MARIJUANA POSES LESS DANGER THAN ALCOHOL

Regarding your Feb. 5 editorial, "New campaign highlights effects of U.S.
drug use'': The Office of National Drug Control Policy's $3.6 million worth
of Super Bowl ads was an opportunistic attempt to link the increasingly
unpopular war on drugs to the overwhelmingly popular war on terrorism.

The most popular recreational drug and the one most often associated with
domestic violence was advertised throughout the Super Bowl. That drug is
alcohol, and it kills more Americans every year than all illegal drugs
combined. Alcohol prohibition once financed organized crime, but that's no
reason to reinstate it.

The drug-control policy office is cynically using the drug war's collateral
damage to justify increased spending during an economic recession. The most
popular illicit drug is domestically grown marijuana, which pays for an
untaxed cottage industry and cross-border drug cartels, not international
terrorists. Unlike alcohol, pot has never been shown to cause an overdose
death, nor does it share the addictive properties of nicotine. As far as I
can tell, the only reason for not taxing and regulating the sale of
marijuana to adults is that doing so would derail the drug war gravy train.

Our gateway policy guarantees job security for drug war bureaucrats. As
long as marijuana remains illegal and distributed by organized crime,
consumers will continue to come into contact with harder drugs like cocaine
and heroin, drugs that really do finance terrorism.

ROBERT SHARPE WASHINGTON, D.C.

The writer is a program officer for the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington,
D.C.