Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jan 2002
Source: The Monitor (TX)
Copyright: 2002 The Monitor
Contact:  http://www.themonitor.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1250

BAD COMBINATION

Columnist Robert D. Novak recently made the ludicrous suggestion that 
President George W. Bush should intertwine the war on terrorism with the 
nation's failed war on drugs.

Novak reasoned that since states are less willing to sponsor terrorism 
these days for fear of an international response, terrorists are raising 
the money needed for their nefarious deeds through trafficking in illegal 
drugs.

Novak is, in this regard, correct. The Taliban used the sale of heroin to 
raise money. In addition, the Taliban ironically received money from the 
United States by merely promising to fight drugs; money that was used to 
kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

However, Novak is wrong in his solution. He accepts the false premise that 
government can eliminate commerce in drugs by killing and imprisoning 
people who choose to buy or sell narcotics and other drugs.

The answer is not to tie the war on terrorism to the failed war on drugs.

Terrorists use the profit from drug sales. The only way to stop that 
activity is to eliminate the profit margin. By legalizing drugs and ending 
the nonsensical prohibition, the cost of drugs would decrease and the 
United States would effectively eliminate funding for terrorists - along 
with reducing the U.S. crime rate, prison overcrowding and a host of other 
domestic problems caused by the failed war on drugs.

It's time to stop this futile effort to save people from themselves. Drug 
abuse is not a criminal problem, but a social one.

Law-abiding citizens have lost many civil liberties in the name of the drug 
war. Police officers have become soldiers in a war with a military 
mentality. Drug raids are conducted by officials wearing masks. Property is 
seized without a conviction. The Bill of Rights is but a speed bump to drug 
warriors.

What a peaceable person decides to put into his body is no business of 
government. The United States should focus its war on terrorism against 
terrorist and not against the use of drugs by American citizens.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom