In regards to the tragic front page article in the April 19 edition (“Kingfisher mother could get parole”), the travesty that is the American justice system becomes as obviously demented as a sick person on oxygen asking for a cigarette outside the hospital. The fact that nonprofit community organizations had to rally around this injustice and bring the Draconian sentence to a public arena exemplifies why something (anything) must be done with the way this country processes nonviolent drug offenders and how we perceive our nation’s losing battle with drugs.

The intent of this letter is not to advocate or educate the readers about the harmlessness of marijuana, or the fact that no death or addiction can be directly traced to the plant. The purpose is a call to arms over the ineptitude of our government to bring down drug usage rates in the 30 years of its useless war on drugs.

Harsh, incomprehensible prison sentences have not stifled the market, but prisoners in “The Land of the Free” have grown nearly exponentially since President Ronald Reagan declared drugs “Public Enemy No. 1.”

As a nation facing inevitable drastic budgetary cuts, the first to go should be prisons (nonviolent drug offenders).

We must look for immediate tax revenues and not expenditures, save money and create a taxable market at the same time. Undoing policies that allowed for a black market to thrive will assuredly decrease the violent crime heavily associated with the practice, and will allow for the end of a terrible policy.