Add new comment

Interdiction Insanity

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 2003-01-31 03:25.
[A letter to the editor in response to an op-ed in the Berkshire Eagle]

The September 9 issue contained a column by Ronald Brownstein, "Bush-Fox lead assault on cartels". Insanity is characterized as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Hence, attempting to beat the drug cartels by more and more interdiction is plainly insane.

Making it harder to grow and distribute drugs does nothing but raise the price. This pours even more money into the cartels' pockets, and corrupts even more police, both Mexican and American. Mexico's new president, Vincente Fox, knows this. He is on record as saying that drugs should and will be legalized. He's only working with the anti-drug crazies because until then it's politically expedient to do so.

Legalize drugs and the cartels will disappear overnight. Without the cash cow of black market drug sales, they will be left with no way to fund their operations. Legalize marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, the whole ball of wax. If you're still suffering from an addiction to controlling other people's lives, regulate and tax them like alcohol. Turn your attention to providing realistic information to prevent drug abuse and voluntary treatment options to help cure it.

Adults own their bodies. What they choose to ingest is nobody's business. Laws criminalizing the possession/sale of vegetable extracts by/to peaceful adults are an abomination. They have no place in a free country.

Bill St. Clair
bill@billstclair.com

Reply



The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.


*

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <i> <b> <u>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web and e-mail addresses are automatically converted into links.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • You can use BBCode tags in the text, URLs will be automatically converted to links
Verify comment authorship
Captcha Image: you will need to recognize the text in it.
*
Please type in the letters/numbers that are shown in the image above.