Fighting Drug Use

* Every so often another editorial or article appears depicting the very real toll zero tolerance and standardized punishments regarding illicit drug use have exacted on our society (“When Sentencing Laws Don’t Do Justice,� Jan. 19). This country’s apparent obsession with punishing drug use is vastly more damaging than the drug use itself ever was. There seems to be a complete dearth of common sense when it comes to this issue.

We are spending billions of dollars a year in punitive measures while cutting rehabilitation prospects with mindless abandon. We are sending more and more people to prisons for smaller and smaller offenses, with neither rhyme nor reason evident in our ruthless demands for vengeance. We enact statutes that whisk away constitutional protections, and we do this most obviously in schools, where we not only don’t have enough money to teach students the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but by our actions inculcate in them a complete disregard for the sanctity of our inalienable rights.

In our zeal to end what we perceive to be a problem of epidemic proportion, we have created vastly worse plagues that will haunt us for generations. The young are tomorrow’s leaders, and what we are teaching them is, in a word, fascism. It is now far past time to stop this foolishness and enact policies that are rational, humane, affordable and effective. FDR once said we have nothing to fear but fear itself. When it comes to our now-unconscionable “war� on drugs, that fear is something to fear far more than the drugs themselves.

GEORGE SCILEPPI

Glendale