WAR ON DRUGS PROGRAMS WASTE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS

To the Editor:

Regarding the recent drug search at Dayton high and junior high schools:
Drug sniffing dogs? 17 hits? No results! Wasted time. Wasted resources,
embarrassed and shaken-up kids. But it was for their own good, right? A
powerful and effective message was sent. Right? Not hardly.

How many billions of dollars, how many thousands of wasted lives, how many
inept, neanderthal policies is it going to take for us, as a society, to
wake up to the glaring fact that the 30-year War on Drugs has been a
complete and utter failure. With absolutely no significant success, the war
should be scrapped in its entirety, with all the inane and fruitless "Just
Say No" and DARE-type programs dismantled from top to bottom, immediately.

Since 1970, over 600 published scientific research papers have been
published that prove, indisputably, that the regular (1/2 hour a day)
practice of transcendental meditation has profound, lasting and positive
psychophysiological effects in the brain's amygdala, panietal lobes and
medulla, and that, among other things, purifies the blood chemistry and
normalizes the functioning of the nervous system that results in an
observable, repeatable, verifiable, undeniable and dramatic reduction of
the desire to use illegal drugs.

In other words, TM dissolves the desire to do drugs at the root of the
problem. Schools that use TM as part of the regular curriculum have no drug
problem: not problems with school violence, not school bullying problems
and their academic performance is off the charts.

Why don't we do what works? There is not a person on this planet who can
effectively and intelligently argue that this approach does not work. Why
don't we take advantage of it? Don't our kids deserve the best?

Blaze Compton, Dayton