DELIBERATELY MISLEADING

The drug war's burden on taxpayers grows every year, as ever more drug
offenders are incarcerated.

In her March 28 Guest Opinion on addiction, Joan Marie Brown cites an
Office of National Drug Control Policy claim that the economic costs of
drug abuse totaled $160.7 billion in 2000. The figure, which comes from a
study titled "The Economic Costs of Drug Abuse in the United States," is
deliberately misleading. The study tallies the cost of incarcerating drug
offenders, the HIV epidemic and prohibition-related violence and
disingenuously presents the total as "costs of drug abuse."

Consider the HIV epidemic. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
researchers estimate that 58 percent of AIDS cases among women and 36
percent of overall cases are linked to injection drug use or sex with
partners who inject drugs. This easily preventable public health crisis is
a direct result of zero-tolerance laws that restrict access to clean
syringes. Yet government bureaucrats would have the public believe that
this unintended consequence justifies more of the same harmful policies.

The drug war's burden on taxpayers grows every year, as ever more drug
offenders are incarcerated. America now has the highest incarceration rate
in the world. The cost of maintaining the world's largest prison system
hardly justifies throwing more money at America's zero-tolerance drug war.

Robert Sharpe, M.P.A.

Drug Policy Alliance