Pubdate: Mon, 23 Sep 2013
Source: Concord Monitor (NH)
Copyright: 2013 Monitor Publishing Company
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/WbpFSdHB
Website: http://www.concordmonitor.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/767
Author: Paul Howland O'Day

PROHIBITION DOESN'T WORK

Re "The right drug war, and the wrong one" (Monitor editorial, Sept. 4):

The cause of your problems is not the solution to your problems. 
Prohibition is the cause of prohibitively high drug prices and 
profits. Prohibition is the means of giving billions of dollars in 
cash and unquantifiable sums of power to the drug cartels. 
Prohibition is the means of applying criminal sanctions to people 
with psychological addictions  the least effective means of helping 
them but the most effective at turning them into unemployable repeat felons.

Prohibition is the cause of impure untested unlabeled drugs and the 
resulting deaths. Prohibition is the cause of corruption and crime 
and the prison industrial complex. Prohibition is why drugs are now 
available in every town, high school and prison. Prohibition is a 
total failure, and prohibition, not drugs, is the cause of our problems.

It has taken the Concord Monitor more than 80 years to recognize the 
prohibition of marijuana is not the solution to the problems caused 
by prohibition of marijuana. Will it be decades more or even 
centuries before one of the leading voices in the so-called "Live 
Free or Die" state realizes that using a massive totalitarian police 
state apparatus to spy upon and persecute the populace for engaging 
in normal routine human behavior in an inevitably failed bid to 
engineer society into a teetotaler's utopian dream world is an epic 
work of folly that should be ridiculed by all as the barbaric, evil, 
and stupid failure that it is?

PAUL HOWLAND O'DAY

Spofford
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