Hemp FACT #31-U.K. Artcl.Pt.7

Date: 95-02-12 12:30:25 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is Part VII of an article that appeared in the Guardian Newspaper on 9/18/93.

Please remember that this article was written in the UK all comments in ( ) are the poster's.

According to Andy Waller, marijuana should "theoretically" cost less per acre than wheat to grow. Yet Nabilone, the only synthetic cannabinoid legally prescribed in the UK, costs the NHS [National Health Service] 39.70 [pounds about 60-70 dollars?] for twenty capsules. "The pharmaceutical industry and regulatory system are addicted to the cult of synthesis," complains Robert Randall. "It's as if every drug has to come out of a factory. God forbid that it might be natural. There's an attitude that man can make a better Garden Of Eden scientifically."

In fact, Dr Grinspoon doubts whether synthetic compounds would be as effective as the natural substance. "It's the synergy of so many cannabinoids in natural marijuana which may be the secret to it's wide-ranging properties," says Grinspoon. However, he doubts whether straightforward cannabis will become a prescription drug. As a plant, cannabis cannot be patented and is therefore an uncommercial proposition for the drug companies.

Legalized prescription would also need to cope with the problems of standardization and leakage on to the market. "There would be queues outside every GP's office," jokes Mike Goodman of Release, the national drugs and legal advice service. "If you can get marijuana for $10 an ounce from your doctor rather than $600 (poster's note--$600 AN OZ.--Must be some incredible stuff ;-)) on the street," says Grinspoon, "it's obvious why prescription won't work. Cannabis must be given the same status as alcohol - legal, with appropriate limitations, for use by adults for any purpose."

Robert Randall echoes others in vehemently disagreeing with Grinspoon's call for general legalization. "The idea that sick people are the key to decriminalization is to hold the welfare of the ill hostage to reformist fantasies. We want it on prescription, like morphine, to help people. Not so that a hippie can have a good time in the afternoon."

Once deemed the weed that propgated flowerpower, the subversive dropout's favoured intoxicant, marijuana has since moved mainstream. It is no longer the narcotic of youthful rebellion for baby-boomers of non-inhaler Bill Clinton's generation. Mike Goodman insists more people now roll joints and eat hash brownies than attend football [soccer] matches, art galleries or church. A survey to be published by two Manchester criminologists next month suggests that close to 50 per cent of teenagers aged 14-16 in urban areas use illicit drugs regularly [does this include alcohol underage?], most commonly cannabis. According to Peter McDermott, editor of the International Journal On Drug Policy: "Cannabis can no longer be regarded as deviant activity. It's part of our national social life."

In a recent survey at a leading teaching hospital, the results of which one source admits to being asked to suppress, "over 60 per cent of medical students were found to be marijuana users." In the same survey, only 30 per cent admitted to smoking cigarettes.

Even senior police officers, such as Commander John Grieve of the Metropolitan Police, have proposed licensing a network of drug suppliers and dealers. Brian Hilliard, editor of Police Review, has called for the legalization of cannabis for several years. "Legalizing cannabis wouldn't do any harm to anybody," he says "We should be concentrating on the serious business of heroin and amphetamines."

Part 8 of dis berry interesting article coming soon to a message board near you.

Hemp FACT #31-U.K. Artcl.Pt.8

Date: 95-02-13 11:02:01 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is the final part of an article that appeared in the Guardian Newspaper on 9/18/93.

Please remember that this article was written in the UK all comments in ( ) are the poster's.

The conviction of 42,209 people in 1991 on marijuana charges contributes to the clogging of the courts and the overcrowding of prisons. Almost 90 per cent of drug offences involve cannabis. Yet the British government spends 500 million pounds (750,000,000 dollars approx?) a year on "overall responses to drugs (international and national)" and receives no tax revenue from the UK's estimated 1.8 billion pound (2.7 billion dollars?) illicit drugs market.

Increasingly, those pressing for marijuana's legalization mirror Grinspoon's belief that, "since scientific scepticism of marijuana has all but collapsed", the chief opposition to cannabis rests on a moral and political, not toxicological, foundation.

The real damage that cannabis causes, the argument goes, is to the body politic. In his recent book, Food Of The Gods, Terence McKenna neatly encapsulates dope's lasting social potentcy: "It (cannabis) dimishes the power of ego, has a mitigating effect on competition. causes one to question authority, and reinforces the notion of merely relative importance of social values."

"It's clear that the government's war on drugs takes precedence over medical rationality," says Nick Partridge of the Terrence Higgins Trust (A national UK charity dealing with AIDS (I think)). "At present we're criminalizing many people in massive pain at the end of their lives. Yet I don't expect the medical arguments to break through the political dogma surrounding marijuana and that is deeply regrettable."

"Marijuana has empowered many sick people for the first time," says Robert Randall. "For many, it is the only drug that works. The real problem with marijuana is perhaps it threatens to put people in charge of their own medical lives. The question is: who is going to control individual's biology - large corporations, doctors and governments, or people themselves?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks go to ALEX KERSHAW who wrote this interesting and revealing article for the Guardian Newspaper.

If anyone is interested in the article in its entirety, email the poster.

Hemp FACT #32-Buckley.Pt.1

Date: 95-02-14 11:01:23 EDT

From: ADBryan

This column by William F. Buckley was in The Albuquereque Journal June 9, 1993. It makes a good argument for marijuana legalization. William Buckley's columns are copyright by the Universal Press

Syndicate.

Legalization of Marijuana Long Overdue

In a recent encounter, Edward Koch reminded his interlocuter that many years ago, Rep. Edward Koch had sought backing for a congressional investigation into the marijuana laws. I had been reminded by the former mayor of New York that along about 1967-68, the typical congressman had to reflect that any law requiring one or five or 10 years in jail as a penalty for being caught using marijuana endangered his own sons and daughters in college. Koch got the support he sought.

But no meaningful reforms, if that is the word we are permitted to use, were enacted. In 1967, all drug arrests came to 121,000. Of these, marijuana arrests were one-half, 61,000. In 1991, all drug arrests were 1 million, marijuana 285,000.

Background data give us perspective. Sixty-six million Americans have smoked marijuana, and at least 10 million - perhaps many more - continue to do so regularly. Comparable figures? Twenty-two million have used cocaine, 1.5 million still do; 150 million have used tobacco, 50 million still do. In 1976, 12 percent of children age 12-17 had used marijuana during the preceding month. By 1990, this figure was down to 5 percent. Over age 26, the percentage had not changed: 3.5 percent in 1976, 3.6 percent in 1990.

The social vectors within the drug-law-reform movement have during the period since Koch asked for an investigation of federal marijuana laws moved as follows:

-The informed public is gradually willing to acknowledge a difference between marijuana and more lethal drugs.

-It is, however reluctantly, acknowledged that marijuana can have therapeutic uses, in particular to bring relief to those suffering from radiation or chemotherapy treatments for cancer.

-There is a gradual awakening of the moral sensibilities of the alert members of the public. My own belated arrival on the scene stings in the memory. It came with a letter from a father in his early 30s who neither smoked nor drank, who had three children, was gainfully employed, and engaged in civic-minded activity - but liked on Saturday nights, to retreat to his woodshed and smoke a joint. He was caught at it, arrested, his house seized, and is now in jail, and sentenced to 10 years. It is hard to understand the moral disposition of the prosecuter who asked for that sentence, and the judge who imposed it.

Part 2 Tomorrow. email the poster for complete copies of articles.

Hemp FACT #33-Buckley.Pt.2

Date: 95-02-15 12:18:36 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is Part 2 of a column by William F. Buckley in The Albuquereque Journal June 9, 1993. It makes a good argument for marijuana legalization.

William Buckley's columns are copyright by the Universal Press Syndicate.

Legalization of Marijuana Long Overdue

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has a program, which is to bring on the legalization of marijuana by the year 1997. The president of NORML, as it is everywhere referred to, is a man of considerable literary and polemical skills. Richard Cowan is a graduate of Yale and a co-founder of Young Americans for Freedom. He is here and there given to hyperbole, as when he cites the support given to the Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA) by corporate America as "reminiscent of the support given the Nazis by German industrialists."

But Cowen is on to something, the root credentials of which are:

-However one feels about legalizing cocaine, the case for legalizing marijuana is an entire world removed from that question.

-The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

-The point must surely come when the American people acknowledge that the drive against marijuana is not proving anything at all, given the continuing availability of the drug and its (relatively modest) patronage.

Richard Cowan makes a telling point, namely that the media are notoriously insensitive to the abuses of the narcocracy. "Most people are unaware of the nature of the marijuana prohibition in America today, the extent of its cruelty and injustice, and the threat that it poses to everyone's freedom. Ironically, many of those who are aware of the extent of the problem view it as being so great that they despair of being able to end it. Consequently, as an act of triage, they abandon it as a lost cause, to work on something which they view as at least possible." Like what? The rehabilitation of President Clinton?

More stuff manana -- Keep those cards and letters coming ;-)

Hemp FACT #34-PFDFA

Date: 95-02-16 11:39:03 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is Part 1 of an article that appeared in The Hartford Courant. It shows the lies perpetrated by the Partnership for a Drug Free America.

"Untruths, unreliable data create obstacles in war on drugs."

It is a stark message designed to persuade youths to stay away from marijuana.

And it is a lie.

The narrator tells television viewers they are watching the brain waves of a normal 14-year-old. As he speaks, squiggly lines with high peaks show an obviously active brain.

The picture changes: The lines flatten. These, the narrator says, are the brain waves of a 14-year-old on marijuana.

The problem with this national television advertisement is that the flatter "brain waves" are not those of a teenager on dope; they are not brain waves at all. The electroencephalograph was not hooked up to anyone.

It is not just brain waves that are being manipulated in the war against drugs. Truth has been a casualty in other areas as well.

For example:

A study cited by presidents and business leaders to demonstrate the effect of drug use on worker productivity has no scientific validity according to the organization that conducted it.

No one has been able to produce another widely quoted study that purportedly showed drug users cost companies more in worker's compensation claims and medical benefits.

A third study, used to show that marijuana could cause long-term impairment, was improperly conducted and reached conclusions no other study has been able to duplicated, according to one of its authors.

[article goes on to say that drugs are bad but that lying about it destroys the credibility of the anti-drug crusade.]

"Part of the problem we have as drug educators today is that kids don't believe us," said Dr. Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School who has researched the effects of marijuana.

"They've been told for so long that marijuana is very bad for them and then they go off to college and see a brilliant English major that smokes dope and nothing's happened to his or her brain or heart. Then they use it themselves and discover it's the least harmful illegal drug. So they say that maybe they've been lied to about cocaine or PCP, too."

But such questions are not the foremost concern of the organization that created the brain-wave advertisement. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America wants, above all else, to prevent people from using drugs.

Theresa Grant, public information director for the nonprofit organization, said she doesn't see any problem with the ad. "The marijuana brain-wave commercial was one of the ads that we used as a fact, rather than a fear-inducing ad," Grant said. later, she acknowledged: "It was a simulation. They manipulated the machine. It was not attached to any person. It was not scientific. At the time we created it in 1987, we were told that it was an appropriate representation," by the government's National Institute on Drug Abuse.

... She emphasized that the partnership has not conceded that the brain-wave representation was inaccurate ...

"It's a flat lie," said Grinspoon. "Marijuana has no clinically significant effect on the electroencephalograph." ...

Citing a Harvard Medical School study, he said, "Nobody has been able to demonstrate one iota of brain damage from smoking marijuana."

Part 2. Tomorrow

Hemp FACT #35-PFDFA

Date: 95-02-17 11:18:52 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is part 2 of an article that appeared in The Hartford Courant in 90 or 91

"Untruths, unreliable data create obstacles in war on drugs." It is a stark message designed to persuade youths to stay away from marijuana.

And it is a lie.

Social 'Studies'

Last year President Bush declared that "drug abuse among American workers costs businesses anywhere from $60 billion to $100 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism, drug-related accidents, medical claims and theft."

Where did he get those number?

Bush, and President Reagan before him, have based their comments about drugs and productivity on a study conducted by the Research Triangle Institute, a nonprofit research organization near Raleigh, N.C., according to Henrick J. Harwood, who led the study and now is senior policy analyst in the White House drug policy office. ...

"It was an inexpensive study done with inadequate data," said Reid Maness, senior manager of communications for Research Triangle Institute. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been attempt since then to do anything better. This still remains the most recent and best study of its type.

"When we see people being critical about it, we don't get too upset. RTI would agree that the study does not have a lot of precision. We never claimed that it did," Maness said.

The study concluded:

o People who had *ever* been heavy marijuana users cost the nation $34.2 billion in diminished worker productivity in 1980.

o Adding the costs of drug-related health problems, crime and accidents --figures that exist only in very rough estimates -- the study concluded that all drug abuse, excluding alcohol, cost the country $47 billion in 1980.

How did the institute come up with its figures?

Using statistics from a 1982 household survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the institute compared the average income for households in which one person admitted to having every used marijuana daily to the average for households in which no one admitted to having ever used marijuana daily.

Households with former heavy smokers of marijuana had an average income 27.9 percent lower than similar households in which marijuana had not been used heavily, the institute said.

The study concluded that, when the figures were extrapolated to the general population, marijuana abuse caused an estimated loss in income of $34.2 billion in 1980. In turn, the researchers equated the reduced income with reduced productivity. ...

"The study is worthless," said Dr. John P. Morgan, medical professor and head of the pharmacology department at the City University of New York Medical School. "It is obviously absurd. It has to do with the fact that NIDA is functioning chiefly as a minister of propaganda in the war on drugs."

The study did not prove any relationship between marijuana use and reduced household income. Despite its conclusion that "The [productivity] loss due to marijuana abuse was estimated at $34.2 billion for 1980," the study elsewhere notes that the reduced income was not necessarily a result of marijuana use.

Even if it were, income does not equal productivity.

In an article in the University of Kansas Law Review, Morgan write that if income were the same as productivity, then "a judge is less productive than a practicing lawyer, a medical school professor is less productive than a practicing physician, a farmer is less productive than a florist and an elementary school teacher is less productive than an owner of a daycare center."

The study arrived at one particularly curious conclusion:

People who were *currently* abusing any illegal drug cost the nation nothing in diminished worker productivity.

A 34-year-old who told researchers in 1982 that he had smoked marijuana every day during the summer of 1966 and had not touched an illegal drug since would be classified as a worker whose productivity was significantly diminished by drug use.

Part 3. Tomorrow - The Study that Wasn't

Hemp FACT #36-PFDFA

Date: 95-02-18 11:46:22 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is Part 3 of an article from The Hartford Courant

"Untruths, unreliable data create obstacles in war on drugs."

The study that wasn't.

Shocking anti-drug statistics seem always to make headlines, regardless of what they are based upon.

In 1983, Dr. Sidney Cohen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, wrote in the Drug Abuse and Alcoholism Newsletter that drug users were five times as likely to file workers' compensation claims and that they received three times the average level of benefits for illness.

His source was a study purportedly done by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. Many other drug fighters, particularly people in favor of widespread drug testing of employees, have quoted either the Firestone study or the newsletter edited by Cohen, who has since died.

In fact, there appears to have been no such study.

"About three people have asked me for that study," said the Firestone medical director, Dr. E. Gates Morgan. "I'm unaware of it. We had an [employee assistance program] man with us, but left the company in 1983 and died in 1987. I've looked all over for the stuff he wrote, but we don't have any copies of it at all." ...

A life of their own

Other widely quoted studies have even larger margins of error -- but you wouldn't know that by listening to the people who quote them. "Marijuana does not wear off in a couple of hours," said Rosanna Creighton, president of the nonpartisan lobbying group "Citizens for a Drug-free Oregon."

"The pleasure high is gone, but the effect it has ... on motor skills, eye-to-hand coordination, peripheral vision ... is not gone. A Stanford University study showed that 24 hours after smoking marijuana, the ability of airplane pilots was impaired."

Creighton was referring to a 1985 study paid for by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Veterans Administration Medical Research Service. It has been used to show that even casual marijuana use is dangerous -- despite many government studies that have concluded the opposite. ...

The study said that although the pilots were unaware they were impaired, their marijuana-induced errors could easily lead to airplane crashes.

But a co-author of the study is not confident of those findings.

"The results of the study were suggestive, non conclusive," said Dr. Von Otto Leirer, an experimental psychologist. "We didn't have the appropriate controls for the experiment. That was a real serious problem."

Leirer said a follow-up study, using the proper controls and methods, was conducted. That study was published in December, but attracted little notice.

...

In the past 20 years, studies have shown marijuana to cause brain damage, paranoia, early senility, heart malfunction and sexual problems, Grinspoon said. In every case, he said, follow-up studies failed to confirm that marijuana caused any of those problems.

Hemp FACT #37-DARE1

Date: 95-02-20 12:13:01 EDT

From: ADBryan

This is an article found on the "net" to add additional insight on D.A.R.E.

The Dark Side of DARE

by Pastor Jaymes Douglass Fyr

Police officers visiting schools - anti-drug programs - neither one is new. I remember being told as a child "the policeman is your friend." I still have the worn old book preaching against drugs and alcohol from high school. These things have been ar ound for decades.

Now they have come together. Former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates created the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in 1983 as a joint effort of the police department and the L.A. school district to fight drug use in the city's schools. It has since spread nationwide and abroad, as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Millions have been exposed to it.

So what is DARE? In most forms it consists of 17 one hour sessions, held weekly and covering subjects ranging from refusal skills to alternatives to drug use. It is taught by uniformed police officers and usually begins with fifth graders. Funding comes from both governmental and private sources.

Nothing is wrong with teaching anybody of any age to assert themselves and think for themselves. Teens often have a hard time saying "no." Breaking the back of peer pressure is hard to do. And this can also help reject pressure to engage in unwanted sex and other temptations.

What makes DARE different is having police officers teach the classes. That's kind of like having teachers arrest muggers. That's not their job - it's not what they have been trained to do. Why not have public health officials lecture about the harmfu l aspects of drugs? To be balanced, why not invite NORML members or Native American shamans to tell how drugs can be used in beneficial ways? Is the information presented truthful? For example, the discredited research of Dr. Gabriel Nahas is still touted about the supposed evils of marijuana use. Are alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and prescription drugs covered, or only "illegal" drugs? Is this an effort to promote awareness of health and safety, or just another attempt to enforce blind obedience to the law?

And finally, is DARE really out to fight the "drug problem" by encouraging children to inform on people they know who use illegal drugs?

The Wall Street Journal, in a front page article on April 20, 1992, reported the case of Crystal Grendell, a fifth grader who was asked if she knew anyone who used drugs. Crystal was taking DARE classes taught by Searsport, Maine, police chief James Gil lway in the spring of 1991. She was worried because her parents grew and smoked marijuana. She didn't say anything at the time, but later went to Gillway and reported her parents. Six cops raided the family home, seized Crystal and 49 one foot high marijuana plants and arrested the parents. The mother lost her job and the father got one year's probation. Crystal's straight A's turned into C's, she now fears the police and frequently has nightmares. The article also mentions other parents who have been turned in by their children - at the instigation of DARE. Parents' anti-DARE groups are beginning to form. A lady from L.A. told me that her child had broken down under interrogation and admitted that "mom smokes pot." This lady received a stern lecture from local child protective "services."

But DARE is wildly popular among politicians, school administrators and cops! Every cop car in town has a DARE bumper sticker on it. Lots of civilian cars have them too. You see people everywhere wearing DARE t-shirts. I even recently saw a black city bus plastered with the DARE logo and slogan, in big red letters. It's an election year, everybody! Climb onto the politically correct bandwagon!

Part 2 on FACT 38

Hemp FACT #37-DARE2

Date: 95-02-20 12:15:32 EDT

From: ADBryan

Part 2 of the article from FACT 37.

Didn't the Hitler Youth and the KGB indoctrinate children in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union? Weren't children encouraged to spy on their parents? Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong and just because it's legal doesn't make it right. Wasn't Hitler elected to power according to German law? Weren't the laws persecuting Jews enacted by due process?

The "War on Drugs" is now using our children as its eyes and ears, having failed with drug screenings and inaccurate propaganda. It's not enough that they demand to analyze samples of our hair and urine; not enough to fly helicopters over houses with he at detectors to find hidden growrooms in attics; not enough that they seize utility records to see how much electricity we use. Now they deputize our kids to be their spies!

All to coerce people into mindless compliance with racist laws enacted long before most people now alive had even been born.

The dark side of DARE. The dark side of our government. The dark side of ourselves!

Poster's note: There is an organization called Parents Against Dare. email for address and phone #

Hemp FACT #39-Police News

Date: 95-02-21 11:12:11 EDT

From: ADBryan

Kinda got messed up on those numbers yesterday. It won't happen again ;)

This next series of posts were found while "surfing" and came from Police News.

A World Gone Mad Part 1

By Ronald W. Rose United States Magistrate Judge

In Police News Spring 94

Twenty years ago as a young prosecutor, my job was to put people in jail for dealing in drugs. As a result, many were convicted. I was absolutely certain that vigorous enforcement and long jail terms was the way to go. I had every confidence that throwing resources, manpower, additional judges, mandatory minimum sentences, life without parole, etc., etc., etc., would soon solve the problem.

Within a few months, I tried another drug case involving the largest (at that time cocaine seizure in the history of Florida - 23 pounds. It was front page news for days. These defendants were likewise convicted and are probably still in prison. Has this solved anything? In my opinion, absolutely nothing was accomplished, except I got to chalk up another victory at a cost to the taxpayers of thousands of dollars each year, for clothing and feeding these dregs of society.

Instead of seizing pounds of cocaine, we now seize buildings full of the stuff. The drug lords in South America are laughing at us all the way to the bank. They know that for every mule or mid-level dealer we take out, there are fifty more waiting to take their place. There is just so much money to be made that the slim chance of being caught is always worth the risk. Believe me, after twenty years as a prosecutor and judge, I can assure you that we only catch the stupid ones.

In disadvantaged neighborhoods, drug dealers are the local heroes. Every kid in the ghetto wants to be one. These children see it as a way out of their despair and poverty. They can make more selling "crack" cocaine, in one afternoon, than a hard working person with a job can make in a week. I customarily speak with DEA agents who visit my office for search warrants. Their attitude is universally one of despair. They spend entire careers believing each day they come to work that their presence makes a difference, but the problem gets worse no matter what they do. It is getting worse in logarithmic proportions. We already have more people in jail, per capita, than any other country on earth (About five times as many per capita).

We used to ignore the battlefield carnage of the street gangs, as they were only killing each other in their own neighborhoods. Now theses same gangs are coming out of their ghettos. They are increasingly taking their act on the road. One new tactic is to cruise the freeways at night looking for wealthy individuals who they can follow home, brutalize, rape and pillage, all for the sake of supporting a drug habit.

Year after year we are treated to the same tired political solutions. We now have a "drug czar." Whoop-de-do! The first one got his picture taken a few hundred times, gave a few speeches, declared victory and resigned. We have spent decades throwing more judges into the system, adding prosecutors, investigators, building prisons (but not in my backyard), using the military, and in short spending an incredible bundle of money.

We have nothing to show for it but a bunch of photo opportunities where a few pounds of the stuff and some seized cash are exhibited in grand style to demonstrate how well law enforcement does its job. The carrot is always held out that we are turning the corner; there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Sure.

By and large law enforcement is composed of men and women truly dedicated to their profession - individuals who would lay their lives on the line and often do. They have an unenviable job. Yet their function has been reduced to stamping out cockroaches without any ability to get to the nest. A total waste of time and energy. The drug lords love it.

Part 2 of this article tomorrow

Hemp FACT #40-Police News

Date: 95-02-22 10:56:15 EDT

From: ADBryan

This next series of posts were found while "surfing" and came from Police

News.

A World Gone Mad Part 2

By Ronald W. Rose United States Magistrate Judge

In Police News Spring 94

My solution is not politically correct and is certainly not acceptable to those upstanding politicians (oxymoron, sorry) we have entrusted to make our decisions for us. It is, simply, to decriminalize the use and possession of drugs. Not only decriminalize them, hut actually give them away to anyone insane enough to want them.

Before anyone goes ballistic here, I do not advocate giving drugs to children. This should always be a capital offense. We have to take the profit motive out of this Dante's Inferno that is killing us like the Chinese "death from a thousand cuts." Prohibition did not work with alcohol and it is not working with drugs. I harbor no illusions that this solution is perfect, but it is essentially the only one remaining.

The Colombian cartels, the Jamaican gangs, the Ins Angeles street gangs, and our local drug lords make the Mafia look like a troop of girl scouts. The terror is coming to our shores, a little bit at a time, and we just sit back and take it. Why can't we realize what is happening to us before it is too late?

If we used the money presently being squandered to lose the drug war, funnel it into drug treatment and education, the problem would largely disappear in a few years. There would be no profit left. Drugs would be free, drug lords would lose their millions and millions in profits, corruption would all but disappear (except maybe in the Savings and Loan industry), our elderly would not feel trapped in their homes, and most importantly, our children would have a future free from the specter of slaughter in their schools or having to endure the nightmare of addiction. The present generation of drug user is probably beyond hope. Perhaps treatment will help, but we have to cut our loses and protect what is left.

Coming Tomorrow to a Message Board near you:

Our Drug Laws Have Failed

By James P. Gray, U.S. Superior Court Judge