Our mayor is a 1980s drug warrior. I read the recent article on the re-criminalization of drug possession in King County and I noticed that Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell doesn’t believe in harm reduction. He seems to think that de-criminalization means putting a meth vending machine on every corner.

Guess what? The types of people who do meth, crack and heroin do not care about the illegality of the drug. The purpose of the state law was to lessen the catastrophic legal consequences of having a drug addiction. Ferrell seems to be operating under the belief that drugs are bad, therefore their users must be bad.

He is also under delusion that we can vanquish drugs from our society if only we lock up enough people. I would urge the mayor to do some cursory research on the drug war. Four decades on, and the only thing we have managed to do is expand our prison population exponentially while wasting billions of dollars. After all of that, people still want to get high.

Paul Butler,

Federal Way