PUT THIS IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT

Dear Editor,

Tristan Meyer's April 10 column "Drug use in universities hinders hard
earned reputation and goals" is a real three-alarm psycho horror show.

Let me provide a brief but accurate translation: If you suspect your
fellow students are smoking marijuana, call the cops on them. (Who
knows? You might even get an "America's Most Wanted" --style cash award!)

I don't know what planet Meyer has been living on for the last 30
years, but here's what his holy super-patriotic crusade against drugs
has done: It's turned the Land of the Free--not Russia, not
China--into the world's biggest prison.

The Land of the Free now has about 2,300,000 women, men and children
behind bars, and leads the world both in raw numbers of prisoners and
in percentage of population behind bars. One out of every four
prisoners on Earth is in an American prison or jail.

Meyer's holy crusade against drugs was cooked up by racists and
continues to target blacks and Hispanics so disproportionately that,
typically by state, 10 to 11 times more people of color are sent to
prison than whites (though we've long known that whites use illegal
drugs at higher rates than minorities).

The marijuana laws he wants to club his fellow students with were
passed after a Hearst newspaper campaign of racist frenzy in the 1930s
that claimed Negroes and Mexicans used marijuana to have sex with
white women.

When you join Meyer's parade, you're marching with the
Klan.

Meyer's attack on his fellow students is particularly disgusting,
because any misdemeanor bust for simple pot possession causes the
lifelong loss of federal college financial aid.

Since this provision of the Higher Education Act was secretly rammed
through Congress without testimony or hearings six years ago, 100,000
kids (all poor--well-off families don't need federal college loans)
have lost all chance to afford college. These victims, too, are wildly
disproportionately Hispanic and African-American.

There is a drug crusade which decent, humane, fair, anti-racist
college students can join: Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, which
is working to euthanize the rabid, racist, youth-bashing pit bull
called the War on Drugs.

You can read about SSDP, join and find your nearest campus chapter at
www.ssdp.org. The broomstick-up-their-butts, fascist, racist,
puritanical Young Republican crowd has always infested college campuses.

The trick for decent, sane students is to defend themselves and
America against them, and limit the damage their irresponsible,
frothing crusades do to ordinary, innocent people, to the poor, to our
minority neighbors. Take a stand and act--before Meyer makes you a
member of the Future Prisoners of America.

Bob Merkin

Students for a Sensible Drug Policy member