Sir,



WHILE one appreciates the concerns of Dutch expats Marlene Smits and Koos Schouten in the article (The Sofia Echo, May 21) on zero tolerance in Bulgaria, as I read it I also watched modern day tourism of Bulgaria recede by maybe a third?

As a Brit, I was recording music in Holland in 1968 when soldiers forcibly chopped off the hair of hippies at the Amsterdam railway station. If one ever needed an omen of how not to force prohibition on a population, that was it. The people reacted against such heavy handed tactics and we have what we have today. A nation where Class A abuse is nowhere as bad as in other nations, and where tolerance of the rights of the individual survives above all the politics and rubbish talked about how bad cannabis is for "so many". This is not true, and people have a right to smoke and grow dope in a civilised Europe.

And in fact, if you turn east and head through Turkey and Iran, you come to Afghanistan where there is a war upon drugs that will not be successful. And much of the increase in Afghan hard drugs will flow through Turkey and probably Bulgaria itself. Some of it on behalf of bin Laden and his friends. The Afghan nation could do with obtaining a product that could be sold instead of the poppy? To assist the Afghan nation, nothing could be better than the toleration of its cannabis products.

As Bulgaria needs all the tourism, it can not put people off by draconian policies on anything. I would suggest to Bulgarian parliamentarians that they think more carefully about their draconian policies on soft drugs.

An element of ridicule and a loss of tourism will result from such an old fashioned perspective on such a zero tolerance of cannabis. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office will become vastly overworked trying to get young Brits out of jail, and the word Bulgaria will not become associated with that which is not COOL - meaning the FCO "cool" as well chaps.



And just in case, I would ever want to return to Bulgaria.



- Roger Bunn