DRUG INITIATIVE WOULD GIVE JUDGE'S DISCRETION

It's bad enough that Gov. Bob Taft lied about the Ohio Drug Treatment
Initiative claiming it would "legalize the use of drugs''; now we have the
ever-so-compassionate Asa Hutchinson, chief of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration, lying about the initiative as well ("Drug treatment needs
accountability,'' Forum column, May 14).

If Hutchinson had bothered to read the initiative, he would have noticed
that accountability is built in. The power of accountability is now back in
the hands of judges, who can better decide, based on the intricacies of the
case at hand, what is appropriate for the offender and the community
without having to conform to some arbitrary federally mandated sentencing
guidelines.

One also needs to be wary of someone who claims to be compassionate while
ordering DEA agents to close down medical-marijuana dispensaries in
California, depriving patients of the only medicine that helps them.
Americans are compassionate people, but we never trample people when they
are down, and we never try to make matters worse with bad policy.

Bad policy is why we need the Ohio Drug Treatment Initiative. Bad policy
fills prisons with mandatory minimum sentences that are longer for drug use
than for rape or murder and spends hundreds of billions of dollars on a war
on (some) drugs here and abroad. Anti-drug media campaigns have proved
abject failures; that is where we to need have accountability.

We've had enough of Hutchinson's boot-heel justice to know that his
boot-heel compassion isn't going to produce any better results. It's time
for real reform, and the Ohio Drug Treatment Initiative does that, with
built-in accountability.

JIM WHITE,Oregon