Drug Offenders

It is good to see The Times supporting drug courts as an alternative to incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders at taxpayers’ expense (editorial, Aug. 31). Will you now review your longstanding and indefensible opposition to marijuana legalization?

Reasonable analysis shows that smoking marijuana, the flowering tops of the hemp plant, is far safer for most individuals than using alcohol or tobacco, driving a car, or having sex. The social costs would be less, too, if, as a society, we reserved our jails for violent criminals and stopped locking up otherwise law-abiding people for smoking or growing God’s green herb.

JOHN D. BALTIC

Topanga

* The Aug. 30 story about the sentencing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’ son to 10 years in prison for selling one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine to an undercover police officer is extremely depressing. Even if nothing else was involved, the idea of putting away a young man for 10 years when he hurt no one, while rapists and muggers are given much lighter sentences, is a terrible indictment of our “justice” system. But given that the young man was arrested five months after the sale, on a warrant issued a week after his mother dared to suggest that the government study legalization of drugs, it is clear that it was a setup to get at the surgeon general. Her son is truly a political prisoner, and I hope The Times pursues the issue.

The same edition of your paper told of “three more former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies” being convicted for seizing drug peddlers’ money for themselves--yet another example of the widespread corrupting effect and suffering brought upon our society by the criminalization of drugs and by the misnamed War on Drugs. It’s actually a war on the American people and a war on civil liberties.

WILLIAM BLUM

Hollywood