest gift to
criminals in the world's history, and they turn around and use those
profits to make the drug problem worse. Ending prohibition is not about
drugs, but about ending the evil empire of the drug lords and their network
of drug dealers. Right now we are financing our worst enemy. We'll do a
much better job with drug abuse when we use regulated supply to adults to
reclaim control of the drug supply that prohibition surrendered.

I might add that Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, and a host
of other experts such as Paul Volcker and George Shultz, have described and
predicted these results for over 30 years. You would illuminate this debate
if you publish the open letter they and hundreds of other world leaders
wrote in the New York Times in 1998. [See Web site:
www.drugpolicy.org/global/ungass/letter/index.cfm ] In July, William
Buckley's National Review will have a cover story on ending marijuana
prohibition - a major first step in correcting this problem.

Jerry Epstein

Houston, Texas