Fighting the War on Drugs in the U.S.
We write to express our extreme dismay at the decision of Congress to use the military for the war on drugs. It seems almost unimaginable to us that America must model itself after totalitarian military regimes in order to keep people from smoking marijuana.
Shall we have soldiers patrolling the streets, enforcing the Moral Majority’s vision of freedom? Will we have to show our identity papers to travel from place to place? Are America’s multimillion-dollar fighter jets going to shoot small, private planes out of the sky?
It is becoming very difficult to be a private citizen in a country where the FBI can tap phones at will, where our urine and our bedrooms are under surveillance, where freedom of expression only applies to those who don’t bother to think anyway, where foreign intellectuals are routinely stopped at the borders that are supposed to keep out these dangerous drugs, where the CIA, in fact, seems to dominate a share of the drug trade in order to finance its secret wars.
In short, we may win our war on drugs. But by the time we do there might not be a free American left within our sanitized borders.
DAN HARWIG
KYMM GAUDERMAN
Newport Beach
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