Source: Bulletin, The (OR)
Contact:  http://www.bendbulletin.com
Pubdate: Fri, 7 Aug 1998
Page: A-6

DRUG USERS AREN'T EVIL

Barry Mc Caffrey's circular arguments, that harm reduction won't reduce
harm and that people who favor legalization should not be trusted because
they favor legalization, seem to rely on the assumption that people who
want drugs legalized are somehow bad or immoral.

A person is not a crimminal merely because he considers an alternative
approach to a problem that 20 years of the current approach have been
unable to solve. Is this the new McCarthyism? Are drug users to be the
pariahs of the new millenium? If so, who's next? Cigarette smokers? Beer
drinkers?

Children are being suspended from school for Rolaids. What has our free
country come to?

Gerald Hannafin
Woodside, N.Y.

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Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)