Hello:

Interesting and well stated editorial that I wanted to share:

February 25, 2000 Arkansas Times Opinion

Traces of cocaine -- the war in your pocket

By Mara Leveritt [mara@arktimes.com]

Readers may wonder why I can't seem to stop beating the drum about drugs. The simple answer is that I have come to regard the topic as this nation's most pressing civil rights issue. The War on Drugs has led to abuses of government as severe as some of the worst forms of segregation. It has surpassed McCarthyism in its destructive mania.

The "cure" our government is trying to impose on problems real and imagined is itself threatening the health of our country. We can't build prisons fast enough. Families and neighborhoods are being shattered. Restraints on police that were once embedded in our laws have been systematically abandoned.

This government's drug addiction is skewing its decisions in every corner of life. And, as with segregation and McCarthyism, its rhetoric rises on its own noise, drowning out calmer voices of reason and humanity.

Here's an example of how dangerously crazy life has become in the bunkers of this war. The Arkansas Department of Correction installs a scanning device that's sensitive enough to detect traces of drugs on the hands of anyone trying to enter a facility. The only problem with it, officials explain, is that almost anyone who has handled a dollar bill has picked up traces of cocaine, so pervasively has the powder dusted our currency.

Then we read in this week's news of the couple in Dallas who found $300,000 on the freeway and turned it in to police. Even though no one has claimed the money, police now say, it will not be returned to the finders because agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration found traces of cocaine on it, declared the money drug proceeds, and confiscated it. By that logic, one could imagine the DEA going into any retail store in America, opening the cash drawer and confiscating its contents. Or what about banks? What about the money in your pocket? It's tainted with traces of cocaine. You can just about count on it. And so is most of the money that flows around Washington.

So what are we going to do? Confiscate every dollar and lock up every American who still occasionally uses cash? Don't laugh. The extremes to which we have already gone would have shocked us 20 years ago.

As usual, when a mania takes control, judgment in all areas is affected. Right now, for instance, the federal government is fighting tooth and nail to beat back grassroots efforts to legalize marijuana as medicine. The drug is far too dangerous, federal officials say, even to be smoked by the terminally ill seeking relief from pain. The feds insist years of testing are needed before the drugs risks can be weighed against its benefits.

At the same time, this same government is injecting an anthrax vaccine into the arms of every member of its armed services, despite multiple uncertainties about both the safety of the vaccine and its effectiveness. Unlike marijuana, whose effects -- positive and negative -- have been known for centuries, the Pentagon's anthrax vaccine is relatively new. It has not been widely used. And the single facility that supplies it has been cited for numerous safety violations.

Never mind that soldiers are resigning from the armed services rather than submit to the injections -- or that, on the other hand, people who smoke marijuana do so of their own volition. The government -- the true drug lord, these days-imprisons for the use of some drugs and imposes the use of others.

Perhaps most tragically, this fixation on illegal drugs robs us of genuine opportunities to improve in such crucial areas as health and education. Take for example Rep. Asa Hutchinson's upcoming visit to Northwest Arkansas, where he plans to hold a "field hearing" about methamphetamine, now that Arkansas leads the nation in meth labs per capita.

One wonders why he did not scramble to hold field hearings over the results of a study just released by the AARP that citizens of his state have the second-highest death rate in the nation due to stroke; that its citizens are among the most uninsured in the nation for health; and that it leads the nation in the number of women who don't get mammograms. Hutchinson's answer to the burgeoning methamphetamine problem is, as always, tougher enforcement.

More laws. More police. More prisons. What a remarkable experience it would be if, just once, a hearing were held to examine whether there might be a relationship between Arkansas's top-of-the-chart rates of poverty, ill education and ill health and all those methamphetamine labs. But like the die-hard segregationists and fiery Joe McCarthy, the demagogues of this current hysteria stoke their cause with fear. They point to a supposed scourge and say civil rights must be sacrificed to repel it. I say let's hang onto our civil rights and throw out the demagogues.

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