DRUG WAR ECONOMICS

Regarding "9 Colombians Convicted Of Drug Smuggling" (Metro, Oct. 2):

I would like to point out some dollar amounts for the public regarding this
case. Nine prisoners, incarcerated for 20 years each at a cost of $25,000
per year per inmate. Do federal agents expect praise or gratitude for
spending $4.5 million on some low-level smugglers who were probably being
paid peanuts to smuggle the decoy shipment in?

I would like to give the U.S. attorney some economics lessons. First, if
you get $15,000 for something you pay less than a thousand for, you can
afford to lose 14 out of 15 shipments to break even. How can we win with
economics like that stacked against us?

Steve Cole states he hopes word gets back to Colombia that the United
States is not playing around and is sentencing people to huge amounts of
time. Does he think the cartels will include this in their training manuals
when they recruit poor people from the shanty towns? The shanty towns are
the refugee cities that have sprung up as a result of Plan Colombia.
Farmers and their crops have been poisoned from the aerial spraying that is
going on in Colombia on our dollar.

When will the "compassionate conservatives" conserve the right things?
Start conserving military budgets. Start conserving drug war costs.
Conserve money from foreign covert operations like Plan Colombia. Conserve
money from terrorist training schools right here in our country like the
School of the Americas.