Your editorial on the well known conflict of interest between Hoosier cops and underage drinkers was neither helpful nor thoughtful.
It is a mistake to think law enforcement is intended to reduce "urges" or "cravings," particularly the well known, but hardly irrepressible urge not only to drink underage, but to do so to flagrant excess in the largest and noisiest groups possible.
Law enforcement can only increase the costs of acting on urges to break the law. It can only do that if sanctions are swift and sure and imposed without regard to law breakers' preferences for a clean, well lit, and safe path on which to walk home.
Underage drinkers would be safest, by your logic, if rectors placed free kegs in every section every Thursday at 5 p.m., and kept them coming until "closing" late Saturdays.
Surely you owe your peers some deeper thought on this topic.
A. Edward Manier
professor
Department of philosophy
Sept. 8
