Links to my original article and Mr. Capra’s rebuttal, and the response below have also been published at http://mccoolportraits.com/mccoolcomments.htm#MATV

LEGALIZING POT IN NO WAY MAKES US SAFER—A REBUTTAL
By Joy Strickland
CEO, Mothers Against Teen Violence

James L. Capra, a Dallas Drug Enforcement Agent, asserted in his article last week, “The United States has had tremendous success in our fight against drug use and abuse.” Anyone vaguely familiar with the war on drugs will concede that Mr. Capra holds what is arguably a fantastic notion of success. His agency’s outdated arguments and misleading statistics are self-serving at best. Indeed, a DEA agent promoting the drug war is perhaps less remarkable than a ringmaster promoting the circus. Still, Mr. Capra’s arguments warrant a rebuttal.

Firstly, Mr. Capra refers to the specter of prisons filled with drug users as an “illusion”. Although an entire communtiy of African American men in Tulia, Texas and the Hispanic men victimized by the fake drug scandal here in Dallas could liken their experience to a bad dream, sadly these shameful stories are very real. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) reveal that drug law violations skyrocketed to nearly 2 million in 2006, of which: 82.5% were for possession of a controlled substance; only 17.5% were for the sale or manufacture of a drug; 43.9 per cent were for marijuana; and 39% were for marijuana possession alone, shattering the myth that the drug war primarily targets drug smugglers and king pins. We cannot separate the rise of the prison industrial complex from our outdated an irrational drug laws.

Secondly, Mr. Capra inferred that favoring decriminalization and control could be construed as favoring underage use. Nothing in the original article warrants this disturbing inference. Perhaps the point that Mr. Capra missed can be clarified by posing the following questions: If a youth should exercise poor judgment by using a controlled substance, should he be barred from obtaining a federal loan for college? Should he be incarcerated? If he has a life-threatening reaction, should his friends risk letting him die because they fail to seek medical attention, fearing their own arrest? It must not be that the cure is worse than the ailment.

There is no accounting for those “studies” showing the harmful effects of marijuana on the body, since Mr. Capra cited no sources. There is ample evidence, however, that marijuana is less dangerous (to adults) in many respects than nicotine. In 2006 the largest case-controlled study ever conducted concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. Donald Tashkin, a pulmonologist at the University of California at Los Angeles has studied marijuana for 30 years. FDA officials have widely used his previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin had hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect,” says Tashkin.

Finally, Mr. Capra alluded to the Netherlands as evidence that liberalized drug policies increase rather than reduce crime. A better informed DEA agent would know that marijuana remains illegal in the Netherlands. Large-scale dealing, production, import and export of all illegal substances are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The fact that Dutch policymakers make a distinction between hard drugs and soft drugs is a step in the right direction. This distinction has led to dispensing marijuana in coffee shops because a policy of non-enforcement has become common. The problem is that there is no way for coffee shops to access a legal supply of marijuana. By pursuing a schizophrenic policy coupling non-enforcement with the failure to control cultivation and distribution, the Netherlands has allowed illegal drug trafficking to remain a profitable venture—and that is the source of the criminal activity.

In the information age, drug war opponents and advocants alike could benefit from a public debate based on facts instead of fiction or scare tactics. Anything less is a disservice to the DEA and the citizens it purports to serve and protect.

I know that everyone is entitled to their opinions, but if you have never tried it then how can you really know the effects of what drugs will do to people lives by making it legal. Drug addiction is just the symptom we need to get to the root cause of why people turn to drugs. And trust me there is always a root cause. I teach a class called Overcomer’s. It is a bible based program that teaches user’s how to live life and overcome the things that keep them bound and in bondage to their drug of choice.

Legalizing drugs would be one of the gravest injustice in my opinion that has ever taken place in the history of mankind. If there is any doubt look at what happened when we legalized alcohol.
S. Poe

The ideas that motivated them are expressed in these quotes:

“Inability of the prohibition law to enforce prohibition is causing an increase in the number of young boys and girls who become intoxicated,” declared Judge H. C. Spicer of the juvenile court at Akron, Ohio, a short time ago when two boys, aged 15 and 16 years, respectively, were arraigned before him. “During the past two years,” he added ” there have been more intoxicated children brought into court than ever before.”
“Statement by Hon. William Cabell Bruce, The National Prohibition Law, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Sixty-Ninth Congress, April 5 to 24, 1926″

Pauline Sabin’s concern over prohibition grew slowly. Initially she favored the Eighteenth Amendment, explaining later, “I felt I should approve of it because it would help my two sons. The word-pictures of the agitators carried me away. I thought a world without liquor would be a beautiful world.”"

Gradually, however, intertwined motherly and political concerns caused her to change her mind. Her first cautious public criticism of prohibition came in 1926 when she defended Wadsworth’s opposition to the law. By 1928 she had become more outspoken. The hypocrisy of politicians who would support resolutions for stricter enforcement and half an hour later be drinking cocktails disturbed her. The ineffectiveness of the law, the apparent decline of temperate drinking, and the growing prestige of bootleggers troubled her even more. Mothers, she explained, had believed that prohibition would eliminate the temptation of drinking from their children’s lives, but found instead that “children are growing up with a total lack of respect for the Constitution and for the law.”"

In later statements, she elaborated further on her objections to prohibition. With settlement workers reporting increasing drunkenness, she worried, “The young see the law broken at home and upon the street. Can we expect them to be lawful?”" Mrs. Sabin complained to the House Judiciary Committee: “In preprohibition days, mothers had little fear in regard to the saloon as far as their children were concerned. A saloon-keeper’s license was revoked if he were caught selling liquor to minors. Today in any speakeasy in the United States you can find boys and girls in their teens drinking liquor, and this situation has become so acute that the mothers of the country feel something must be done to protect their children.”"

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It’s worth mentioning that The United States had the worst outbreak of teen alcoholism during Alcohol Prohibition in the entire history of the nation.

After mothers began opposing Alcohol Prohibition the policy was effectively DEAD. Within 7 years complete repeal was accomplished.

One of our missions must be to convince mothers that drug crusade is endangering their children. Once that is done, the drug warriors will have a losing battle on their hands.

[Ms. Strickland's article] is a very good start.
R Givens

Your Children and Prohibition

In America in the year 2008 it’s perfectly legal to use recreational drugs. There are no laws prohibiting the use of drugs which will get you loaded, drugs which are addictive, or drugs which pose a significant chance of killing you. You can use them on school property. You can use them while you’re at work. You can use them in the company of small children, the elderly or the gravely ill. All this is perfectly legal and always has been. There’s only one catch: you have to use the same drugs we do. We are the people who decide which drugs are socially acceptable. We are the majority. If you use drugs that are different from our drugs we’ll throw your ass in jail. Right now we’re building prisons as fast as we can for just that purpose. Most of the people in prison today are there for buying or selling drugs. We spend billions of dollars every year to enforce this policy.
You might think that the drugs we use are relatively safe and the drugs of which we disapprove are dangerous. You would be wrong. There is one popular drug which has never been responsible for a single death and that one is at the top of the illegal list. But the drug which kills the most people by far is perfectly legal. Our decisions in this matter have nothing to do with reason and everything to do with passion and prejudice. A brief summary here is in order:
When the Chinese immigrated to the west coast in large numbers after the Civil War we didn’t like them very much. They didn’t look like us and they had strange customs. So naturally we looked for some excuse to put them in jail. But we couldn’t admit that Americans would incarcerate someone because of racism alone so we had to find something that was peculiar to them and not us and use that as the reason to jail them. Opium! The British Empire had forced opium on the Chinese in the 1840’s and that could be used to justify putting them behind bars. A few years later some Southern legislators convinced themselves that cocaine would send black men into a white-woman-raping frenzy and so cocaine was added to the list. During the Depression there were no jobs beneath the dignity of American workers and we needed leverage against Mexicans who came here looking for work. That made marijuana illegal. Nixon added on hallucinogens as a way to attack the kids who disapproved!
of his lack of respect for law and order. And the Drug War (not the drugs themselves) has created huge cartels which are terrorizing the entire western hemisphere.
If you discovered your son or daughter buying or selling drugs would you turn them in to the police? If not, why not? Do you approve of your neighbors kids going to prison? Would you send them to live with violent criminals as a way of scaring your own kids?
The number of people who die every year as a result of using illegal drugs is about 16,000. That’s enough to fill a basketball arena. The number of people who die from alcohol is a little more than twice that–35,000–and would just about fill a baseball stadium. The number of American servicemen who died in Vietnam–58,000–is significantly less than a normal-sized football stadium will hold. To get an idea of how many people die from tobacco each year, imagine if a Hiroshima-sized nuke were dropped on New York City. Then another one on Chicago. And another one on Houston. And one more on Los Angeles. If you did that you would still kill significantly LESS people than tobacco kills in a single year. So imagine next year four more american cities getting nuked. And four more the year after that. Then imagine that nobody cares. Imagine our government sending tax money to help the people pay for the nukes they’re dropping on our cities. Our only sanctions would b! e to sue them in court. The Bible speaks of someone who can strain at a gnat and swallow a Camel®.
If our country can patiently endure the deaths of over 400,000 Americans every single year who die from the use of a particularly noxious recreational drug, how can we wage a war on our own children for buying and selling drugs that whatever their destructive capabilities are not nearly as dangerous? If we were to end prohibition a second time we would put the drug cartels out of business. They only traffic in drugs because of the galactic profit margin. Legal drugs have a tiny profit margin because they cost virtually nothing to produce. Al Capone’s greatest fear was the repeal of prohibition. Seventy percent of his income came from bootlegging. Historians agree that more alcohol was consumed during prohibition than either before or after.
We have proved beyond any doubt that no matter how draconian our enforcement people are going to find ways of becoming intoxicated. Only organized crime benefits from prohibition and it doesn’t achieve it’s primary goal: making drugs unavailable. If you’re not willing to send your own children to prison for buying or selling drugs how can you send the son or daughter of some other parent to jail for doing the same thing? Congress will not end prohibition until you tell them to. Save your sons. Save your daughters. Teach them good judgement by exercising it yourself. Make them aware of the dangers of all drugs. And end this madness. Send a copy of this e-mail to your congressman, your governor, your president:

I don’t approve of my children doing dangerous drugs. I believe it is my responsibility to teach them to be responsible. But if they make a mistake I don’t want them to go to prison for it. I want the criminal justice system to focus on violent criminals. Let the police do their job and I will do mine. I do not support this failed policy any longer. Please end Prohibition now.

I read your editorial in today’s paper and found it to be very insightful. It is unfortunate that so many people don’t see the big picture of the billions we waste on this “war on drugs”. It is not much different than prohibition but, for whatever reason, people don’t see it that way. I personally don’t advocate use of these types of drugs, but the reality is that they will be used and where there is a demand, a supplier will meet that demand. We have created a criminal culture surrounding many drugs which, frankly, are less harmful or additive than alcohol, or tobacco. A governmental system that decriminalizes certain of these drugs (e.g., marijuana), controls distribution through legal sources and taxes the sale would save billions in tax dollars and raise even more. This would also cut the legs out from under the criminal enterprises that thrive on selling what is now illegal (as they did with alcohol when it was illegal). In any event, I am glad to see someone taking the time to express a very logical and practical solution in response to a failed govermental program that we can’t seem to admit just doesn’t work. Keep up the good work. S. Lownds