Just Following the Leader

Dean’s article carries a central irony lost on your staff writer. A review of Sen. John Kerry’s Subcommittee Report on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (available at no charge from the U.S. Senate) reveals the extent to which North’s anti-leftist crusade beyond our borders cost the American people an unsurpassed volume of cocaine deluging our streets, with the oft-cited result of cocaine prices dropping so dramatically during the Reagan-Bush-North years that it went from being a vice of the rich to the scourge of the poor.

How refreshing it would be for a reporter to put point blank to North the question that so many of us would have liked asked at either his trial or the congressional hearings: If Marxism dooms Nicaragua’s economy to failure, why contaminate our streets with cocaine trying to overthrow the Sandinistas?

MITCH RITTER, Berkeley