Your Feb 5 editorial on the government's Super Bowl anti-drug ads was illogical. In these ads, drug-warriors smeared druggies as facilitators of terrorist funding. Alas, the shoe is on the other foot. Drugs can fund clandestine enterprises only because they're highly illegal. A desired product that's criminalized can fetch exorbitant prices, thus becoming a potential source of clandestine funding. It's not the substance but the illegal status that's important. Criminalize toilet paper and it too could fund terrorism. [continues 204 words]
Your prison-boom editorial (Aug 16) was feeble defense for a "free" society that denies freedom to more of its citizens than any other nation on earth. You wrongly pooh-pooh the Drug War's role in prison expansion. Today the U.S. jails more citizens for drug offenses than it jailed for all crimes in 1970; and more than the entire European Union currently jails for all crimes. Drug incarceration also has an indisputable racial bias against blacks and Latinos. [continues 134 words]
USA TODAY commentary writer Amy Holmes apparently didn't understand either the movie "Traffic" or her experiences on Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) raids. What she saw and disliked in both cases was the black-market system for distributing pleasure drugs. It's a bad system. What she missed was the fact that prohibition policies cement the black-market system firmly in place by guaranteeing profits to traffickers ("Pessimism shouldn't thwart war on drugs," The Forum, March 30). Despite their paramilitary heroics, drug enforcers' raids perpetuate the very black-market system they're attacking. Furious efforts to eliminate all production, distribution, and use of certain pleasure drugs simply drives it all underground and minimizes society's control over it. 85 years of drug-prohibition history shows that the government can never enforce total drug abstinence on all citizens, no matter what mix of supply-reduction, demand-reduction, treatment, or prevention it uses -- and no matter how badly it erodes the Constitution or fills up prisons. [continues 168 words]
Congratulations to Australia's Government for its appointment of zero-tolerance drug commissioners (Herald, March 19). The emissaries of the US drug czar who've doubtlessly been hounding you on this must have appreciated your meek response to being brow-beaten back into the camp of Neanderthal, zero-tolerance drug war nations. While Europe is forging ahead into harm minimisation policies, you're regressing into America's willfully unrealistic and garishly moralistic prohibitionism - the US sponsored "flat-earth society" for drug control. Pity really. Paul M. Bischke, Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota, March 21. [end]
Here's the Drug War body count from the Nov 21 bust by Minneapolis police: one suspect dead, one badly wounded, passersby slightly wounded, officers bumped but unharmed. No drugs or guns found. In due defense of these officers, deadly self-protective force is clearly justified if a suspect tries to kill them with a car. But were 20 shots and the driver's death necessary? Details, now sketchy, are important, and any judgment of officers' response to threats must consider their predicament. What urgently needs review and repair, however, are the Minneapolis police policies that created this predicament of deadly confrontation in the first place. [continues 279 words]
The Page 1 headline "Heroin deadliest drug in Cities" [June 22] was the most ignorant and ridiculous sentence I have ever read in the Pioneer Press. The deadliest drugs in the Twin Cities, in order of deaths annually, are 1. tobacco, 2. alcohol, 3. prescription drugs, 4. aspirin and other over-the-counter drugs. If the drugs were itemized individually, heroin probably wouldn't even rank in the top 20. I am appalled that Carol Falkowski of the Hazelden Foundation could have made such a gross error and that reporter Hannah Allam could have overlooked such a preposterous mistake in her report. No competent drug professional would deny that tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs are actually drugs; nor can anyone deny that these drugs are far deadlier than heroin in terms of actual deaths caused. [continues 189 words]
Paul Bischke, St. Paul, Minn. [end]
As one who lived in upstate New York for 13 years, I am pleased to see major New York state newspapers finally calling the Rockefeller drug laws what they really are: gross injustice. That charge is serious, and correcting these laws is no longer optional. If Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver is holding out on reform, let's make it clear that he's standing four-square in support of injustice; tough on crime can only equate with injustice in totalitarian nations. [continues 115 words]
As Arianna Huffington rightly points out in her May 9 column, "Kicking down doors all over America," the same politicians who shudder at the storm-trooper tactics used to seize Elian Gonzalez have created a drug-war machine that visits far worse official violence against suspects. How can Rudolph Giuliani object to Elian's treatment after defending the cops who killed Patrick Dorismond (the New Yorker who got shot for "just saying no to drugs")? Drug war violence is everywhere. Just recently, police in Durham, N.C., brutalized two elderly citizens based on a bogus drug warrant. Recently in Minnesota's Twin Cities, allegations arose concerning a paralyzed man who was thrown from his bed and kicked repeatedly by police during a cocaine raid in which no drugs were found. Police are rarely held accountable for these atrocities. [continues 58 words]
In the Judaeo-Christlan tradition, the standard of good conscience regarding pleasure drugs is temperance, not abstinence. Brian Watters seems unable to grasp this (Daily Telegraph, March 22). Temperance means that when pleasurable drugs are used, they must be used wisely and with situational appropriateness. For minors and folk who can't handle drugs such as cannabis, temperance means abstinence. For the great majority of adults. however, temperance allows for moderate use. Conscience concerning drug policy is certainly a neglected issue. Many governments around the world have foltowed the lead of the US in enacting patently unjust draconian laws to enforce abstinence. An examination of conscience is needed. [continues 133 words]
I would like to offer The Detroit News staff my wholehearted approval of the story on the issue of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) programs in public schools (“DARE doesn’t work,” Feb. 27). I offer this praise not because I necessarily have an agenda in the “war on drugs,” but because I feel there is a concerted lack of discourse about these vital matters in almost every American public forum. Kevin Michaels, Milford Thanks for The News’ sensible stance about DARE. Let’s stop wasting drug-prevention dollars on something that doesn’t work — and which may actually be counterproductive. The constructive course of action is clear. Dump DARE. Let police departments do public relations work on their own tabs. Then install an honest and proven drug education program in schools. Any questions? Paul M. Bischke, St. Paul, Minn. [end]
Paul M. Bischke, St. Paul, Minn. [end]
Regarding Morgan Grams: I do wish Sen. Rod Grams had not voted in favor of drug laws that subject all other Americans, especially young blacks and Latinos, to vicious and destructive punishments. I believe America's drug laws would look very different if lawmakers imagined the punishments being applied to their own sons and daughters, and not just to the powerless. Paul M. Bischke, Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota, St. Paul [end]
When journalists let drug-war enforcers act as gatekeepers for drug information, important facts are often omitted or distorted, as in your Nov. 14 methamphetamine story. Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Special Agent Tim O'Malley said, ``Meth users are dangerous.'' That's misleading. The vast majority of meth users are not dangerous. On May 5, a San Jose Mercury News article (see www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n478.a10.html (http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n478.a10.html))titled ``Violence-drug link disputed: Justice Department report contradicts common perception'' reaffirmed that the meth-violence cliche is a hoax used by police to stir up public fear: ``According to the study, meth users were found `significantly less likely' than other drug arrestees to be charged with a violent offense.'' Pioneer Press reporters laudably questioned police assertions about the prevalence of meth use in Minnesota. In general, drug users are normal people. [continues 110 words]
The Figure of 52,000 Americans killed by criminalised drugs annually (News, last week) comes from a study General McCaffrey commissioned but which he will not release. The American National Center for Health Statistics records "14,843 deaths from drug-induced causes in 1996". The accepted figure for illegal drug deaths is 3,000-10,000. The drug war is an unmitigated disaster in the United States. The annual $18 billion federal drug war budget and overall $50 billion national spending have given us paramilitary-style policing, racist enforcement, curtailed civil liberties, jam-packed prisons, police corruption, dangerous streets, a huge bureaucracy that is propagandistic and self-perpetuating, persecution of patients who would benefit from medicinal marijuana and opiates, increased Aids infections, and no decrease in hard-core drug abusers to show for it all. Paul Bischke Policy Reform Group of Minnesota [end]
The American National Center for Health Statistics records "14,843 deaths from drug-induced causes in 1996". The accepted figure for illegal drug deaths is 3,000-10,000. The drug war is an unmitigated disaster in the United States. The annual $18 billion federal drug war budget and overall $50 billion national spending have given us paramilitary-style policing, racist enforcement, curtailed civil liberties, jam-packed prisons, police corruption, dangerous streets, a huge bureaucracy that is propagandistic and self-perpetuating, persecution of patients who would benefit from medicinal marijuana and opiates, increased Aids infections, and no decrease in hard-core drug abusers to show for it all. Paul Bischke, Policy Reform Group of Minnesota [end]
Since proponents of drug legalization often are unfairly denigrated in the press, I thank USA TODAY for presenting Gov. Gary Johnson's drug views with care and accuracy ("N.M. governor calls for drug legalization," News, Wednesday). Those favoring regulation over criminalization, as I do, are motivated by a desire for public health, public safety, legal equity, racial justice, civil liberties and social order - all of which have greatly been harmed by the war on drugs. Contrary to U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey's contention that legalization would increase drug use by minors, there is good reason to believe that civil regulation would provide greater control. [continues 84 words]
Bush claims to be a devout Christian. The moral disconnect I see is this: Bush's claim of being a faithful Christian versus his endorsing laws of disproportionate severity, in violation of Christian doctrine. Early Judaism distinguished itself from the surrounding pagan world by adopting a simple but profound moral principle: "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," which means that a society may mete out punishments only on the basis of tangible harms (not to make symbolic statements, and not for vulgar vengeance), and only in proportion to the degree of harm the individual lawbreaker actually caused. Christianity says punishments more severe than this are immoral. [continues 90 words]
I think a cocaine-besmirched George W. Bush should run for president only after he has waited out the number of years that a cocaine possessor might be sentenced under his own Texas drug-prohibition law. Fair's fair. Paul M. Bischke, Saint Paul, Minn. [continues 5 words]
Paul M. Bischke, Saint Paul, Minn. [end]
