TIME FOR A NEW STRATEGY IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Your editorial, `Reforming Drug Laws' (6/12), makes an eloquent plea
to Governor Pataki and the NY State Legislature to reform the
Rockefeller drug laws.

You state the laws are considered to be a failure even by those who
originally wrote and sponsored them, are racist in action, drain the
taxpayers' wallets, and do little, if anything, to curb drug abuse.
Then you go on say there is virtually no chance for any reform or
compromise by Albany's feudal government structure, especially in an
election year.

Why then do you advocate reform of the laws? Why not advocate
completely ending the Rockefeller drug laws? We ended the NY State
alcohol prohibition laws in 1925, eight years before the Federal
government alcohol prohibition was overturned by an amendment to the
U.S. Constitution. During those eight years, alcohol related violence,
particularly in New York City, was minimized and NY State law
enforcement funds were directed to other areas of crime.

Prohibition doesn't work. It is also frightfully expensive and
needlessly increases human suffering. Common sense pragmatism, what
the Dutch call Ogedogen', would dictate regulations whose strictness
was based on the public health harmfulness of each drug.

Most of the violence associated with illegal drugs is due to their
illegality. Al Capone didn't kill people because he was a drunk. He
did so because there were large profits in selling illegal alcohol.
Besides, if lowering violence is the object, illicit substances like
opiates and marijuana decrease rage and aggression. The only drug
associated with increasing the intensity of violence is alcohol and
we've learned to regulate it fairly well.

Most of the illness due to use of illegal drugs is also due to their
illegality. Instead of seducing our fellow citizens into public health
clinics, we drive them into shooting galleries and other places least
accessible to public health and provide reservoirs for HIV, hepatitis
C, tuberculosis, depression, and apathy.

Instead of redirecting our concern from a punitive criminal justice
approach, like the Rockefeller drug laws, to a common sense, public
health oriented harm reduction policy, we foolishly and hopelessly
pursue an addictive war on our own citizens, especially the poorest,
the youngest, and people of color.

We cannot protect free adults from their own choices nor should we use
the force of law to try. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H.
Jackson summed it up best. `It is not the function of government to
keep its citizens from falling into error. It is the function of the
citizens to keep their government from falling into error.'

Justice Jackson's thought should be our motto in an election
year.

Gene Tinelli, MD ReconsiDer, Forum on Drug Policy