A HASH ON DRUGS POLICY

Ros Coward has completely misunderstood the argument for legalising drugs
(Comment, June 3). Nobody is saying that all drugs are safe, nor that we
should simply ignore their dangers. The point is that any drug becomes more
dangerous when you hand over its production to criminals. They pollute the
product, hurting users; and they provoke a crime boom, hurting the entire
community.

By all means discourage people from consuming drugs which can hurt them,
but whether a drug is inherently dangerous, like cannabis and alcohol, or
inherently benign, like heroin, it must be legalised so that finally we can
control it in a way that a regime of prohibition cannot.

As it is, there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country whose
lives are being ruined, not by the drugs which they consume, but by the
black market which has been created and protected by the wanton ignorance
of politicians and journalists.

Nick Davies, London

The good news about cannabis psychosis is that there appears to be a simple
cure: stop smoking dope. Drug warriors like Ros Coward don't help when they
combine nonsense - "cannabis is 30 times stronger than in the 70s" - with
language that comes straight from the era of Reefer Madness - "sad
shifty-eyed self-ostracising paranoids". Perhaps this describes Evelyn
Waugh, who liked hashish, but does it also apply to Rudyard Kipling, Louis
Armstrong, Robert Altman and the various Tory politicians who "came out"?
If you want to deliver a message about the dangers of drugs, it helps to
have a sense of perspective - not to mention a sense of humour.

Patrick Matthews, London