COUNCIL PROPOSAL WON'T WORK

ESCALATING DRUG WAR

While I applaud the Tampa City Council's motives (stopping the spread of
the medical problem of addiction in our community), I have to question the
methodology. Is using law enforcement to stop addiction (a medical problem)
cost-effective? Is removing judicial discretion from the picture a wise move?

The federal drug war budget ballooned from $62 million in 1969 to $17.9
billion in 2000. What have we gotten out of our investment? For instance,
the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency, had this to say:
``Marijuana appears to be available to almost all high school seniors; some
89 percent reported that they think it would be `very easy' or `fairly
easy' for them to get it - almost twice the number who reported ever having
used it (49 percent).'' The RAND Corp. studied this very issue and found
that additional domestic law enforcement efforts cost 15 times as much as
treatment to achieve the same reduction in societal costs of reducing drug
abuse in our society.

The Framers of our nation intended to limit the invasions of our privacy
made by the government. They built separations of powers into our very
Constitution to protect us from police and the government. Giving the
police more power is not the answer. The only way to stop drugs is to
remove the profit and eliminate the black market.

Anthony Lorenzo, Tampa

The writer is a member of the Florida Cannabis Action Network. E-mail:
anthony@flcan.org

OFFER DRUG TREATMENT

Re: ``Getting Drug Dealers Off The Street'' (Our Opinion, Dec. 24):

Yes, law enforcement should be given every legal means to rid the streets
of drug dealers. But we must all understand that the local market will
shrink, move, then finally return to find and addict those people willing
to pay the price. Even the risk of capital punishment for kingpins would
not stop substances worth 60 times what they'd bring on a free market. (Can
you imagine anything worth more than $20,000 per ounce?)

There is only one way to kill the illegal market for keeps: Take out the
profit and the addiction. The least destructive way would be for states to
run stores the way Pennsylvania has been selling liquor since it was
relegalized in 1933. Then go one step beyond Pennsylvania and use part of
the revenue to offer open-ended, free treatment.

John Chase, Palm Harbor

The writer is a board member and secretary of Unitarian Universalists for
Drug Policy Reform. Web site: www.uudpr.org