Obfuscation is the name of the game for Joseph Califano and William Bennett.
The Netherlands has about half the marijuana use we do and, with no marketing link to cocaine, about one-eighth our cocaine use, according to a World Health Organization survey. Marijuana use is up 30% here in the past 20 years, and we have over a million teenage drug sellers in our schools. Legal drugs would be more available? Impossible! A federal government-sponsored report says that “marijuana has been almost universally available to American 12th graders over the past 31 years.”
The pending bill in Congress would simply allow states to decide about marijuana. We used to call this approach the laboratory of democracy, but this pair prefers Chicken Little rhetoric to facts.
According to the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey published July 2002: “Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones.”
Jerry Epstein
Houston
Pubdate: Fri, 08 Jul 2011
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2011 Jerry Epstein
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Note: Second of 4 letters in response to http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n431/a02.html