Pubdate: Thu, 04 May 2000
Source: Canberra Times (Australia)
Copyright: 2000 Canberra Times
Contact:  http://www.canberratimes.com.au/
Author: Geoff Page

QUESTIONS FOR US ANTI-DRUG WARRIOR

IT IS instructive to see the different American responses to your admirable 
editorial "It's political if US jails 1.9 million" (CT, April 24, p.8). 
While Dave Michon (Letters, April 27) points to the police-state atmosphere 
created by the twin simplicities of his country's "War on Drugs" and its 
populist predilection for mandatory sentencing, his compatriot, Linda Oja, 
on the same page, recycles the precise rhetoric which has created the 
problem in the first place. Some elementary questions for Ms Oja might 
include: 1. How is that Americans are so criminally-inclined that they need 
more people in jail that China has? 2. Why were currently illegal drugs 
made so in the first place and have not her country's attempts to eliminate 
them produced many more problems than they are ever likely solve? 3. Why 
did it take her compatriots less than 20 years to learn that their 
prohibition on alcohol was disastrously counterproductive and yet more than 
60 to realise that their world-wide crusade against illegal drugs has been 
equally so?

GEOFF PAGE
Narrabundah
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