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LIGHT AT THE END OF DRUG WAR TUNNEL

Dear Editor:

Finally, the criminal justice pendulum starts to swing back toward the middle.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in a speech before the American Bar Association that the hallmarks and cornerstones of injustice - racial discrimination, contracting civil liberties, the tying of the hands of federal judges in the sentencing process, and the imposition of three-time-loser laws and mandatory-minimum sentencing for non-violent criminals and non-violent drug offenders with reckless abandon as if Americans were made of money to waste on prisons - are about to end.

Unmentioned in press reports of Eric Holder's speech and the speech itself are the efforts of people like Julie Stewart and organizations like hers, Families Against Mandatory Minimums ( FAMM ).  For 25 years, these thoughtful organizations have been calling for the reform that is now finally in sight.  This reform will put an end to draconian sentencing of non-violent drug offenders, a public policy pothole that historically collected politicians' votes, churned public opinion into thoughtless frenzy, wasted limited public revenues, accomplished racially discriminatory arrest, prosecution and incarceration law-enforcement practices, and supported the economic interests of drug gangs and drug cartels that feed off the intolerance of the war on drugs that made violent crime the new incurable American cancer.

Thanks to other organizations like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition ( LEAP ) ( www.leap.cc ), Students for a Sensible drug Policy ( SSDP ), National Organization Reform of Marijuana Laws ( NORML ), the Marijuana Policy Project ( MMP ), the Drug Policy Alliance ( DPA ) and many more, hope is on the horizon for resuscitation of individual freedom and the recovery of society.

The legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state, the prescription of medical marijuana written by the voters and state legislatures in 20 states, the decriminalization of all drugs for personal use in Portugal in 2000, and the rapidly coming legalization of marijuana and others drugs in Uruguay, Chili, Equator, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rico, all these developments are a bright light at the end of the long, dark drug-war tunnel - Renaissance after a self-inflicted World Drug War.  Even the United Nations and its three drug-prohibition treaties that are the "Fountainhead of Drug Prohibition" worldwide may succumb to reason, reality and reform.  A summit worth the price to see

James T.  Gierach, Palos Park