Pubdate: Fri, 14 Mar 2014
Source: Fresno Bee, The (CA)
Copyright: 2014 The Fresno Bee
Contact:  http://www.fresnobee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/161
Note: Does not publish letters from outside their circulation area.
Author: Norman Lambert
Note: Norman Lambert of Fresno is retired and likes to cook, write 
and dabble in magic.

DRUG LAWS HURT MORE THAN HELP

What does the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman tell us about life in 
our United States of America in 2014? Everyone seems to concentrate 
upon the loss of a gifted actor to the ravages of drug addiction. 
Lost in all of this I sense there is a back story.

It appears that our rapacious appetite for illegal drugs here in the 
United States has almost single-handedly wrecked the rural economies 
of Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.

Growing, processing and shipping drugs to the U.S., bribing local 
officials, and killing anyone who stands in their way is how business 
is done by the drug cartels.

So we send money and arms to our neighbors to the south to stop the 
flow of drugs, and they become as addicted to that as we are to the 
drugs that still come streaming through to us, regardless of how we 
all try to stop them.

All of this is being done to help a giant nation fight a "War on 
Drugs" that was ill-conceived in the beginning, and followed the same 
blend of childish, wishful thinking as Prohibition did back in the 1920s.

So, when will we grow up and make drugs such as heroin and marijuana 
legal? Alcohol is readily available even though we know that there 
are millions of addicts (alcoholics) and that over imbibing and 
drunken driving kill people all over the nation everyday.

Let's face it, there are thousands of drug addicts out there right 
now. Many are using dirty needles (passing on a variety of horrible 
diseases). Is legalizing drugs going to suddenly make us a nation of 
addicts? I doubt it. National statistics actually tell us that per 
capita alcohol consumption has been dropping over the last 100 years.

Hoffman was a very well-to-do young man, who through the years was 
able to purchase the illegal drugs he desired on the streets of New 
York whenever he needed them. This is somewhat akin to the crime of 
prostitution.

Who is more culpable, the john or the prostitute? Did the drug 
dealers search out Mr. Hoffman and addict him to heroin or did Mr. 
Hoffman addict himself to heroin and then solicit dealers to satisfy 
his addiction to heroin?

A larger question for the public to address is one of skin color. Mr. 
Hoffman was white, as was a young television actor who recently died 
of an overdose, as was an English female singer who also died of an 
overdose. Three white skinned people, well known, and addicted. All 
three more than likely began using drugs as a form of recreation, a 
way to unwind, to loosen up after the tensions of a stress-filled 
professional life.

Why is it that when young black and brown men living in the ghetto or 
barrio use drugs to escape the tensions of living in their 
surroundings, we find them to be evil doers and send them to jail? I 
rather suspect that the stress that they live under every day is more 
than Hoffman ever experienced, but I'm not sure of that.

The point is, our prisons are full of black and brown men serving 
time on nonviolent drug charges. So full that we rank higher than any 
other industrialized nation for the percentage of our citizens in prison.

Young white males who are picked up by the police for marijuana and 
minor drug charges are generally not given jail time. They have the 
resources to retain lawyers. They have parents to stand up for them. 
They usually have jobs or are in school and thus have strong roots in 
the community and warrant being shown leniency. The young brown or 
black man from the heart of a poverty stricken area probably has no 
job because there are none to be had, probably has only a single 
parent and doesn't present a very good risk for the judge to send him 
back into the neighborhood.

At least for starters, we could get over the nonsense about 
marijuana. It's legal in this state, not that one, it's not legal for 
the feds, but it's legal in this county, not that one. Really, isn't 
that a little bit inane?

Actually, the "War on Drugs" - started by President Richard M. Nixon 
in 1971 - is becoming more than difficult to justify. Maybe it's time 
to have a national discussion about where we're going with it and 
consider the billions of dollars that we have wasted on it to date.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom