Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,alt.drugs,uiuc.civil-liberty
From: [k--d--e] at [cs.uiuc.edu] (Carl M Kadie)
Subject: Illinois ACLU letter on drugs
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 1994 18:22:33 GMT

Jay Miller, Executive Director of the ACLU of Illinois, has a Voice
of the People letter in Sunday's Chicago Tribune. Here
are some excerpts:

"Need a better way to deal with drugs

[...]

In 1914, just before drugs were criminalized, they presented a
moderate health problem, but not nearly as serious as tobacco, which
kills some 400,000 people a year, or alcohol, responsible for 130,000
deaths annually. Even today, with about 11 percent of the population
using illegal drugs, yearly deaths number fewer than 5,000.

However, the war on drugs is responsible for more street crime,
including homicides, a tripling of prison population, increased gang
and organized crime activity, increased HIV transmission and the
serious erosion of constitutional rights.

[...]  When [alcohol] prohibition ended, alcohol consumption rose
somewhat -- yet no reasonable leader today would recommend reinstating
prohibition.

Furthermore, when liquor prohibition ended, the homicide rate dropped
by half. [... P]olice department in major cities attribute 80 percent
of burglaries, thefts and robberies to people trying to get money to
pay the inflated price of black-market drugs. [...]

In the Netherlands, consumption of both marijuana and cocaine actually
decreased when they were _de facto_ decriminalized. In Liverpool,
England, where doctors decriminalized all drugs a few years ago, there
was no increase in the addict population -- but there was a
significant reduction of crime as well as HIV transmission caused by
shared needles.  [...]

If Congress is truly committed to waging a war on drugs that it can
win, it should focus federal resources on treatment and education to
reduce the use of all dangerous substances, including tobacco and
alcohol. It should then commission a major study on the best way to
treat drug use as a social and medial problem an an alternative to the
25-year, megabillion-dollar failure of trying to control drugs with
the criminal justice system."
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-- 
Carl Kadie -- I do not represent any organization; this is just me.
 = [k--d--e] at [cs.uiuc.edu] =