Pubdate: Mon, 02 Dec 2013
Source: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner (AK)
Copyright: 2013 Fairbanks Publishing Company, Inc.
Contact: http://newsminer.com/pages/submit_letters_to_editor
Website: http://newsminer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/764
Author: Edward S. Paxson

THE WAR ON DRUGS

To the editor: Social intervention by the government always brings 
unintended consequences to the table. Drug prohibition is no different.

Cocaine had been around and used for almost a hundred years before 
the 1970s, when there was demand in the inner city for a cheap drug. 
Demand for drugs has always and will always be met and it was - in 
the form of crack cocaine. You cook a little cocaine with simple 
kitchen ingredients and it turns into a hard, smokable substance that 
provides a far more potent high. Had cocaine been legal, crack likely 
would never have been invented.

About 3,000 people die in America per year as a result of cocaine or 
heroin use. About 80 percent of those die from an overdose caused by 
an unexpectedly potent product or an adverse reaction to the material 
used to cut the drug.

During Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal in this country from 
1919-1933, the rate of acute alcohol poisoning was more than 30 times 
higher than today because of back-alley products.

Gangs usually survive off illegal trades, mainly drugs. The core of 
gang violence is at territory and contract enforcement. Alcohol and 
tobacco gangs do not exist because those products are legal.

Drug dealers face incentives to push harder, more expensive drugs - 
$50,000 worth of pure heroin weighs about 1 pound while the same 
value of marijuana weighs about 100 pounds. Which is easier to conceal?

The government now regulates your ability to buy pseudoephedrine. You 
often have to give up personal information to buy cold medicine. It 
is for the noble cause of reducing homemade methamphetamine, and it 
has. Unfortunately, meth use hasn't gone down. Demand has stayed the 
same, which caused imports from Mexico to soar (part of their drug 
cartel crisis). Mexico's meth is more potent, and deadly overdoses 
from this unknown product have increased.

To form an opinion on drug laws, we need to have both sides. And that 
includes the unintended consequences of our 
$100-billion-plus-per-year war on drugs.

Edward S. Paxson Fairbanks
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