End ‘War on Drugs’

Your article of Aug. 26, “Southeast Residents Stand Tough, Get Rid of Criminal Element,” could not be a better illustration of the wrong-headedness and futility of making drugs illegal. It illustrated the many ways that the government’s war on drugs imposes high costs on average citizens while producing a small benefit for a few members of the government elite, creating jobs for bureaucrats and police.

The “war on drugs” has been going on now for 50 years and is no closer to being “won” than it was at the beginning. While libertarian arguments about the right of individuals to control their own bodies, worthy though they may be, have had relatively little impact, even such longtime supporters of drug prohibition as William F. Buckley and Ernest van den Haag have now acknowledged that the costs of this “war” outweigh the gains.

Wake up, Southeast San Diego residents! All you did by “standing tough” was push the street drug market into someone else’s neighborhood.

You cannot get rid of the drug market, you can only move it somewhere else.

The best place to move it is indoors, to a legitimate store where transactions are legal and criminals find no profit in it.

You cannot reduce the overall use of drugs by direct action against the users and dealers.

Face reality! Drug use, like alcohol use, is here to stay.

If you really want to make your neighborhoods safe, you will fight for legalizing the use of drugs by adults and getting the business of selling them out of the hands of the street criminals.

You will then see your local police able to concentrate on violent crime, and your children will not be finding syringes full of drugs in your gardens. Strangers will not be partying in your front yards until dawn, and you will not feel like prisoners in your own neighborhood.

Perhaps best of all, you will no longer be subject to a government “war” in which you are the main casualty.

SCOTT M. OLMSTED

Solana Beach