Christopher S. Wren's Aug. 20 Chronicle article ("People who
reside with drug abusers face murder perils"), touched on some
good points that correlate higher rates of suicide and homicide
with people who abuse illegal substances.

Unfortunately, in attempting to assign causality, Wren left out
the fact that prohibition and the "war on drugs," is one of the
biggest contributing factors to this increased risk.
Prohibition causes otherwise good people to have to deal with the
dark side of the drug culture by forcing them to buy from
questionable people.

It also causes some abusers to steal and commit other crimes to
support their artificially expensive habits. Without drug
prohibition, a large portion of these homicides might never
occur.

We need to take a more open-minded view of the illegal drug
problem instead of labeling all drug users abusers and criminals.
As we have seen many times before, prohibition is not the answer.

Jeremy Cranfill
Austin