'LEAST HARM;' LESS COPS

Editor, The News:

It saddens me that we need more police personnel again when the main reason
we do need them is the policy of prohibition (war on drugs).

It has been stated again and again that 50 per cent of crime is the result
of prohibition.

Indeed, in the Merseyside experiment in Liverpool, when they supplied free
heroin the rate of crime dropped by 70 per cent.

Switzerland adopted a similar policy on heroin three or four years ago. Two
years later, in a referendum on the continuation of the program, 70 per
cent of the voters supported continuation of the program.

In the U.S., prohibition reached savage levels under President Reagan.
Since that time the prison population has risen from about 500,000 to more
than two million; a vast number of these for marijuana possession and many
on the testimony of one criminal seeking this to soften their penalties.

Meanwhile, the U.S. consumes 50 per cent of the world's illegals. The only
benefit of prohibition goes to the drug pushers - big and small.

We would all be more secure with fewer police, if we would only seriously
implement "least harm" instead of prohibition, which so totally failed for
alcohol in the U.S. for 13 long and increasingly miserable years.

For illegal drugs: Legalize, regulate, rehabilitate.

Gilbert Currie-Johnson

Abbotsford