In Response To The Dec. 22 Letter, "Reform Of Rockefeller Drug Laws Long Overdue":

I thought Gov. Eliot Spitzer's feeble attempt to reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws this year was a shame. Now, on top of that, his attempt to show compassion this holiday season fell way off of the mark.

Spitzer's single pardon to an individual set free 10 years ago, coupled with the fact he did not grant one clemency, was nothing more than a safe political move.

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You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these days. It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer, a holdover from bygone days. Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets the news media hype and campaign trail rhetoric. Railing against recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be locked away is so '90s.

But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news cameras and photo-ops, still chewing up federal and state resources and casting criminal sanctions over entire neighborhoods. Four or so decades into an intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug use, billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of criminals, many of them foreigners, have been enriched; and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been imprisoned. And the use of illegal substances continues unabated.

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Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer's approval rating is at an all-time low of 36 percent, according to a survey by the Siena College Research Institute. This is a far cry from his 69 percent approval rating when he took office. The survey polled about 1,000 voters in December, of which 47 percent said the governor should become a "kinder, gentler governor." But 41 percent of Republicans said they doubt whether the transformation can be made.

The question I pose is: "How can Spitzer counter his downward spiral and start winning back the voters of New York State?" One answer is to show the citizens of New York that, despite the negativity generated from the trials and tribulations of his governorship, he is still an individual who shows compassion for others. Compassion, a virtue found in many great leaders, is said to be not sentiment but the act of making justice through works of mercy.

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Congress and President Bush have done the right thing, lifting a disastrous nine-year ban that prevented Washington from using locally raised tax dollars on needle-exchange programs that help fight the spread of AIDS. Unfortunately, that still leaves in force an even broader and more damaging law that prohibits the use of federal funds for needle-exchange programs in the United States or abroad.

That ban must also be rescinded.

The country's most important medical and public health organizations endorsed needle-exchange programs more than a decade ago, and such programs have proved highly successful all over the world. Opponents' charges that needle exchanges would encourage addiction have turned out to be nonsense.

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To the Editor:

Recently, the United States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to allow federal prison inmates to seek reductions in their crack cocaine sentences ("Retroactively, Panel Reduces Drug Sentences," front page, Dec. 12).

Roughly 3,800 inmates could be released within the next year. The most important question is: Is our society prepared to help these young men and women become productive members of society?

I am an inmate at the federal correctional facility Gilmer Camp in Glenville, W.Va., currently serving a sentence for a crack cocaine offense. I can speak only for myself, but I have been preparing myself for many years for the day I am to be released.

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I am disappointed by "Dare to end the DARE program" [Editorial, Dec. 6], which all but celebrates the impending demise of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) in Suffolk.

I cannot speak to the so-called national and local studies that claim the program failed in its mission to decrease long-term drug use. Yet, I can attest to this: As an elementary schoolteacher until my retirement in 2006, whose students were involved in DARE since its inception almost 20 years ago, along with its later counterpart, the STARE (Stop Anti-Semitism and Racism Everywhere) program, I can confidently say that both were meritorious.

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The Supreme Court rulings on federal sentencing affirms an important principle: The authority to impose a criminal sentence ultimately lies with the judge.

It is time for the state Legislature to embrace this principle and restore judicial discretion to judges in cases involving drug offenses. Intended to target major drug traffickers, New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws have compelled judges to incarcerate low-level, nonviolent drug users.

Perhaps more disturbing is the impact these laws are having on communities of color: Blacks and Hispanics comprise more than 90 percent of those currently incarcerated for drug felonies -- far out of proportion to their actual involvement with drugs. The state's harsh mandatory sentencing scheme has neither curbed drug use nor enhanced public safety. Instead, it has destroyed thousands of lives and wasted limited tax dollars.

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As plans to drop county police participation in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in January or February of 2008 move forward, the debate on how best to encourage abstinence of drugs and alcohol - and address other health and safety issues - among Suffolk County's student populations has entered a new phase.

At a recent meeting of the Suffolk County Legislature's Public Safety Committee, in which a dozen county legislators sat in at various points, lawmakers heard from DARE officials, Suffolk County Police Department Commissioner Richard Dormer, several school districts and representatives from HealthSmart - another drug prevention program that also focuses on other issues young people face.

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The mandatory sentencing craze that began in the 1970s was a public-policy disaster. It drove up inmate populations and corrections costs and forced the states to choose between building prisons and building schools or funding medical care for the indigent. It filled the prisons to bursting with nonviolent drug offenders who would have been more cheaply and more appropriately dealt with through treatment. It tied the hands of judges and ruined countless young lives by mandating lengthy prison terms in cases where leniency was warranted. It undermined confidence in the fairness of the justice system by singling out poor and minority offenders while largely exempting the white and wealthy.

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Not only does Drug Abuse Resistance Education not work, but it could be putting students at greater risk for drug use ["Dare to end the DARE program," Editorial, Dec. 6].

Independent evaluations of DARE have found the program to be either ineffective or counterproductive. The scare tactics used do more harm than good. Students who realize they've been lied to about marijuana may make the mistake of assuming that harder drugs like cocaine and heroin are relatively harmless as well.

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There was an avalanche of sentencing news last week. The Supreme Court gave trial judges more power to show mercy, the United States Sentencing Commission gave almost 20,000 prisoners doing time on crack cocaine charges a good shot at early release, and even President Bush commuted a crack sentence.

The net effect: tinkering.

The United States justice system remains, by international standards at least, exceptionally punitive. And nothing that happened last week will change that.

Even the sentencing commission's striking move on Tuesday, meant to address the wildly disproportionate punishments for crack and powder cocaine, will have only a minor impact. Unless Congress acts, many thousands of defendants will continue to face vastly different sentences for possessing and selling different types of the same thing.

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A group of parents and Suffolk Republican lawmakers mounted an unsuccessful last-ditch effort yesterday to save the school-based drug prevention program known as DARE.

Democrats and Working Families Party members, who control the county legislature's public safety committee, blocked a bill to allow Drug Abuse Resistance Education to continue for one more semester and give the full legislature time to evaluate whether the program should be eliminated.

Four legislators, two Democrats and two Working Families Party members, voted yes to keep the bill in committee while three Republican legislators voted no.

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Many Residents See Improvement In A Schenectady Neighborhood Known For Crime And Violence.

SCHENECTADY - Daisy Smythe knows what crime is like in Hamilton Hill.

In 2002, gunfire roused her from her Schenectady Street home in time to see gunmen fleeing a murder scene next door and her then-7-year-old adopted son, Savaion Parson, hiding from flying bullets in the driveway that separates the two homes.

"There came a point where I couldn't let my foster children and grandchildren go out onto the porch alone or ride their bikes," the 73-year-old woman known as Grandma said. "When they were out, I was out, and when I had to come in they had to come in. Repeatedly, as fast as I would buy them a bicycle, a scooter, skates, whatever, when they went out to play, it would be stolen."

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December 16, 2007 -- Bill Clinton smoked marijuana but didn't "inhale" ("Hill Goes up in Smoke," Dec. 13).

George W. Bush snorted and drank himself silly but fudged the facts. Sen. Barack Obama smoked and snorted but openly admitted both.

When weighing Monica Lewinsky, weapons of mass destruction and straight-up honesty, of the three, Obama's looking pretty promising.

Manhattan

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With the Iowa campaign in wild flux -- and in the case of Hillary, acid reflux -- The Des Moines Register decides to hold a tie-breaking debate with the two Democratic front-runners.

Carolyn Washburn, the phlegmatic editor of the paper, once more moderates.

WASHBURN: Senator Clinton, I'd like you to start us off by explaining why your campaign has been getting down and dirty with someone so clean and articulate?

CLINTON: I apologized to Senator Obama. I absolutely did not authorize or condone the remarks made by one of my co-chairs in New Hampshire about my distinguished colleague's youthful indiscretions. If primary voters don't care that he did "a little blow," then my goodness, why should I? Even if he had packed a straw full of the white rabbit and had a snow bunny blow it in his ear, who would care, for Pete's sake? I only wish I knew all that colorful chasing-the-dragon lingo. Senator Obama certainly has a lot of street cred, even if it isn't Main Street. We owe it to the good people of Iowa to stick to critical issues like the economy, and how to get a fiscally responsible budget like we had in the '90s, the '90s, the '90s

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"American Gangster" Frank Lucas has been expelled from a Brooklyn school.

Lucas, the reformed drug kingpin and subject of the hit Denzel Washington flick, was scheduled to lecture students at Middle School 143 in Bed-Stuy last Friday before the principal abruptly canceled his appearance.

"I was very disappointed," Lucas said yesterday. "I really wanted to talk to them, to tell them what I did was wrong. I'll go down on my knees if I have to."

The man who ruled Harlem's heroin trade in the 1970s recently started speaking to schoolkids, sharing his past and imploring them to stay away from drugs.

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The first county-by-county look at U.S. drug imprisonment rates uses hard numbers to document what many already know: The drug war is primarily waged against African-Americans "despite solid evidence that they are no more likely than their white counterparts" to use or sell drugs.

And Erie County is one of the places where that drug war hits blacks hardest.

"In Erie County, African-Americans are admitted to prison for a drug offense at 30 times the rate of whites," according to the Justice Policy Institute, which analyzed per-capita drug imprisonment rates in large counties.

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One day last December, a Brooklyn prosecutor called the Police Department laboratory to check on a test of drugs that had been seized six weeks earlier.

The drugs were nowhere to be found in the laboratory.

As officials hunted for the evidence in that case, they made a startling discovery: The drugs seized in 42 other arrests made in Brooklyn that same day, Oct. 20, 2006, also had vanished without a trace.

In short, all the evidence from every narcotics arrest in Brooklyn that day was gone.

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Most articles concerning drug crime, along with the opinion of the advocates for the drug dealers, seem to have one common theme: It is the fault of the police or the judicial system that these individuals are incarcerated. Once again we see the removal of personal accountability, we blame everyone except the person committing the act. Street level drug dealing is the primary factor in the violence within our community; this is a fact not opinion.

I am a narcotics enforcement officer in Albany and can say I have never targeted anyone because of their sex, race or ethnic background, although I have targeted violent criminals with long criminal histories and watched them released after doing a fraction of their sentence because of a little known loophole called merit release, a back-door program that essentially throws out a judge's sentence and releases felons back into the community to commit further damage.

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Re: "Norwich store brings hemp clothing to area," Dec. 1: I've been purchasing products with imported hemp for years and would prefer obtaining them with American-grown hemp.

It's foolish and anti-American that communist Chinese farmers may grow hemp but "free" American farmers can't. It's time to reintroduce hemp as a component of American agriculture.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

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