Times Series on Cocaine

Your articles on cocaine and the drug problem sweeping the country deserve an immediate proposal.

That first-time users go on probation instead of incarceration is paramount. Three years is too much. Let us propose a modest but mandatory seven days in the clink and see what happens.

We are too cheap to submit to taxes that would better take care of obvious problems such as crowded jails, national deficits and poverty, hence seven days is a modest proposal, less costly, perhaps, than “mandatory counseling.”

Think what deterrent seven days would do to you, a trucker, a clerk, a salesman, a manager, a business executive or a professional, all with social responsibility and self-esteem.

How would your boss, your family, your neighbors, your own conscience react to your sitting seven days in the local slammer?

Sufficient, I believe, to provide a shocking deterrent to first-timers, experimenters and cocky-as-hell users who laugh at present law and provide the demand for coke that is so necessary to the supply that we can’t seem to stop.

If you want to contribute to curtailing this drug catastrophe you will phone or write your lawmakers and judges and demand seven days mandatory for first-time users of cocaine.

RUSSELL T. CONNORS

Shell Beach