To the Editor:
Rather than address one by one the errors of fact in Brandon Del Pozo's column "A Coalition for Legal Marijuana," (Feb. 22), I would like to express my dismay that he tries to be funny in defending a legal situation that results in the imprisonment of those whose choices of recreational drugs are not his own.
I don't smoke cigars (or pot, for that matter) and think there are plenty of good arguments not to, but I would hardly find it humorous if tobacco were criminalized to such an extent that Del Pozo found himself sentenced to several years in jail for persisting in what he might argue is a personal choice, and none of the law's business.
I would like to suggest that Del Pozo check some of his glib assertions by reading Ethan Nadelmann's "Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives" in the Sept. 1, 1989 issue of Science magazine, and by having a look at the books "Sex, Drugs, Death and the Law: An Essay in Human Rights and Over-criminalization," by David A. Richards (Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1982) and "Ain't Noboby's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society," by Peter McWilliams (Prelude Press, L.A., 1993).
I don't think these authors are either left-wing academics or hoodlums, and find their discussions remarkably more mature than Del Pozo's.
Richards, for instance, asserts that "The American prohibitionist perfectionism, expressing a moral theory of extirpation and total denial, has not only failed to foster the kind of framework of legal regulation that could facilitate [larger] social patterns, it has insured that its own vision of radical evil will produce the worst possible consequences for drug users and society at large.
"This vision appears to feed on itself - immune to evidence, ferocious in the extent of penalties it is prepared to impose, and savage in its violations of basic human rights. We must, I believe, disencumber our conception of criminal justice of these perfectionist ideals, which pursue no aspiration that the state may justly compel and which work violence to basic human rights."
JOHN FINN '69
Lecturer, Math Department
