In Milton Friedman’s, “An open letter to Bill Bennett” he uses many rhetorical strategies to argue his point and persuade Bill Bennett that the ways he is trying to solve the drug crisis are doing the very opposite. He starts off the letter with a very direct quote that begins to argue his point. I think he uses this quote to astonish his reader from the start and help Bennett realize that he is not just arguing his point, but rather explaining why Bennett and Bush are, in his eyes, wrong. He then continues to list all the things that they are doing which Friedman believes aren’t helping. He says “… and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse.”  Throughout Friedman’s letter he uses ethos, pathos and logos to argue his point and convince Bennett that there are much less destructive ways to solve the drug-war than what he is enforcing.

Friedman uses ethos to show us that he is credible and that we should trust him because he knows what he is talking about. A prime example of when he uses ethos to convince his audience, is when he says “I append excerpts from a column that I wrote in 1972 on ‘Prohibition and Drugs.'” By putting this into his letter, the audience now has a reason to trust him because he has experience and is credible.

Another rhetorical strategy that Friedman uses in his letter is Pathos, which is a way to appeal to one’s emotion. This is one of Friedman’s main strategies to persuade Bennett. “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us.” Friedman says this to touch the emotional side of his reader and help them see how sad the effects of drugs have on people. He say “you are not mistaken” to show Bennett that he understands his point and tell him that they have the same hopes in the end. Friedman then switches from agreeing with Bennett to saying “Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore.” By this he means that although he understand his vision, his path to get their is evil and destructing society and innocent victims. Friedman continuously draws out the readers emotions in his letter. With such a deep subject on drugs and the way drugs affect individuals in our society, Friedman’s letter would be far less persuasive and productive if he did not use pathos. Another great example of how Friedman plays with our emotions is when he says, “The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the U.S.” This clearly is a heartbreaking truth and by putting this in his letter he is able to pull his reader one step closer to agreeing with himself. In the last paragraph of his letter Friedman says, “This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as l am by the prospect of turn- ing the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with causal drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down un- identified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.” This is a great way for Friedman to finish out his letter because it leaves Bennett unable to disagree with Friedman that this is no where close to where they want to see the U.S. in the future.

Friedman also incorporates logos into his letter as an attempt to use logic to persuade Bennett to stop trying to prohibit drugs and rather solve the drug-war in a different way. Friedman brings up the fact that more deaths are caused by alcohol and tobacco than by drugs. He then logically explains a better way to save lives that are being lost do to drugs by saying “… even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.” This forces Bennett to see the outcomes of his plans and be able to compare it to that of Friedman’s vision. Friedman’s letter to Bennett is a great example of the many ways that someone can use rhetorical strategies such as ethos, pathos, logos and more to persuade the reader.