Drug laws abet crime

After reading about more and increasingly hideous violence affecting Mexico’s border states – and beyond – the sad parallels to America’s first prohibition against alcohol are evident. We learned the costly and futile lesson that prohibition does not work; our jails are overflowing in every community. We are warehousing human beings with terrible results at staggering expense.

Drug decriminalization will eliminate the major source of income for ever-sophisticated gangs, effectively shutting them down.

By applying the Drug Enforcement Administration’s $2.6 billion annual budget toward treatment rather than a long-lost war on drugs, we can choose to handle drug abuse as a medical rather than a criminal problem.

Have you really been watching? Is anybody listening?

John Newman

Spokane