Pubdate: Mon, 07 Aug 2000
Source: News-Sentinel (IN)
Copyright: 2000 The News-Sentinel
Contact:  600 West Main Street, Fort Wayne, IN 46802
Website: http://www.news-sentinel.com/ns/index.shtml
Author: Leo Morris, for the editorial board

NO COHERENCE IN OUR DRUG POLICIES

And that breeds something we can't afford -- a disrespect for the law.

Here's today's pop quiz on drugs.

One causes more deaths than all the others put together. One causes, by far, the most social destruction. One is the least harmful of the three. A) What are the three drugs? B) Which one is illegal?

The answers are, A) nicotine, alcohol and marijuana and, of course, B) marijuana.

This is not going to be a call to "legalize drugs" (at least the ones still not available at the retail level), though more voices are beginning to speak of that option, from all across the political spectrum. It is, rather, a plea that we at least acknowledge this nation's confused and contradictory attitudes about drugs so that we can have something approaching a rational discussion about them.

That has not been made easier by recent official actions in Fort Wayne. The police department has decided not to exclude from consideration job candidates who might have used hard drugs in their younger days. How credible would such an officer be in dealing with today's youthful offenders? "Do what I say, kid, not what I did." (It's not as if the police officer candidates are 40-year-olds whose "youthful indiscretions" are 20 years in the past.)

And this comes on the heels of City Council's "no smoking in restaurants or the workplace" ordinance to ban the evil act anywhere council thinks it can get away with it -- and stepped-up efforts by officials to keep retailers from selling cigarettes to minors. So, on the one hand we have an illegal act (and a felony at that) that will be forgiven, even to the point of allowing those committing it to join the group of people whose job is to nab the perpetrators of such crimes. And, on the other hand, we have a legal act that officials are going to make just as difficult as they can.

Never mind the young people among us, that sends out confusing signals to everybody.

About all drugs -- nicotine and alcohol along with all the illegal ones -- either one of two things is true:

Never mind people having the "right" to hurt themselves if they want to -- the fact is that a great number are going to do so. If that's what they want, why is that any of our concern? Whom did movie star Robert Downey Jr. hurt with his drug addiction but himself, and why was he in prison?

Drugs harm not just the people who take them, but society as well, and they all ought to be banned. Selling them, buying them, using them, possessing them -- all of them -- ought to be punished.

But we can't quite go one way or the other, so the law is a mishmash of "sometimes it's legal and sometimes it isn't" or "some harmful drugs are legal and some aren't." And the laws, really, don't always have a lot to do with common sense. We spend billions of dollars and put thousands in jail to stop the scourge of cocaine while billions are lost and thousands are killed because of the abuse of alcohol.

The law is, to put it mildly, less than coherent. And if we want a decent, law-abiding society, coherence should be our top priority. People must believe the law (not just "laws" but "the law") has a valid function and a consistent approach. Only then will we have respect for the law.

We are breeding, with our haphazard approach to "drugs," a disrespect for the very concept of law. And that's something any civilized society should fear greatly.
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