REPEAL DRUG POLICY

This is concerning your Jan. 4 editorial, "Grand Traverse County's Drug
Court is worth a try."

After over 88 years of utter failure it is utterly insane to suggest that
"drug courts" can make America's lunatic drug prohibition scheme work. A
more practical course would be to repeal a counterproductive drug policy
that causes more troubles than the drugs by themselves ever did or ever
could do.

History proves that America's drug war is unnecessary because no one was
robbing, whoring and murdering over drugs when addicts could buy all of the
heroin, cocaine, morphine, opium and anything else they wanted cheaply and
legally at the corner pharmacy. When drugs were legal addicts held regular
employment, raised decent families and were indistinguishable from their
teetotaling neighbors. Overdoses were virtually unheard of when addicts
used cheap pure Bayer Heroin instead of the expensive toxic potions
prohibition puts on the streets (See: The Consumers Union Report on Licit
and Illicit Drugs
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm).

Where drug crime was unheard-of, we now have prisons overflowing with drug
users. Where addicts lived normal lives, we have hundreds of thousands of
shattered families. Where overdoses were extremely rare, we have tens of
thousands of drug deaths every year. The addiction rate is now five times
greater than when we had no laws at all.

These are the consequences of criminalizing drug use, not the effects of
using the drugs themselves.

Drug courts are desperate drug warriors' way of delaying the inevitable
repeal of drug prohibition because of its counterproductive nature.

It's worth remembering that Eliot Ness and the revenuers never put the
booze barons out of business. Repeal and a regulated market for adult
alcohol use did that. Regulation works for alcohol and regulation will work
for drugs. Prohibition, on the other hand, has never worked for anything,
anywhere, anytime.

Redford Givens,

San Francisco