Pubdate: Mon, 22 Dec 2003
Source: The Monitor (TX)
Copyright: 2003 The Monitor
Contact: letters@themonitor.com
Website: http://www.themonitor.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1250
Author: Kirk Muse
Note: Newshawk title.

THROWING AWAY BILLIONS OF POTENTIAL TAX DOLLARS

I'm writing about your outstanding editorial of Dec. 7th: "'Noble
Experiment' Ultimately A Failure." I'd like to add that Alcohol
Prohibition was terminated in 1933 not because they decided that alcohol
was not so bad after all, but because of the crime and corruption that
prohibition caused.

Alcohol prohibition corrupted all levels of our government from the cops on
the beat to the highest levels of our administration. Just as our drug
prohibition policies are doing today.

Alcohol prohibition didn't stop people from drinking or buying alcohol, it
just stopped people from buying their alcohol from legal, regulated and
taxed sources.

Speaking of taxes, by keeping marijuana and other recreational drugs as
criminalized products, we are throwing away tens of billions of potential
tax dollars. Perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars.

It's time to end drug prohibition and take organized criminals out of the
recreational drug business the same way we took them out of the alcohol
business in 1933.

Kirk Muse

Mesa, AZ