LIKE PROHIBITION, MISGUIDED DRUG POLICIES SPAWN CRIME, VIOLENCE

To the Editor:

In a recent commentary, Dave Crockett correctly asserts that,
"There's no reason why hardworking adults shouldn't consume marijuana
anymore than they shouldn't drink beer or cocoa or tea." He further
suggests that questions about drug use in America should be answered
by "the powers of reason and wits, not by conservative zero-tolerance
prohibitionists" or by government seeking to protect us from
ourselves. We should heed Mr. Crockett's advice.

Government's track record at protecting us from ourselves has been
less than impressive. For instance, Prohibition in the 1920s
criminalized alcohol consumption and sales, replacing previously
legitimate producers and sellers of alcohol with a new,
Congress-invented class of criminals: The bootleggers and other black
marketers.

When Prohibition ended in the 1930s, that's when those "criminals"
disappeared and the nation's crime rate immediately began to fall.
Nobody wants to return to alcohol prohibition's black markets, gang
battles over territory, exhausted police forces, and an overburdened
court system.

But that's exactly what we have today, except that now it is caused
not by alcohol prohibition, but by drug prohibition.

In the 1960s, government began to step up its enforcement of drug
laws, and - more than coincidentally -that is when the U.S. crime
rate again began to rise. Now, 40 years and billions of dollars
later, government is no more successful with drug prohibition than it
was with alcohol. For example, since 1972, among American teenagers,
the number regularly smoking marijuana more than tripled, from 7
percent to 24 percent.

More importantly, it is government's banning of marijuana and other
drugs - today's Prohibition - that actually has spawned the vast
networks of drug traffickers in the first place.

Without anti-drug laws, the underground drug market and its profane
profits would evaporate.

The "bad guys" want their chemical products to remain illegal; it is
the good guys like Mr. Crockett who see the folly in government's
losing battle to keep these compounds from a willing market of consumers.

This is not quantum physics, it is just common sense: Take away the
anti-drug laws and you take away the underground market; take away
the underground and you take away the crime.

Government decides what is a crime and what is not, and
government-defined crimes are overcrowding and overtaxing our penal
system. We are paroling violent criminals, including murderers,
rapists, and child molesters, to make room in our prisons for drug
users and participants in other consenting adult "crimes." More than
750,000 people are in jail right now because of something that did
not physically harm the person or property of another.

No harm, no victim; no victim, no crime!

Whenever government invents crimes that have no victims and imposes
itself into the personal lives of consenting adults, government is
acting as if it knows better than we do about what is best for us.
Why are there not more "limited government" conservatives speaking
out against such government intrusion?

It is they who ordinarily protest the most strongly against
government controls over our lives and in favor of the law of supply
and demand.

Along those lines, letter writer Ellen McDaniel-Weissler correctly
points out that generally "conservatives are .. hollering about free
enterprise ... and allowing markets to regulate themselves, without
government interference." In the face of government's obsession with
intrusive prohibitions and with what drug users do themselves, it is
those free-market conservatives who should be screaming the loudest
at Big Brother in Washington, "Hands off! Stop trying to protect me
from myself!"

Unquestionably, government must continue to protect our youngest
citizens from alcohol and drugs and to protect any of us from being
harmed by drinkers or drug-users, but in the Land of the Free it
should be none of government's business what an adult drinker or an
adult drug-user simply does to himself.

Because, as Mr. Crockett observes, "Whenever a government exists to
protect us from ourselves, it is time for us to protect ourselves
from government." Mr. Crockett is supported in that admonition by
none other than Thomas Jefferson, who was certain that "the
legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as injurious
to others." Amen, Brother Jefferson! Amen, Brother Crockett! Amen,
Sister McDaniel-Wiessler!

Ken Metz

Frostburg