Pubdate: Saturday, 23 January 1999
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Forum: http://www.sfgate.com/conferences/
Copyright: 1999 San Francisco Chronicle
Author: ELEANOR and ALAN RANDELL Victoria, B.C.

"LET USERS GET DRUGS AT CORNER STORE"

Editor -- Our heart goes out to Boz and Carmella Scaggs as they try to
come to terms with the tragic death of their son, Oscar (Chronicle,
January 13).

However, as grieving parents of a son who died at 19 years of age
after ingesting street heroin back in 1993, we reject completely Mr
Scaggs' understandably emotional notion of a ``plague of heroin.'`
Heroin is not a poison. Contrary to conventional wisdom and the war on
drugs propaganda, there are no known irreversible physical
side-effects of opiate drugs.

As America's disastrous experiment with the prohibition of alcohol
clearly showed, it is the prohibition of various substances that
poisons users and spawns murder and mayhem in the streets, not the
substances themselves. Today, the prohibition of marijuana, heroin and
a other drugs is exerting precisely the same effects, and yet Mr
Scaggs and others cannot, or will not, see that the problems will only
diminish when we end prohibition and allow all drug users to purchase
cheap, clean drugs at the corner store.

Piling tragedy upon tragedy, Boz Scaggs' ill-considered comments,
together with your one-sided account of them, will increase public
support for the disastrous war on drugs and thus condemn even more of
our children to die. Oscar and our Peter have seemingly died in vain.

ELEANOR and ALAN RANDELL Victoria, B.C. 

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