HOME-COURT ADVANTAGE

Michael Massing did an excellent job of pointing out the major differences
between the war on drugs and the war on terrorism ["Home-Court Advantage,"
December 3]. Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime profits from the heroin
trade because of drug prohibition, not in spite of it. Attempts to limit
supply while demand remains constant only increase the profitability of
drug trafficking. Here in the United States, the drug war distorts market
forces to the degree that an easily grown weed like marijuana is literally
worth its weight in gold. In South America, the various armed factions
tearing Colombia apart are all financially dependent on the obscene profits
created by America's $50-billion war on consensual vices. The drug war is
the problem, not the solution.

Heroin produced in Afghanistan is primarily consumed in Europe, a continent
already experimenting with public-health alternatives to the drug war.
Providing chronic addicts with standardized doses in a treatment setting
has been shown to reduce drug-related disease, death, and crime. Also,
expanded prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organized crime of
its core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking
unprofitable, spare future generations addiction, and significantly
undermine the Taliban's funding. Harm-reduction policies have the potential
to reduce the perils of both drug use and drug prohibition.

Robert Sharpe, M.P.A.

The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation

Washington, D.C.

If we fight the war on terrorism as we've fought the war on drugs, can we
expect the same results? Will terrorists multiply exponentially, be cheaper
to deploy, and become far deadlier? Can we expect terrorists to flood
across our borders in an unstoppable deluge? Will the few civil liberties
remaining after the war on drugs now fall prey to the war on terrorism? How
will the definition of a terrorist evolve, and will it change on the whim
of some anonymous bureaucrat, as it did in the other war?

Mike Plylar

Kremmling, CO