Letters to the editor

This philosophical framework offers innovative American solutions to reforming health care, while the plans of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards offer only steps toward socialism. As P.J. O’Rourke once said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”

Mr. Giuliani underscores the obvious: only the innovation of the private sector and competitive pressures exerted by individual customers will cure what ails the health care system.

SCOTT W. ATLAS

Senior adviser, Giuliani Presidential Campaign

Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Professor, Stanford University

School of Medicine

Stanford, Calif.

Drug legalization

Paul Kengor’s commentary “A conservative take on drugs” (Forum, Sunday) is atypically bad. His take on those of us who oppose the war on drugs, also known as Prohibition II, is wrong in many ways. Primarily, his notion that legalization advocacy is solely a libertarian view is absurd.

I would point to former Secretary of State George Shultz, the late economist Milton Friedman and a man Mr. Kengor quotes, William F. Buckley, as non-libertarians against the drug war. The good professor should know that Mr. Buckley was friends with Peter McWilliams, a man whose death still lays at the feet of Prohibitionists. Mr. McWilliams’ death is one of the saddest examples of our present-day Prohibition’s errant ways, and Mr. Buckley is no friend of the drug war.

Even former Rep. Bob Barr, who almost a decade ago held Washington voters’ ballots hostage for nearly a year because of the medical cannabis (Measure 59) issue, is supporting the Marijuana Policy Project.

ALLAN ERICKSON

Drug Policy Forum of Oregon

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