LEAVE THE CONCERTGOERS ALONE

In your online article "Buzz-Killer?" [Web news, March 23], you reported
that City Council member Dr. Carl Mumpower obtained privileged entry
to the recent Bob Weir concert in Asheville and subsequently observed
concertgoers exchanging and using illicit drugs.

Apparently, it is Dr. Mumpower's wish that law enforcement should pay
particular attention to this breach of the law and spend its limited
energies continuing to chase the immoral, unconstitutional and failed
"war on drugs." It is my opinion that the police present at this event
should have only concerned themselves with actual rights-violating
crime--that is, the crime of one individual violating the rights of
another.

That is their proper role, the Harrison Act notwithstanding.

It is the typical, paternalistic overreach of the government to
arrogantly presume to protect me from myself--an odd scenario that
happens to contain no victim. A victim only exists in cases where a
perpetrator forcibly deprives an otherwise free individual of choice.

The victimless, peaceable and voluntary commercial exchange and
consumption of legally prohibited, recreational chemical substances is
a government-created crime, and one that should not receive the moral
sanction of a free people. (Unless, of course, American citizens are
subservient to the state, and their right to pursue their own
happiness as they see fit is subject to prior government approval.)
Voluntary associations and consequent personal behaviors, whether
socially unfashionable or simply unpreferred by a self-anointed moral
minority, should not be the object of law enforcement's attentions.

Tim Peck,

Asheville