To the editor:

Three recent articles in your paper really grabbed my attention.

The first was about the poor soul sentenced to 11 years for possessing cocaine for the third time. The next article was about the guy who also possessed cocaine for the third time, but as he had quantity, he was sentenced to life in prison. The third article was about cigarettes and how health officials have determined that ONE BILLION people will die this century from their legal but lethal nicotine addictions.

Now consider for a moment a world where cigarettes were outlawed and an individual who didn’t kick the habit would go to jail for 11 years if they didn’t quit smoking after being warned twice. Would you be outraged? If a person was caught for a third time with multiple packs of cigarettes and was sentenced to life, would you think that too was outrageous?

The war on drugs in a misnomer. It is a war on people who use or distribute drugs and a war on you the taxpayer who foots the bills for such wasteful incarceration (more than $20,000 per year per inmate) – money that could be well spent on non-prison sanctions for the offender with lots of money left over to give to our bankrupt public schools or to mobilize a real campaign to educate our children about the dangers of cigarette smoking so that they won’t be one of the billion that receive a death sentence this century.

Rick Frydman,

Lawrence