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home. Some years later the U.S. media lamented about the many soldiers who became addicted to heroin in Vietnam and continued their addictions after discharge from the service. Actually, only around 5 percent of the soldiers who were regular users of heroin in Vietnam ever returned to the drug once back in the U.S. and most of those who did return to heroin probably experienced as little hope for their future here as they did in Vietnam. Hope is essential if we want to lower the incidence of drug addiction. Hope comes in the guise of available rehabilitation centers that offer a way out of the addictions. Two - thirds of the hard drug addicted people who come begging us for help find there is no room in the inn. Due to the "zero tolerance" attitude fostered by prohibition, judges are giving young folks caught smoking a joint on Friday night the choice of going to rehab or going to jail. Which would you choose? Rehabilitation for someone smoking a joint is much less necessary or reasonable than suggesting I need rehabilitation because I will drink a Jack Daniels after I finish writing this tonight. But because courts are needlessly flooding rehabilitation centers with pot smokers those hard drug addicts must continue to go begging. We are spending so much money locking them up we don't have any left to help them end their addictions. Hope can also rise on the wings of guaranteed minimums. Instead of creating more mandatory minimum sentences, what would happen if we spent some of that saved money to create mandatory minimum education for everyone, mandatory minimum health care; decent housing; jobs for everybody who wanted to work; instead of thinking about minimum wages how about creating mandatory livable wages for everyone? Can you imagine how many fewer addicts we would have in our society? We are the richest country in the world and we make a very specific decision every year to spend $69 billion to destroy lives rather than to help people put their lives back together to alienate rather than ameliorate. Give drug users hope for the future and they have less need to use drugs; less need to use drugs means less drug addicts. And isn't reducing the rate of drug addiction the reason we concocted the war on drugs? The last half of step four is to redirect another part of those saved billions to programs that offer true education about drugs. I'm not talking about the failed policy of teaching D.A.R.E. but real programs that tell the truth about drugs. Does drug education work? You bet it does! Again, we have a perfect example of a policy that did work. In 1965, 42 percent of the adult U.S. population smoked tobacco, the most deadly and addictive drug known to humans. Smoking tobacco kills 435,000 people in the United States every year, while the use of all illicit drugs and the misuse of all prescription drugs combined kills about 17,000 per year. We tend to procrastinate a bit in the U.S. so we didn't really get angry about all the tobacco deaths until the late 1980s. Then we decided we were going to do something to bring down that death rate. But we didn't start a war on tobacco. We didn't start arresting users. We started a very strong drug- education - program aimed at lowering tobacco use. It worked. By 1998 only 24 percent of the adult U.S. population smoked that most dangerous of drugs and the percentage is dropping every year. We took the worst drug problem known to the United States and nearly cut it in half through education. Now, what we at LEAP want to make clear to you folks is that we didn't have to send one person to prison to make it work; we didn't have to destroy a single life to achieve our goal. There are better ways of lowering the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction than this failed policy of a war on drugs. In