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The High Point Enterprise
High Point, North Carolina
October 29, 2001

Letter: Drug network uses media

Thank you for Doug Clark's clear-headed column against legalizing drugs (Oct. 23). You no doubt will receive hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from drug-legalization proponents who say you are wrong. (You are not.)

This is an orchestrated protest that occurs every time a newspaper publishes an editorial or article that displeases the legalizers. For several years, they have posted to the DrugSense Media Awareness Project, an Internet Web site they created (http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews), copyrighted newspaper articles from publications throughout the world.

This site also teaches browsers how to write brief letters to the editor to protest any point of view that varies from their own. And it extends the protest to news articles that convey information with which they disagree.

Articles particularly offensive to them earn a "DrugSense Alert," which goes out to a large Internet list asking for immediate letter-writing action.

DrugSense knows that newspapers try to balance viewpoints received in letters to the editor. They are determined to overwhelm publishers by inflating the ratio of letters that espouse their point of view. In other words, they are trying to manipulate the media.

Some newspapers have responded by refusing to publish any letters about drug abuse and addiction. Such a response eliminates the public's ability to voice a variety of viewpoints about a problem as complex as drug abuse and addiction.

Today, some 105 million Americans regularly use alcohol, and some 65 million regularly use tobacco, society's two legal addictive drugs. These levels of use produce 530,700 deaths each year. In contrast, 14 million Americans regularly use illicit drugs, producing about 16,000 deaths a year. Keeping drugs illegal holds down drug use, abuse, addiction and death. If we were to legalize drugs, we would create legal industries that would use some of their revenues to advertise and market to increase consumption and some to contribute to political campaigns to block regulation. Soon, use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs would reach today's levels of alcohol and tobacco use. Abuse, addiction and death rates would escalate proportionately.

SUE RUSCHE

Atlanta, Ga.

The writer is executive director of National Families in Action in Atlanta; co-author of "False Messengers: How Addictive Drugs Change the Brain"; and co-director of the Addiction Studies Program for Journalists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

İHigh Point Enterprise 2001

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