Letters

From the April 2002 issue

Kill the Messenger

Did Nick Gillespie really need to list all the illegal drugs he's used (Editor's Note, January)? I have written to reason before about its apparent conversion into a druggie fan magazine. My breaking point has been reached. Please cancel my subscription.

Gillespie, you and your minions seem unaware of the terrible tragedies that follow drug users. In today's society, there is no penalty for what you are doing, but I can only hope that you and your crowd are visited by a drugged madman with an AK-47.

Rinehart S. Potts
Glassboro, NJ

I thank Nick Gillespie for coming forward with his recreational drug history. Perfectly normal Americans have been demonized for far too long by the moral zealots who would jail us all for violating their narrow sensibilities. The conventional wisdom has also bred many hypocrites -- those who privately indulge in illicit recreation but publicly rail against drugs and their effect on those presumed to be too irresponsible to manage their own lives.

I have been a marijuana user for nearly 30 years. I hope that Gillespie's refreshing candor helps send a clarion call to all of us to come forward with the truth. In order to approach these substances -- which have been and always will be with us -- safely, we need truth and education, not propaganda and hysteria.

Michael J. Petro
Phoenix, AZ

Drugs of Choice

At the risk of sounding like those who recommend that everyone try Ecstasy at least once, I suggest that Jacob Sullum's article on MDMA ("Sex, Drugs, and Techno Music,," January) should be required reading. Comprehensive, balanced, and logical. Bravo.

Mitch Bogen
Somerville, MA

Jacob Sullum mentions that much of supposed MDMA is contaminated or actually some combination of other drugs. Back in my days, when LSD was in wide circulation, its reliability was much greater, for a couple of reasons.

First, most LSD was circulated on tiny squares of blotter paper (and still is). There are few substances in the world that are potent enough to have any effect when taken in that quantity, so it would be hard to fit an effective dose of even many potent poisons on one of those paper squares. Thus "blotter acid" is hard to contaminate or fake with other drugs.

Second, due to LSD's high potency and the fact that it's easy to produce, "hippie entrepreneurs" with small, portable labs could meet most of the market's demand. With MDMA , however, since the effective dose is over 1,000 times the weight of an LSD dose, all the above is multiplied by the same amount. You need a warehouse and a crew of chemists to produce a similar number of doses. You also need heavy-duty smugglers.

So, as you can imagine, MDMA production tends to be controlled by large criminal enterprises. By contrast, in the old days, a few strange but usually nobly motivated individuals could satisfy the market for LSD. And thus with MDMA we see the net effect: contaminated and bogus doses, violent confrontations, and the whole spectrum of "harm maximization" produced by prohibition.

Peter Webster
International Journal of Drug Policy
Auvare, France