Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Contact: Sunday, 1 March 1998 Website: http://www.sfgate.com/ Editors note: These two published letters, one from our Executive Director and the other from the Editor of our weekly Newsletter (and board member) are just more examples of the success of DrugSense/MAP supporters in reaching the public thru the media, a most significant part of what we are all about. Solid estimates are close to a million dollars in what it would have cost for ads for all the published LTEs and OPED items for the past year. Many, but not all, are posted at: http://www.mapinc.org/lte/ ANOTHER BAD IDEA Editor -- I read with interest your editorial (Sunday, February 22), hoping that political posturing by the president and the speaker over conduct of the drug war would not cause Mr. Clinton's plan for drug testing inmates to be jettisoned. I agree, superficially at least, that a prison should be the one place where such a program might be ``successful.'' This led me to wonder -- if prisons are so secure, why do they have drug problems to begin with? The answer, of course, is that corruption of prison staffs has proven impossible to prevent. Just by chance, the Sunday London Times carries a story about drug testing of prisoners in the UK. The first line reads: ``Figures showing the number of prisoners testing positive for drugs at Shotts prison, one of Scotland's most secure jails, have been manipulated to mask a growing crisis, staff members claim.'' The story went on to describe how older prisoners, known not to use drugs were being tested excessively to hide the true number of positive tests among younger, drug using inmates. Like so many other bright ideas for making the drug war work, it's back to the drawing board for this one as well. THOMAS J. O'CONNELL, MD San Mateo - -------------- THE CANNABIS PAPERS Editor -- Failure of the press to cover the suppression of the World Health Organizations findings that cannabis (marijuana) is much safer than tobacco or alcohol could easily be construed as demonstrating a bias on behalf of protecting a well-funded liquor and tobacco industry. A studious nationwide search failed to produce a single U.S. newspaper that carried the Reuters news service article that detailed the repression of this report. Numerous Canadian and UK publications printed this information. Why not this or any other U.S. paper? New Scientist Magazine reported in it's February 21 edition and on-line at http://marijuana.newscientist.com that the WHO attempted to hide the facts. According to New Scientist, which published a special report on marijuana on February 18, a leaked document about the analysis concluded that marijuana posed less of a public health threat than alcohol or cigarettes, even if people consumed the drug on the same scale as the other substances. It certainly looks like the conspiratorial even if it isn't. MARK GREER Executive Director The Media Awareness Project (MAP) Inc. Porterville ©1998 San Francisco Chronicle