Other Stuff
Pinched from the LA Times
BEHIND BARS
Let those dopers be
A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth
and other drugs
By Norm Stamper, Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police
Department. He is the author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark
Side of American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005).
SOMETIMES PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop
who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way
they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.
Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of
Seattle's police department.
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But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of
pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms
and LSD.
Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform
me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and
use as a public offense, punishable by fines.
I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten
drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.
Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs
rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible
drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able
to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical,
not a criminal, matter.
As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting
far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been
prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with
one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush —
delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and
cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the
most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison
overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the
doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and
state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000
residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions.
In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure
had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for
murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?
I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential
neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers
and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on
protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and
killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and
drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health
and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous
subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because
we like our drugs — and can't have them without breaking the law.
As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered,
untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.
Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police force — the
Los Angeles Police Department included — that has escaped the problem: cops,
sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting
dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves,
intimidating or murdering witnesses.
In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War
requires "hostiles" — enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate
categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope
fiends, evil-doers, less than human. That grants political license to ban the
exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin
addicts motivated to kick the addiction.
President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to
"coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for
whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.
As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at
both the "drug scene" and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility of
our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive
enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole,
founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
How would "regulated legalization" work? It would: 1) Permit private companies
to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle
drugs.
2) Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or
paleo-conservatives).
3) Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
4) Ban advertising.
5) Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for
drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the
new regulatory agency.
6) Police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch
on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way
excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to
minors, stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's
child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes,
a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing
in order to support their habit or addiction.
Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit
drugs — substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including "bunk,"
i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as
the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene
profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it
would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of
business once and for all.
Combined with treatment, education and other public health programs for drug
abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely
healthier place to live and raise a family.
It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater
police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.
But wouldn't regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point,
drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure — our leaders are too timid
even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new
policy models. My own prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible
increases in abuse.
The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg
booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up.
Whether to find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one's
sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to
mood- and mind-altering substances.
They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's
time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a
public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.