A22 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 , 2020
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR[email protected]O
N ELECTION DAY, voters
around the country opted to re-
lax state drug laws. New Jersey,
Arizona, South Dakota and Mon-
tana voted to legalize recreational mari-
juana, and Mississippi voted to legalize
medical marijuana. Oregon went further,
decriminalizing small quantities of all
drugs. These movements mark a wel-
come shift in decades of destructive drug
policy.
Since the Reagan-era escalation of the
war on drugs, severe criminal penalties
for drug possession have fueled a huge
growth in the prison population, with
particularly devastating consequences
for many Black communities, where both
penalties and policing have been harsher
than for Whites. Using the criminal
justice system as the primary tool to curb
the sale and use of illicit substances has
had astronomical costs without the de-
sired effects.
In recent years, opioid overdose
deaths have soared — nearly 50,000 in
2018 — underscoring just how cruel and
counterproductive it is to criminalize
addiction, a fact long understood by
Black communities ravaged by crackcocaine in the 1980s and 1990s. Not only
are incarcerated opioid users much
more likel y to fatally overdose shortly
after being released than the general
population, but contact with the crimi-
nal justice system can throw up barriers
to employment, housing and govern-
ment benefits, making it harder to
overcome addiction. People battling ad-
diction benefit from treatment and are
harmed by imprisonment.
Oregon’s ballot initiative to fully de-
criminalize personal use of even harder
drugs such as cocaine and heroin leans
explicitly on this logic. Although selling
these substances is still illegal, those
found with small quantities will now pay
a $100 fine or be given options for
addiction treatment. Crucially, the meas-
ure also expands addiction services, us-
ing the tax on marijuana sales to fund
new treatment centers. (Marijuana was
legalized in Oregon in 2014.)
There is logic to funding a public
health approach to addiction through
taxes on legalized drugs, but a move
toward a more humane, compassionate
and effective approach to addiction
should not be contingent on tax streamsthat may or may not materialize as
predicted — and that may provide un-
wise incentives to promote drug use.
The challenge for public policy in de-
criminalizing drugs is to avoid the
harms of criminalization without pro-
moting, or seeming to promote, the use
of drugs that may have harmful effects,
especially for young people. I t’s dif ficult
to know how new drug laws will affect
drug usage overall, and there is a rela-
tive lack of rigorous research on the
long-term effects of illicit drug use.
Caution is warranted.
It follows that a clear role for the
government is to enable rigorous re-
search that can support decision-making
on the complex questions that lie ahead.
This should include changing marijua-
na’s status as a Schedule I drug, a federal
classification that makes the drug’s po-
tential medical value harder to study.
More broadly, as states implement
varied new drug laws, researchers will be
able to closely observe these laboratories
of democracy, hopefully ushering in a
new phase of drug policy based on
evidence and the principles of public
health.The war on drugs isn’t working
Voters agree: Drug policy should be based on evidence and the principles of public health.
another day of loss for the American
people.
Individuals still have the power to
improve their chances and help those
around them: Wear face masks every-
where in public, keep socially distanced,
avoid large crowds and tightly packed
indoor spaces, and practice good hy-
giene. Rethink the risks of everything,
including Thanksgiving family celebra-
tions that could become superspreader
events. Bars, restaurants and gyms inmany places should close temporarily.
Congress ought to be preparing another
stimulus package to support businesses
hurt by winter restrictions and to pro-
vide the necessary personal protective
equipment for the coming deluge. A
vaccine won’t be widely available for
some months. Until then, strong action
could save lives and enable a speedier
recovery. Failure to act will prolong the
economic damage — and sentence tens
of thousands of people to death.R
EMEMBER WHERE you were
on Sept. 21? Today, more than
twice as many people are hospi-
talized with the coronavirus as
on that day. Nearly twice as many people
are dying on a seven-day average. The
United States took 96 days to reach the
first million infections; the past million
took just 10 days. The pandemic has
reached runaway speed in the United
States, and the president has vanished.
A dire consequence is that overloaded
health-care systems — the reason to
“flatten the curve” in the spring — a re
becoming grim reality. In Illinois, health-
care workers wrote the governor and the
mayor of Chicago, saying the state will
surpass its intensive care unit capacity by
Thanksgiving, in less than two weeks.
The University of Kansas Health System
is getting appeals from Oklahoma, Texas,
Arkansas, Iowa and Nebraska seeking
hospital beds. In Idaho, the spread has
become so rampant that a chain of clinics
can’t even answer all the phone calls
flooding in. The chief executive of a group
that operates 14 hospitals in southwest
and western Michigan announced it may
hit capacity in a matter of days. A top
Wisconsin medical official said the state
“is very close to a tipping point,” after
which hospitals may not be able to serve
everyone who becomes severely ill. Na-
tionwide hospitalizations have now
zoomed past the April and July peaks.
Another sign of spreading illness, test
positivity, is also skyrocketing; 39 states
have a rate above 5 percent. The World
Health Organization has advised that it
should be below 5 percent for 14 days
before reopening.
On Wednesday, 1,549 people died from
the virus in the United States. Would the
leadership of the nation be on high alert
if, sa y, that many people were killed in
three jumbo-jet crashes? If a terrorist
group or foreign attacker drew such an
awful toll on a single day? Yet there was
not a word from President Trump, so
self-absorbed with his election defeat
and the mirage of voter fraud that he
seems unable and unwilling to deal with
an extreme national crisis. Mr. Trump is
still president; each day of inaction isThe pandemic reckoning is here
Failure to act strongly now could cost tens of thousands of American lives.
Regarding the Nov. 6 Metro article
“Fairfax families sue over admissions
changes at Thomas Jefferson High”:
A lottery has been proposed to replace
the entrance exam for Thomas Jefferson
High School for Science and Technology.
A lottery could be at least as discrimina-
tory as a test. For a test, one must attain a
certain minimum score. If there is a
lottery, individuals could be capable of
high achievement but not picked. As an
aspiring TJ student, I would rather be
told that my score wasn’t quite high
enough than to be not selected by chance.
Other criteria, yet to be identified, have
also been suggested.
Clearly there is demand for the type of
curriculum that TJ provides. So why have
only one science and technology
school? Why not two, situated some
distance apart, so that more students can
attend? Or even three? If our goal is to
provide a certain kind of education, why
must it be limited to a tiny fraction of
youths, when it appears that more of
them are capable of doing the work?
Providing “another TJ” would be pref-
erable to selecting students using a lot-
tery, which is arbitrary and limits the
potential student population that could
benefit from this type of school.
M arianne S. Rankin,
University ParkProvide ‘another TJ’
ABCDE
FREDERICK J. RYAN JR., Publisher and Chief Executive OfficerP
RESIDENT TRUMP is attempt-
ing to overturn the lawful results
of a free election by spreading
lies and suborning local officials
to abet his conspiracy. He is not likely to
succeed, but the toxic effects on U.S. de-
mocracy will not soon dissipate. Repub-
licans such as Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who think they
can pander to Mr. Trump’s lies with no
harmful effect, are complicit in the
damage.
As court after court rejects Mr. Trump’s
baseless complaints about last week’s
vote, Republicans appear to be in creas-
ingly focused on Michigan, with litigation
aimed at heavily Democratic Wayne
Coun ty, home of Detroit. This might seem
strange, because President-elect Joe
Biden won the state by nearly
150,000 votes, far more than his margins
in other key states. But Michigan’s unusu-
al method for certifying votes could give
the president a p ath to dishonestly over-
turn the results if enough state Republi-
cans can be pressured to go along.
The Trump campaign has sued to
prevent the bipartisan Board of StateCanvassers, composed of two Democrats
and two Republicans, from certifying the
vote. The lawsuit is likely to fail as
ignominiously as the others. But it could
kick up enough dust to entrench doubt in
the minds of Michigan Republicans — or,
if not authentic doubt, at least a facade of
a pretext to burglarize the election.
Then, when the board meets on
Nov. 23, its two Republican members
could refuse to certify the results based
on those fake fraud allegations. From
there, the question could be thrown to
the GOP-led state legislature, which
could try to declare Mr. Trump the “real”
winner of the state’s electoral votes. It is
unlikely state courts would stay on the
sidelines as this all played out; this is also
the case in other states in which such a
maneuver might be attempted, but any
possibility of such a subversion of democ-
racy should be nauseating.
So far, only a scattering of Republicans
around the country have talked up the
“electoral college strategy,” which would
have GOP state legislatures send their
own slates of electors to the electoral
college. But there are some ominoussigns. Two Republicans in the Michigan
state S enate demanded a full audit of the
vote before its certification, citing the
same sorts of overheated claims of irreg-
ularities on which the Trump campaign’s
bogus federal lawsuit is based. Georgia’s
two senators, in a stomach-churning
display, turned on their own secretary of
state, Republican Brad Raffensperger,
for honestly counting the votes. “We may
be one presidential tweet away from this
gambit becoming orthodoxy for much of
the Republican Party,” writes conserva-
tive commentator Rich Lowry.
Though conducted by partisan offi-
cials, the mechanisms of vote-counting
and election-certifying have until now
been understood to be formalities based
on actual vote counts. Vote counting
cannot depend on which party can more
effectively manipulate the machinery of
government. Many local officials, includ-
ing Mr. Raffensperger, continue to stand
by that bedrock principle of democracy.
It’s a s hame that Mr. McConnell and
other supposed leaders don’t have the
decency to support them, loudly and
clearly.Mr. Trump and his GOP enablers
They’re unlikely to overturn the election results, but they are damaging democracy.
ABCDE
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The Washington Post
1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071 (202) 334-6000Mr. Biden will take away our guns (he
won’t) and raise our taxes (not if you
make less than $400,000, which is most
of us). Mr. Trump told us that science
doesn’t matter, so the coronavirus is
nothing more than sniffles (but has killed
more than 240,000 Americans) and cli-
mate change is a Chinese hoax.
But now he would have us believe that
2+2=3. The media didn’t “call” the elec-
tion; they merely reported the numbers,
and if we count only the legal votes, the
numbers add up to a Biden victory. If we
believe the president now, we also believe
that white is black and up is down. Those
who want to doubt science and fact
checking distress me. But arithmetic?
Seriously?
Sorry to disappoint, but 2+2=4, and
Mr. Biden has more than 270 electoral
votes. Mic drop.
Barry Lurie, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.The Nov. 10 front-page article “Pen-
tagon upheaval begins anew as Esper is
ousted,” reporting on President Trump’s
petulant behavior, sent alarm bells warn-
ing of serious danger to electoral transi-
tion, national security, public health,
foreign relations and economic growth.
If this is allowed to continue for the next
two months, it will permanently scar our
democracy and complicate a recovery.
History will not forgive a complicit
Congress, in the face of the growing
storm, for failing to address an uncon-
trolled and vindictive president. Justice
is still possible.
Jack McAndrews, FairfaxThe common view that President
Trump took over the Republican Party
must be reversed. The Republican Party
took over Mr. Trump, using him for its
established agenda of business-friendly
deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, ap-
peals for law and order, and appointment
of far-right judges.
His other behaviors, such as fiddling
with barriers to free trade, dissing allies
and befriending dictators, haven’t inter-
fered with maintaining that longtime
domestic program of succor for the fortu-
nate and rhetorical sops to their inferi-
ors. Other useful idiots will be found for
the next round.
Charles Planck, PurcellvilleThank you for reminding readers
about the large differences in voter turn-
out among the states in our presidential
election [“2020 voter turnout set to break
record from 1960,” news, N ov. 7]. It is an
alarming measure of the health of our
democracy that some of our most popu-
lous states score so low in voter turnout:
New York: 49 percent; Texas: 60 percent.
Does this also not suggest that our out-
dated electoral college system provides a
disincentive for voting — convincing
potential voters that their individual
preferences will not alter the outcome
because their states’ party preferences
are not in doubt? Consider turnout in the
“battleground states” of Florida, 71 per-
cent; North Carolina, 71 percent; Michi-
gan, 73 percent; Wisconsin, 76 percent;
and Pennsylvania, 69 percent.
It is surely time to abandon our anti-
quated electoral college system so that all
voters will be convinced that their prefer-
ences can make a difference.
Greg Thielmann, ArlingtonTalk about a failed state! The refusal by
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) and his henchmen to accept the
lawful result of a presidential election
borders on treason. The leaders of our
government refuse the expressed will of
the people! And what about their oaths to
protect and defend the Constitution? To
uphold the law? How far will these
desperate men go to keep their hold on
power? Or is this some bizarre political
theater, acted out for the base?
Obviously, they are not concerned with
the welfare of the republic, which they
continue to damage. The dangers of a
Trump second term (pointedly observed
in the pre-election editorials of this pa-
per) are being advanced into the waning
days of his first.
H arry Hoffman, Ellicott CityShame, shame on those Republican
senators and representatives who are
egging on President Trump in his current
conspiracy theory of a rigged election
[“Under pressure, some in GOP echo
Trump’s unsubstantiated fraud claims,”
news, Nov. 7]. We expect nothing better
from this president, who still insists that
the nearly 3 million votes he lost to 2016
Democratic presidential nominee Hil-
lary Clinton were illegally cast, but we do
expect our other elected officials to pro-
vide a reality check, not an echo to the
madness.
Thank you to Sens. Mitt Romney (R-
Utah), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and
the few other Republicans who have
called President-elect Joe Biden and con-
gratulated him on his victory. The rest of
the Senate and House Republicans need
to follow their gracious example. After
all, if you insist that the election is rigged,
might we not conclude that you are in
your own seat fraudulently?
Roslyn Lang, BethesdaThere is an attempt at hand to steal
the presidential election, but it’s not by
President-elect Joe Biden. Throughout
this election season, President Trump
has continued lying. He has told us thatAlarm bells ringing
DRAWING BOARD MATT DAVIESB Y MATT DAVIES F OR NEWSDAY Letters can be sent to
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