Marijuana Policy Project

 Re "The dangers of marijuana" (Ron Mapes, Monitor letter, Oct. 5):

I applaud Mr. Mapes for having served as a law enforcement officer. However, his letter was completely uninformative and misleading. Marijuana never posed any danger to him. It's a benign plant that contains a drug that is illegal and that some people use. It's the legality issue that posed the danger and which is why the people don't want the law anywhere around them.

If the plant was legal to own and use, the people using it wouldn't have any problem with the law being around.

The real issue is that we have to rethink our strategy against narcotics, hallucinogens and other drugs. The billions of dollars we have spent and the tens of thousands of lives that have been ruined by our past and current strategy have done nothing to improve the situation. Just look at the experience we had with prohibition. Once we changed our strategy, most of the crime associated with alcohol disappeared.