Lower crime by regulating drugs
Regulating drugs will make organized crime rates go down [Talking to Teens: Teens discuss legalization of drugs, Jan. 29]. You don’t see a whole lot of alcohol bootleggers anymore. Prohibition just promotes crime on both sides of the law. There have been two very high times of violent crime in the United States. First was at the beginning of the first prohibition (alcohol) and the second was the “Drug War” of the 1970s. Violent crimes decreased at the end of the first prohibition. Not too mention teen cigarette use is down below that of cannabis use, and no one is getting locked up for smoking cigarettes. This proves education works much better than prison.
Ray Grill
Submitted at AustinWeeklyNews.com
Undermining dealers
Interesting opinions, but some of the logic is a little loose. “Legalization” would never mean to remove all legal controls on drugs, as some of the comments seem to imply. “Legalizing drugs” would mean to control them in the same way we currently control alcohol and tobacco; i.e. the government would grant licenses to reputable companies to produce and sell drugs to adults. Remove adults from the illicit drug market and the demand from minors would be insufficient to support the drug dealers. With their profits decimated and with the police still arresting and incarcerating them, the drug dealers would have no option but to exit the market. Like Nicole said, people offer her illicit drugs on the street today during our policy of prohibition. But where are the bootleggers offering her alcohol? When alcohol was legalized in 1933 the bootleggers disappeared because demand for their product vanished. The exact same thing will happen when we legalize drugs.
Jillian Galloway
Submitted at AustinWeeklyNews.com
Big sister blues
I think what is worse with being short is having younger siblings taller than yourself [The sting of being different, and living past it, Sandra Johnson, May 10, 2007]. At 25, I have a younger sister who is 23 and she is 5 inches taller than me. My brother; I expected him to be taller. Boys usually are. So he is 20 years old and a full foot taller than me. Even being his height, my brother is still one of the shortest out of his friends. Our mum is 4 foot 11 and dad is 5″6. I couldn’t quite work it out why I wasn’t as tall as mum, but she said that her side of the family are pretty short. She used to say that my nan (her sister) was really short. She was only 4’6. I didn’t know my nan but I would have loved to meet her and show her that we did have something in common, even if it was mainly our height. I accept who I am. God made me short for a reason. If I come up to the same height as primary school kids, it isn’t my fault.
Lucinder Green
Submitted at AustinWeeklyNews.com
