Thursday, August 16, 2007

Although it is encouraging that the FBI is reducing its discrimination against job applicants who have used marijuana ["FBI Bows to Modern Realities, Eases Rules on Past Drug Use," news story, Aug. 7], the change highlights the hypocrisy in the war on drugs. While the federal government is allowing college-educated people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts to apply to the nation's top law enforcement agency, it is denying school loans, food stamps and public housing to hundreds of thousands of lower-income people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts. And there's the racial divide. Law enforcement routinely targets black communities for drug arrests, even though blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates.

While white drug users go on to work at the FBI, blacks go to jail.

BILL PIPER

Director of National Affairs

Drug Policy Alliance

Washington