DRUG WAR CREATED MANY PRISON JOBS

Letter writer Cody Boudreaux asks: "Why hasn't our war on drugs been won"?
It cannot be won. We cannot overcome the basic laws of supply and demand.
If Americans want a product and are willing to pay a substantial price for
that product, someone somewhere will supply it.

We can't keep drugs out of high security prisons with barbed wire and
electric fences, security cameras everywhere and prisoners subject to full
body searches, including body cavity searches. How are we going to be able
to keep drugs out of a country with thousands of miles of international
borders and coastline? We're not.

Victory is not the goal of the war. Continuation of the war is. The United
States has more than 2 million prisoners. Those 2 million prisoners create
hundreds of thousands of relatively high paying government jobs. The
workers with drug war created jobs will do anything and everything in their
power to make sure the drug war never ends.

Until we can solve this problem, the drug war and our prison population
will continue to expand: and our personal freedom will continue to shrink.

Kirk Muse

Vancouver, Wash.