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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (12269)	12/2/2001 6:21:18 PM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

War on Drugs. In this country free needles are given out to slow down the spread of HIV. My argument is why stop there??? Fill em up too. Kill off the lucrative business selling illegal drugs! It would be a self funding government operation. Others seem to think the same too. themoscowtimes.com War on Drugs Filling Up the Taliban's Coffers Letters In response to "Taliban Won't Be Pushover," a comment by Pavel Felgenhauer on Nov. 22. Editor, While the Taliban's eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop was ostensibly for religious reasons, the U.S. Department of State suspects that the real motive was to increase the value of the Taliban-held opium stocks cited in Pavel Felgenhauer's column. Afghanistan profits from the heroin trade because of drug prohibition, not in spite of it. Attempts to limit supply while demand remains constant only increase the profitability of drug trafficking. Here in the United States, the drug war distorts market forces to the degree that an easily grown weed like marijuana is literally worth its weight in gold. In South America, the various armed factions tearing Colombia apart are all financially dependent on the obscene profits created by America's war on consensual vices. The drug war is the problem, not the solution. Heroin produced in Afghanistan is primarily consumed in Europe, a continent already experimenting with public-health alternatives to the drug war. Providing chronic addicts with standardized doses in a treatment setting has been shown to reduce drug-related disease, death and crime. Addicts would not be sharing needles if not for zero-tolerance laws that restrict access to clean syringes, nor would they be committing crimes if not for artificially inflated black-market prices. If expanded, prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organized crime of its core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable, spare future generations addiction and significantly undermine the Taliban's funding. Harm-reduction policies have the potential to reduce the perils of both drug use and drug prohibition. Robert Sharpe Program Officer Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation Washington