CAMPAIGN AGAINST MARIJUANA A WASTE

An Oct. 17 article in The Daily Star on New York's Marijuana Reform Party
erred in claiming that marijuana "was used recreationally until the 1930s,
when the federal Bureau of Narcotics began a campaign against it." Most
Americans had never even heard of marijuana at the time, much less used it.

The first marijuana laws were enacted in response to Mexican migration
during the early 1900s, despite opposition from the American Medical
Association. White Americans did not begin to smoke marijuana until a
soon-to-be entrenched government bureaucracy began funding reefer madness
propaganda.

Dire warnings that marijuana inspires homicidal rages have been
counterproductive at best. An estimated 38 percent of Americans have now
smoked pot. The reefer madness myths have long been discredited, forcing
the drug war gravy train to spend millions of tax dollars on politicized
research, trying to find harm in a relatively harmless plant.

The direct experience of millions of Americans contradicts the
sensationalistic myths used to justify marijuana prohibition. Illegal drug
use is the only public health issue wherein key stakeholders are not only
ignored, but actively persecuted and incarcerated. In terms of medical
marijuana, those stakeholders happen to be cancer and AIDS patients.

Robert Sharpe, Arlington, Va.,

Sharpe is program officer for Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, D.C.