BE OUR GUEST: READER FEELS ZERO TOLERANCE EFFORT LACKS PERSPECTIVE

Lakota Douglas is a resident of Cape Girardeau and founder of the local chapter of Help End Marijuana Prohibition.

I would like to add balance to the information area residents are receiving about the recent Good Hope arrests and the escalating war on drugs.

It is my personal opinion that the recent "sweep" was racially and economically based, and served to satisfy the average citizen's desire for a scapegoat fitting their definition of the criminal element. Am I supposed to feel safer now that the poor and black are behind bars? Cape residents want to ignore the reality of who the average drug offender is. Young black men make up 50 percent of those arrested for drug crimes while they make up only 12 percent of this country's abusers of drugs. How many raids on white suburbia are splashed across the Southeast Missourian's front page?

No one has been bothered by the use of a grand jury in the Good Hope sweep, regardless of the abuses of justice which can occur with such trials. A grand jury makes it possible to bring about swift punishment with little or no evidence being presented and the defendant often grossly under informed of his rights. Using a grand jury, a Michigan prosecutor recently attempted (and mostly succeeded) in convicting hundreds with no physical evidence, based on testimony and previous drug use. Grand juries prevent the right of the accused to receive a thorough trial by a jury of peers.

In my opinion, the Southeast Missourian has not reported on the drug war in an objective manner. News coverage of local drug trafficking is reminiscent of Hearst "drug menace" journalism common before the Second World War. The local media does not reflect the reality of the impact of the war on drugs. What about absurd forfeitures and families torn apart over a few marijuana plants? In the Scheper case, the Southeast Missourian actually mentioned the presence of High Times magazine in the home, characterizing it as a veritable drug use encyclopedia regardless of the excellent coverage they give of subjects such as AIDS, the environment and government corruption. In doing such a poor job of being objective, the local media manages to buttress citizen fears about Good Hope while ignoring the realities of the war on drugs.

Some Good Hope businesses have been stressing the need to "clean up" the neighborhood. Those familiar with the civil rights struggle or the politics of the underclass v. public administration can only wince at this. Personal dealings with one of the neighborhood's major businesses in which blatant racism was displayed makes me fear the worst for this "clean up" effort.

The general public continues to buy in this drug war fervor hook, line and sinker. Our government engages in drug smuggling and money laundering operations while hoping we will continue to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Drug use and the horrors associated with it continue to soar in direct correlation to the strictness of our laws against them, without anyone seeing the obvious link. These crimes are becoming as prevalent and vicious as they are because of the war on drugs. The more difficult we make it to obtain drugs, the more dangerous and profitable the drug trade becomes. If trading drugs were not profitable and did not involve the loss of property, money, family or life, the incentive for someone to engage in it or to use violence in the process diminishes to virtually nil.

Our war on drugs is a misnomer it is a war on people. A recent survey showed that 62 percent of Americans would be willing to give up rights in this fight. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would be willing to give up their liberty for security will soon have neither. The government now has the right to take away our property, money and children without so much as a conviction, with the public's full permission. Mandatory minimums are exacerbating the worst prison population explosion in history. Prisons can't be funded fast enough to keep up with the non-violent drug offenders thrown in them. A recent caller to Speak Out advocated the death penalty for drug users. In Michigan, drug laws made it possible for 150 people to be sentenced to life without parole for cocaine or heroin in excess of 650 grams while four teenagers facing murder charges in the same state may serve as little as eight years. The conviction rate for rape is slightly over 12 percent, with few serving more than five to seven years. Do you feel safe?

While our politicians and police get rich from drug bribes, extortion and forfeitures, the public turns a blind eye. Our country is killing itself with legal drugs in the hundreds of thousands, costing our country billions. But the public is willing to spend billions more enforcing laws against drugs which, put together, kill less than 10,000 people a year. America must come out of this cycle of absurdity and stop accepting the lies they are being told. We can start bringing logic into the discussion here at home. The residents of Good Hope deserve real justice and a community that really cares about them. We must find rational alternatives to the morass of lies that is called the war on drugs. Unless we do so, the list of casualties will continue to grow, and it won't stay in the neighborhood "across the tracks."

(Editor's note: Questioned about various data included in this piece, Ms. Douglas gave as a reference High Times magazine.

Regarding her assertions about the grand jury process, it must be pointed out that this judicial mechanism in no way denies criminal suspects their constitutional rights. One need only sit in a courtroom pleading procedure or sentencing, and hear a judge repeatedly inquire about an accused person's knowledge of their legal rights, to realize that protections are in place.

Finally, nowhere in the "Zero Tolerance" series was there racial fingerpointing. In fact, the series went to some length to point out the drug problem crossed racial lines. About three dozen people were indicted last fall by the grand jury here. The Southeast Missourian knows the racial breakdown of those three dozen; the breakdown was not published because its not relevant to the story. We suggest that Ms. Douglas does not know that breakdown; if she did, she would surely know her comments are the type that perpetuate stereotypes.)