READER'S VIEW: Drug paraphernalia raids

When I saw the front page on the Feb. 25 Journal, I wanted to stand up and
shout "Long Live Soviet America!" In the land of so-called free enterprise,
we have the Gestapo closing down legitimate businesses and arresting their
owners.

I am, of course, referring to the raids conducted by the Drug Enforcement
Agency and local police against Pegasus, Smokey's Den, and 20 After 4,
along with many others across the state and nation. This demonstrates how
desperate the government is getting. They don't want to admit the war on
drugs is a failure, so they go after easy targets like small businesses.

Then, in the next day's paper, we learned that police actually called one
of the business owners and told him the store had been robbed. Of course,
this was a lie - the robbery did not occur until he got there, and the
police were the robbers. As Ayn Rand once asked, "Who shall protect us from
our protectors?"

Hasn't the government got anything better to do with our tax money than
this? With the country in Orange Alert, they should rethink their
priorities. Drug prohibition today is as much a failure as alcohol
prohibition was in the 1920s. Hopefully, the voices of freedom and sanity
will prevail, the war on drugs will be ended, John Ashcroft will be fired
and the DEA abolished.

Peter B. Hull,

Pocatello