Pubdate: Wed, 19 Feb 2003
Source: Times, The (Lafayette, LA)
Copyright: South Louisiana Publishing 2003
Contact:  http://www.timesofacadiana.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2474
Note: additional fax: (337)261-2630
Author: Larry Seguin

TAKE MARIJUANA OFF THE FRONT LINES

I appreciate The Times of Acadiana publishing two outstanding letters by 
Robert Sharpe (Letters to the Editor: Government misinforms On Marijuana, 
Dec. 11) and Kirk Muse (Letters to the Editor: Marijuana's History a Benign 
One, Dec. 11). Take marijuana out of the drug war.

The war on drugs today is mostly about marijuana. Marijuana arrests, 
convictions, incarcerations and the seizure of property in marijuana cases 
constitute the great majority of "drug-war incidents." Without marijuana 
prohibition, the War on Drugs and its bloated budgets would simply not be 
justifiable, nor the DEA, nor foreign intervention, nor political anti-drug 
posturing; without marijuana prohibition the whole War on Drugs would soon 
fall apart.

America is in the throes of an addiction, to be sure. But it is to drug 
prohibition far more than to drug use. Enormous and wildly increasing 
budgets are squandered on ever-higher doses of the drug prohibition habit, 
and vehement denials that the prohibition habit is the problem are heard 
along with pronouncements that with one more big fix of "enforcement and 
interdiction" the drug problem will be resolved. And in great irrational 
fear of the imagined rigors of withdrawal, the addict is ready to commit 
any disgrace, deception, crime or doublethink whatsoever to get his fix. 
Drug prohibition has become a "monkey on the back" of democracy itself.

Larry Seguin

Lisbon, N.Y.
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