Source: April 2, The Daily Oklahoman. fax: 14052313183 by: MICHEAL PEARSON, director, Oklahoma NORML TO THE EDITOR: Mark Woodward's "Legalizing Marijuana Won't Help" ("Your Views," March 18) can be countered with "Prohibition of Marijuana Won't Help." Prohibition means no control or regulation. Prohibition creates a black market where business disputes are tried by street justice keynoted with violence and corruption. A majority of black market vendors are children. A white powder dealer will sell marijuana and then insist that the buyer try a free line where the real profits are. That is the largest gateway to hard drugs. By replacing black marketeers with licensed adults to sell with accountability, the gate would be closed. The documented findings of several governmentsponsored programs in the Netherlands show that the separation of the marijuana marketplace and the medicalization of hard drugs has caused a decline in marijuana use by teenagers to half that in the United States and a steep decline in the number of hard addicts and street violence. Because of Dutch tolerence to drugs, these research studies obtain verifiable data. U.S. data, at best, is guesswork. Woodward's statement that "the Netherlands is tightening these laws because of measurable increases in drugrelated crimes" is false. Individual sales are being reduced from 1 ounce to 5 grams because of the political pressure of the United States on the European Community's drug policies. No pharmacologist has ever found the lethal doses of marijuana. There is no neural chemical or physical damage to the brain. Smoked marijuana does not cause cancer of the lungs. Drivers under the influence of marijuana tend to overestimate the adverse effects of the drug on their driving quality and compensate when they can; drivers under the influence of alcohol tend to underestimate the adverse effects on their driving quality and do not invest compensatory effort. It's clear that prohibition policies don't work. Sooner or later, politicians will have to stop running scared and address the evidence: canabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further underground may well be. ********************************************************************