Pubdate: Sun, 25 Oct 1998
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Contact:  http://www.dallasnews.com/
Copyright: 1998 The Dallas Morning News
Author: Steve Blow

2 OPPONENTS OF DRUG LAWS DEFY STEREOTYPE

Take a moment to picture a drug-reform activist in your mind.

Now erase that hippie-dippy image and let me introduce you to a couple of
folks.

Suzanne Wills is an SMU graduate and a CPA. She has three children and five
grandchildren.

Rodney Pirtle is a retired Highland Park school administrator, a bigwig in
Rotary and a former college basketball coach. He, too, has three grown
children and five grandchildren.

Ms. Wills is 54. Mr Pirtle is 64.

And both firmly believe that most of our drug laws ought to be thrown out.

As Ms. Wills puts it, "The laws are more dangerous than the drugs."

I'll confess that I haven't pondered this issue much. But I talked with Mr.
Pirtle and Ms. Wills over breakfast the other morning, and they gave me lots
to think about.

Lessons of Prohibition

Most of us have no trouble looking at the Prohibi-tion era of the 1920s and
'30s and seeing it as a dismal failure. People still drank alcohol, and a
vicious crime underworld flourished to provide it.

"The phenomenon of Al Capone could not have happened without Prohibition,"
Mr. Pirtle said.

It's also easy to look around today and see that the prohibition of drugs
has created an even more vicious underworld to supply them.

And yet . . . . It's awfully hard for some of us to take that next leap --
to say that the answer to our problem is making drugs easier to get, not
harder.

Mr. Pirtle sympathizes there, too. "It is not a simple question."

Ms. Wills and Mr. Pirtle said they do not use drugs. Nor have drugs been a
problem in their families. Their passion, they said, comes from frustration
in watching billions of dollars spent and countless lives lost in a drug war
that is never won.

They say most of the horror associated with drugs stems from the drug
trade,not drug use: Gang wars. Bribery. Police corruption. Soaring prison
populations. Black-market pricing. Theft and prostitution to pay those
prices.

Ms. Wills and Mr. Pirtle belong to the Drug Policy Forum of Texas
(214-827-1514), a group "seeking better solutions to the drug problem."

But they don't like the word "legalization." "People think it means you want
to put drug-vending machines in the high schools," Mr. Pirtle said.

They don't favor that. They do, however, think drugs should be legal but
controlled -- much as alcohol is today.

But what about kids? Drug sales to kids would still be illegal, of course.
And a profitable, well-regulated legal market for drugs would dry up risky,
unprofit- able sales to minors, they believe.

"Kids in Plano will tell you that right now it's easier for them to buy
heroin than it is to buy beer," Mr. Pirtle said.

A European example

Drug policy in Holland comes closest to what the reformers favor here.
Marijuana is legal there, and addiction to harder drugs is generally treated
as a medical problem, not a criminal one.

And for what it's worth, marijuana use among teens is slightly lower there,
the heroin addiction rate is less than half or ours, and the murder rate is
15 percent of ours, according to Dutch figures.

We will never eradicate the supply of drugs, Mr. Pirtle said. "They can't
even stop drugs inside prisons. That ought to tell us something."

Only individuals can choose not to use drugs -- or to use safer ones. And
honest, straightforward information is the key, the reformers say.

"Reefer madness" made a mockery of drug education for my generation. And
credibility has been a hard thing to win back.

One thing is for sure: Our national hysteria over drugs only makes them more
attractive for many teens. "Forbidden fruit," Mr. Pirtle said.

As I say, it's hard to know what to think. But clearly, we need to be doing
more thinking.

Mr. Pirtle said drug reform author Mike Gray recently spoke to the Plano
Rotary Club. He began by asking how many think we're winning the war on
drugs. Then he asked how many think we canwin the war with current policy.

"Not a single hand was raised," Mr. Pirtle said.

Some drug war.

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Checked-by: Don Beck