STOP TRAMPLING ON OUR RIGHTS

To the editor:

Donald V. Adderton's characterization of the Goose Creek (S.C.) High
School pot raids as "a little overzealous" makes me question his
qualifications to responsibly edit the Delta Democrat Times.

In an age where high school kids hopped up on Ritalin, Prozac,
caffeine and several ounces of white sugar are dared to turn in their
parents over joints that supposedly fund terror, we don't need any
more propaganda from those who are supposed to be journalists.

Americans sworn to uphold the laws of the land unlawfully violate
freedoms from unreasonable searches and seizures, to pursue happiness
and of speech, racketeering and antitrust rules, including restraint
of trade.

They create careers for crooks, many with badges issued with their
guns. In fact, historical trends show that substance prohibitions
increase abuses and homicides across the board.

While newspapers at one time or another encouraged whites to disdain
the Chinese for their opium use, blacks and Hispanics continue in that
tradition today as a scapegoat by which to justify pot
prohibition.

Despite the fact that whites and minorities use illegal drugs in about
the same proportions, court records and prison logs prove that drug
laws are enforced per capita in inverse proportions to the offender's
skin color.

Tellingly, today's media ignore the hypocrisy of laws that enable
weapons of mass destruction to kill millions of cigarette, booze and
pill addicts, while those who choose far safer generic intoxicants or
medications are offered arrest and asset forfeiture as
"treatment."

To this day, despite a mantra that smoked marijuana is "a cruel hoax
on the sick and dying," all federal agencies and most neoconservative
newspapers turn a blind eye to the pending Food and Drug
Administration approval of cancer sticks - as medical devices.

It's true that there are drugs in our midst. But aggressive responses
to that intrusion is not welcome should rightly come from those pot
smoking kids who were actually in school at 6:30 a.m.

Anti-drug agencies reluctantly concede that their efforts to date have
increased high school marijuana use to more than 50 percent.

Yet the fact that only .2 percent of the nation is addicted to hard
drugs seems to escape the grasp of gateway theory proponents.

If anything, such statistics indicate marijuana use discourages hard
drug habits. Instead, taxpayer funded, full page newspaper ads and
slick television pitches encourage the wholesale jailing of an
oppressed class of people, as if it is so much entertainment.

It's time citizens put law enforcers and career propaganda workers on
notice:

The jig is up. That you exempt yourselves and your cohorts while you
make, enforce or advocate such hypocrisy proves that drug war is crime.

Jose Melendez,

DeLand, Fla.