THE GOOD OLD DAYS

The Washington City Paper ("Magic Pill, 10/26) abandons objective
journalism by accepting Alan Leshner's lies, dissembling, and
propaganda for drug prohibition at face value without the withering
criticism that such nonsense deserves. What Leshner seeks to hide is
the fact that drug use caused no societal problems worthy of mention
before the drug laws went on the books. No one was robbing, whoring,
or murdering over drugs when addicts could buy all the heroin,
cocaine, morphine, opium, and anything else they wanted cheaply and
legally at the corner pharmacy. When drug 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 once unheard-of we now have prisoners
overflowing with drug users. Where addicts once lived normal lives,
we have hundreds of thousands of shattered families. Where overdoses
were once extremely rare, we have tens of thousands of drug deaths
every year. The addiction rate is now three times greater than when
we had no laws at all.

Alan Leshner and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) do not
want people to know that virtually all of the "drug problems" we
currently have are the direct result of drug prohibition, not the
drugs themselves. Never in its history has NIDA accomplished a
single thing that lowered drug abuse, so Alan Leshner is nothing more
than a propaganda agent with a bag of harmful deceptions to inflict
on society. The universally bad results of drug prohibition mark it
as a destructive policy that should be abandoned.

Redford Givens, San Francisco

WEIRD SCIENCE

The Washington City Paper's cover article on addiction ("Magic Pill,"
10/26) referred to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Intramural Research Program as "cutting-edge science." As a social
scientist trained in research methods, I'm skeptical of the alleged
science NIDA cranks out with our tax dollars, especially as it
pertains to marijuana. According to the NIDA Web site "[m]arijuana
is a green or gray mixture of dried, shredded flowers and leaves of
the hemp plant." NIDA can't even get the color of marijuana right.

What does that say about the validity of their research?

The article noted that a NIDA researcher "recently won accolades from
his peers for finally training monkeys to smoke marijuana
voluntarily." Apparently, most animals don't enjoy marijuana but
"take to cocaine and heroin like fish to water." NIDA's
determination to train monkeys to use marijuana despite repeated
failure says a lot about the organization's integrity. Science and
predetermined outcomes are mutually exclusive.

NIDA has a long history of funding methodologically suspect research.
The reefer-madness myths that led to marijuana prohibition have long
been discredited, forcing the drug-war gravy train to spend millions
on politicized research, trying to find harm in a relatively harmless
plant. Last year's highly publicized NIDA study involving squirrel
monkeys and cocaine is a prime example. Frustrated with animal
research subjects' unwillingness to self-administer THC (one of the
many psychoactive ingredients in marijuana), NIDA researchers devised
a flawed but headline-grabbing means of supporting their dubious
contention that marijuana is addictive: The problem was overcome by
first teaching the monkeys to self-administer cocaine. After
strapping squirrel monkeys into chairs and turning them into cocaine
addicts, NIDA found that monkeys would willingly self-administer THC
when forced into cocaine withdrawal. The NIDA press release quoted
Stephen Goldberg, one of the study's authors, as concluding that
"marijuana has as much potential for abuse as other drugs of abuse,
such as cocaine and heroin." Despite questionable methodology and a
statistically insignificant control group of four monkeys, the study
made headlines around the nation. NIDA produces propaganda, not
science.

Robert Sharpe, Cleveland Park