HUNTERS ASKED TO HELP FIND POT

Your December 1 article, "Hunters Asked To Help Find Pot", regarding
the request by Vermont State Police asking hunters to act as police
spies while out hunting and to notify them if they find evidence of
marijuana cultivation. This is just another example of how our
nation's failed war on pot smokers makes us all less free, whether one
uses marijuana or not. Enlisting private citizens to spy on others,
conducting aerial surveillance, drug raids on the wrong houses, and
drug war exemptions that have shredded our constitutional rights, all
represent unwarranted governmental intrusions. Yet Americans continue
to surrender civil liberties to a growing police state, while the
press fails to question the reefer madness lies being generated by
unelected drug war bureaucrats like drug czar John Walters, who
illegally campaigned against marijuana law reform ballot initiatives
in Nevada and Arizona earlier this year on the taxpayers' dime.

The nearly 750,000 marijuana arrests each year for marijuana waste
billions more tax dollars, and ruin lives, costing otherwise law
abiding jobs, student loans, drivers licenses and even their freedom.
Meanwhile over 61% of Americans polled say they don't want people
jailed for pot and 80% want medical marijuana legalized.

Cannabis is but a God-given herb that can provide so many benefits to
mankind if our government would only comes to its senses. But when
you've been lying for 65 years, it gets pretty embarrassing to admit
you were making it all up. It's much easier to keep escalating and
escalating and maximizing the harm, like inviting citizens to become
police spies. Is this America or the Soviet Union we waged a cold war
against?

GARY STORCK

Madison, Wis.