Letters

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

Drug War Defectors

I would like to thank Michael Lynch and the three ex-drug warriors he interviewed for the refreshingly truthful "Battlefield Conversions" (January). The information presented makes one thing undeniable: Some government departments have been lying to us for years about the War on Drugs. Unfortunately, John Q. Public remains mostly unaware of the depth of this deception. Lynch's article should be required reading for every taxpaying American voter.

L.J. Carden
Concord, CA

In "Battlefield Conversions," Joseph McNamara relates that when he was police chief in San Jose, the city manager didn't budget money for police equipment, telling him to raise the funds through drug seizures. McNamara says, "So law enforcement becomes a revenue-raising agency…."

You don't have to be a whole lot smarter than a turnip to appreciate that a prerequisite for drug profits is a profitable drug trade. San Jose and just about every jurisdiction in the country are betting the police budget that there will be a profitable drug trade next year. Making police departments profit-sharing partners is the best way I can think of to guarantee a profitable drug trade in America.

Paul Kelly
Boulder, CO

Nostalgic for War

I have to comment on Michael Valdez Moses' "Virtual Warriors" (January). The "explosion" of motion pictures about World War II resulted from the success of Saving Private Ryan. The formula worked so well that other movies jumped on the bandwagon. World War II was the last war that occurred when our country was still naive. People trusted and believed in their government (even if it wasn't innocent then either). It was the last time that we fought a real evil. It's understandable that people today would be nostalgic about such a time.

Writing about Enemy at the Gates, Moses mentions that due to the Cold War's end the movie reflects a more positive attitude toward Russia. He says the true evil of the movie is fascism. Did he see the first 30 minutes? Did he watch the scenes where the Russian soldiers prepared to battle the Germans and every other man was forced into the field without a gun? Or the scene where those same men, after getting hit by a barrage of German firepower, retreat only to get shot dead by their own Russian officers? The officers of the Russian army sure defined evil for me.

Writing about Saving Private Ryan, Moses criticizes Ryan's decision to stay and fight instead of going home. He feels it was unrealistic. I have read extensively on World War II, and unless the veterans are lying many of them did choose to stay and fight when given a choice. It's called true patriotism.

I think Moses needs to do a little nonfiction reading of his own. Maybe then he won't be so sarcastic toward movies attempting to accurately depict events of that war. It's a put-down to the men who served.

Maria Keneck
New York, NY

Michael Valdez Moses replies: Far from intending a "put-down of the men who served," I aimed to show how the sacrifices of World War II veterans have been cleverly misrepresented and manipulated by a generation of filmmakers not hitherto known for their warm embrace of the U.S. military or of the virtues of American patriotism. In pursuit of that goal, I endeavored to draw precisely the distinction that Maria Keneck demands, that between what really happened in World War II (as best I can determine from a fair reading of historical accounts) and current cinematic representations of it.

If the evils of communism are vividly portrayed in the opening minutes of Enemy at the Gates, as I acknowledge in my article, they are nonetheless increasingly obscured and marginalized as the film approaches its dramatic climax, in which the audience is meant to sympathize with a "simple" Russian sniper (as against his "upper-class" fascist counterpart), whose triumph is stage-managed by the Soviet intelligence service. Suggestively, the main Russian characters, who always speak English, are played by British actors, while the evil fascist sniper, whose occasional German dialogue must be subtitled, is played by the only American actor cast in a major role. The cinematic reduction of the battle of Stalingrad to a media campaign manages to eclipse the vast military struggle and the tremendous human sacrifice actually required to lift the siege of the city. Such subtle manipulations of the audience suggest to me the post-Cold War (European) sensibilities of a left-of-center and mildly anti-American media-savvy generation.

During her extensive reading, Maria Keneck no doubt came across the fact that the airborne trooper on whom Spielberg's Pvt. Ryan is loosely based was found by a chaplain (not the squad depicted in the film) and immediately removed from the front lines. What I find curious is not that the historical counterpart of Pvt. Ryan, who performed his patriotic duty, should have followed orders requiring his immediate evacuation, but that Spielberg should alter history for a variety of ends, some dramatic and commercially motivated, others ideological and politically self-serving. In short, my criticism was directed at a current generation of filmmakers and not toward an earlier generation of warriors, or those, such as Keneck, who faithfully honor them and their memory.

Subverted Justice

I agree with Glenn Garvin's positive review of Killing Pablo and his critique of the War on Drugs ("A Splendid Little Drug War," January). But I take issue with his one-sided portrayal of the hunt for Escobar. Garvin complains that the U.S. "subverted" the Colombian criminal justice system to catch a drug lord, but he leaves out an important part of the tale.

For several years the Colombians, with U.S. support, tried to bring Escobar to justice through normal channels. It was impossible. Escobar either bribed or killed anyone in a position to threaten him. Cops were killed in scores. Judges were killed, and others refused to hear cases out of fear. Attorneys were killed. Politicians were killed. And the families of all these people -- they were killed, too. Pablo even had a name for this strategy: plata o plomo, silver or lead. If someone wouldn't take the silver, hit him with the lead.

Over the course of his "career," Escobar was responsible for literally thousands of deaths. Los Pepes was an organization not just of Escobar competitors, as Garvin suggests, but also of prominent Colombian families who were fed up with the government's inability to stop the slaughter.

Although the U.S. may have gone after Pablo for the wrong reasons, the violence he used to protect his empire more than justified the actions taken against him and those who worked for him. No sane person questions America's right to go after bin Laden. Escobar was no different -- maybe even worse, because he was just in it for the money. How much more death would Escobar have had to cause before Garvin would have approved of extra-legal methods to stop him? Do his victims count less because they were Colombians, not Americans?

Escobar himself effectively destroyed the Colombian justice system. To complain about going outside it to bring him to justice is naive.

Daniel Welch
Via e-mail

Glenn Garvin replies: Mr. Welch is quite right about Pablo Escobar's subversion -- perhaps "violent suppression" would be a more appropriate phrase -- of the Colombian criminal justice system. And I hope I made it plain in my review that I didn't shed any tears about his death. But I cannot comprehend how the murder of his maids and horse trainers by Los Pepes advanced the cause of justice. These people weren't accidentally caught in a crossfire; they were deliberately targeted for killing, usually in as cruel and violent a manner as possible. The U.S. government would never have countenanced this in a campaign against a bank robber or a child molester or even a terrorist -- witness the Pentagon's reluctance to launch a missile attack on Mullah Omar's convoy at the beginning of the air war in Afghanistan. But somehow the fact that Escobar was a narcotrafficker made it OK.