This letter is in response to the Oct. 11 Daily article “Living a NORML life” by Tracy Lucht.

In general the article was balanced, and presented my interests in creating a student NORML chapter.

A few comments: In objection to the opening sentence, I am not fighting for a right to get high. I am fighting against prohibitionism, the quasi-religious fascist behavior of a rogue state prohibiting adult consensual behavior that physically hurts no one save possibly the willing participants.

Under our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights we have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (including privacy), and that these rights are inalienable.

The state can’t give us as consenting adults what we already possess. Read, for example,, the book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country” by Peter McWilliams (Prelude Press, Los Angeles, 1996).

What the state does have is lots of police.

Fear of the state is the reason why in your article “The legalization issue is an apparently touchy subject.”

Prohibition is effective at intimidating and controlling people. That is its purpose.

I am reminded of Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”, in The Gulag Archipelago by Nobel laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, where he discusses Soviet police interrogators: “Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views, and they are not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering, and that is what they do and what they are.

We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of that legion, which is stripped of universal human ideals.”

Imprisonment and forfeiture of property for consensual behavior is what Nazis, Communists and witch-hunters do to their own people.

It’s time for a cease-fire and armistice in the War on Drugs, the War on the People.

Derek P. Grimmer

Ph.D.