ANTI-DRUG LAWS ARE A DANGER TO OUR CHILDREN

Who could fail to be moved by Alice Petlock Pauser's story of her daughter
Genevieve's addiction to marijuana and consequent involvement in the
murdere of Kyle Hachmeister ("Parent, child heartache," Jan. 19-20)?

Yet, with all due respect for the aforementioned heartache, I submit that
Alice Pauser has erred in laying the blame for this situation solely on
drugs. If we look more deeply into the situation, we see that the problem
is not the drugs themselves, but rather the laws that try (with spectacular
lack of success) to ban them.

Consider alcohol and tobacco, two drugs whose bad effects on the user's
health are unarguably worse than those of marijuana. Do we see kids knifing
each other to death over beer or cigarettes? We do not.

Why? Because those drugs are legal and therefore widely and cheaply available.

Kyle Hachmeister was killed while being robbed of a goodly stash of illegal
loot. How could a teenager pile up that much cash from just selling pot?
Three Reasons:

* The market is huge. The potential black market for beer and booze is
confined to the relatively small segment of the population from the
mid-teens to 21. For pot it includes the entire adult population as well.

* The price is artificially high. Since trafficking in dope is illegal,
everyone along the supply chain charges a premium price for his or her role
in passing it along. This premium goes to pay for things like burned crops,
confiscated shipments, lawyers, bribes, lookouts, turf wars, medical
expenses and other costs which normal businesses don't have to deal with.

* Competition is restricted. In any other field of endeavor we'd probably
admire the guts and initiative it takes to go into drug dealing. But
clearly it's not for everyone. Competition is based not on economics but on
fear, so dealers don't need to worry about Pot-Mart opening up two blocks away.

Take away the anti-drug laws, and all three of these conditions evaporate
like the morning fog. Respectable, law-abiding, tax-paying businesses would
supply the obvious demand at reasonable prices under controlled
conditions,including carding kids before selling to them. Hachmeister might
still have been a doper, but he wouldn't be making any money out of it.

And, more to the point, he'd still be alive; Pauser and the three other
teenagers convicted in his killing would be free; insurance and
professional medical providers would deal with their drug-related health
problems; and their five families would not be devastated.

When historians of the future write about our era, they will compare it to
the Salem witch hunts, Prohibition and McCarthyism as examples of mass
hysteria broght on by collective delusion - in this case that drugs are so
bad that we must destroy our children in order to save them.

Take a good look at the Jihad on Drugs. There are no winners, only losers.

The real danger to our kids is not drugs, it is anti-drug laws. The sooner
we replace them with legalization, commercialization, sensible governmental
regulation, and the attitude that drug problems are health issues, not
legal ones, the sooner that tragedies like this will become a thing of the
past.

Richard S. Russell, Madison