Pubdate: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 Source: St. Petersburg Times (FL) Copyright: 2004 St. Petersburg Times Contact: http://connect.sptimes.com/contactus/letterstoeditor.html Website: http://www.sptimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419 Author: Joe Reinhardt Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v04/n350/a09.html TWO SCOURGES INSTEAD OF ONE Re: Drug war is worth the battle. After reading the letter from Calvina Fay, the executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation Inc., I was left with a feeling bordering on total disgust. Either Ms. Fay doesn't recognize sophistry when she sees it, or, worse yet, she assumes your readers don't recognize it either. In the first place, her attempt to justify the incarceration of thousands of her fellow human beings by linking them to the murder of Carlie Brucia is a cynical example of the logical fallacy known as "after the fact, therefore because." By using this fallacy, Ms. Fay ignores the fact that there are millions of people in this country who have used drugs and who have never harmed anybody with the possible exception of themselves. To see how specious this argument is, we need only consider the case of Andrea Yates, a fundamentalist Christian who murdered her five children to protect them from the evils of this world. Likewise, several religious sects routinely withhold medical treatment from their children, which results in needless suffering and sometimes even death to those children. If we apply Ms. Fay's logic to these situations, then it would make good sense to incarcerate all fundamentalist Christians to protect their children from potential harm. Secondly, Ms. Fay completely overlooks the fact that the scourge of drugs is made far worse by criminalizing drug use rather than treating it. The dollar figures and other negative effects of drugs that she cites are in large part a consequence of the war on drugs and not a direct result of drug use itself; therefore, if we follow her advice, we get two scourges instead of one, with the secondary scourge being demonstrably worse than the first. Joe Reinhardt Pinellas Park - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin