[Seattle Times] Legalizing street drugs an experiment worth considering

Legalizing street drugs an experiment worth considering

WASHINGTON — Can a single city do anything to change drug policies that are delivering terror to our inner-city streets, diverting police, clogging our courts, breaking up families, and making a once-proud America quite literally the incarceration capital of the world?

It's tough because federal and state drug laws, passed by tragically misguided "law-and-order" politicians, are highly intrusive. But Syracuse, N.Y., with a detailed analysis of drug-law impact by outgoing City Auditor Minchin Lewis, followed up by recent City Council hearings, is courageously asking tough questions and searching for alternatives.

Lewis' audit, inspired by Syracuse drug reformer Nicolas Eyle, focused on the Syracuse police department. It discovered that 22 percent of the department's 28,800 arrests in a single year were for drug-related incidents, more than arrests for assaults, disturbances and larcenies combined. Close to 2,000 persons were charged with possession or sale of mar1juana, a substance many claim is no more if not less dangerous than alcohol.

Lewis found that drug arrests were focused in six poor, heavily black inner-city neighborhoods. Police raids in search of evidence were rendering housing units, many government-owned, uninhabitable, and forcing many families to split up because of government rules evicting drug users from public housing.

If Syracuse's drug raid and arrest policy is intended to reduce drug use, the Lewis audit concluded, "it is not achieving its goal. The drug activity is continuing with an ever-increasing spiral of violence."

It's true, Lewis concluded, that the city can't change federal or state drug laws. But it can use its authority over police to reduce the emphasis on drug-related arrests and focus on "harm reduction and prevention efforts rather than absolute prohibition."

City Council member Stephanie Miner said she found citizens typically unconcerned about people using drugs in the confines of their homes, but deeply alarmed by the violence visited on their neighborhoods by drug dealing on the street.

"The main effect of prohibition is to drive the market underground," Jeffrey Miron, a Boston University economist and drug trade expert, told the Syracuse council hearing in October. Like the alcohol trade in the Roaring Twenties, he said, narcotics rendered illegal by federal decree soar in price and have created an opportunity for traffickers and dealers interested in getting a share of the $65-billion-a-year nationwide market.

Jack Cole, the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who served 12 years as an undercover agent for the New Jersey State Police, told the hearing: "There is such an obscene profit motive that an army of police officers will never arrest our way out of it. ... Every arrest is a job opening."

Eyle, head of Syracuse-based ReconsiDer, is meeting again with the City Council to discuss such steps as a resolution asking the federal and state governments to change drug policies that are merely stimulating black-market activity, crime and violence. Instructions to divert Syracuse's police to more important tasks, perhaps lowering the priority of mar1juana arrests in the city, will be considered.

"This is a unique opportunity to change the image of the city, from an undistinguished Rust Belt city to a progressive community actively working to improve itself," Eyle argues. But it's clear his long-term goal is much broader: lifting drug prohibition altogether.

What would that mean? Eyle suggests European-style "harm reduction," recognizing that a segment of the population will always use illegal drugs, so that government's role is to reduce the harm to the user and society. A possible approach: decriminalizing personal possession of drugs, leaving importation and manufacture and sale of significant amounts illegal. There also would be voluntary treatment programs for addicts.

What about total "legalization"? It's a good possibility, says Eyle, if we revise, hand-in-hand, appropriate regulations. The parallels in his argument are intriguing:

"We currently regulate alcohol to ensure its purity and to keep it out of the hands of children. We regulate its points of distribution and hours of sale. We tax it. Do we still have an alcohol problem? You bet. Can kids obtain alcohol? Absolutely."

But, Eyle asks, do we have "a large market in every community selling alcohol to minors? No. Are beer salesmen spraying bullets at each other to settle arguments over shelf space in the supermarket? No."

Legalization, by this reasoning, is OK, and good for us all, if it can successfully eliminate the gruesome waves of crime that surround today's illegal drug market. The "how" could be complex: Does government do the selling, or does the free market? Is advertising permitted? How do rules differ for mar1juana, cocaine, heroin?

But just think what legalization could deliver: radically reduced incentive to crime, far safer streets and cities, fewer shattered families, less-crowded and costly prisons breeding new criminals, more racial equity. In a society that prizes freedom and innovation, I'd call this an experiment we owe ourselves.

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002138380_peirce03.html

 

Whose war is it anyway?
IAN BELL

The "war on drugs" has been going on for most of my life. This is not my definition of a successful sort of war, or of even an intellectually respectable war. As Doctor Russell Newcombe of Liverpool's John Moores University remarked during Drugland (BBC2, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday), if you pursue a policy for four decades "only to show that the problem got worse every year" you might want to trade your policy in for a new one.
Not a bit of it. The drug trade is worth £8bn a year in the United Kingdom alone, and therefore finances a great many otherwise "legitimate" businesses. There are estimated to be five million regular users of narcotics in the country, and no fewer than 20,000 dealers serving London, far less every seaside town, housing scheme and country village on the map. Across Britain, according to Newcombe, half a million people are involved in the sale of drugs. Yet is prohibition discredited?

One aspect of this perennial farce that went almost unremarked in a fine piece of investigative journalism, was the extent to which the crusade against drug use has become a political shibboleth. No politician truly believes that the "war" has achieved anything, yet no-one in government would dare to be "soft", which is to say sensible, in dealing with the issue. The professor spoke, briefly, of the numerous coppers and legislators who admit privately that legalisation may be the only answer. Those same people, he said, return to the approved mantra whenever the cameras are turned on.

It is as though drugs have acquired an aura of unique evil. Ninety five per cent of drug use is classified as "recreational". In other words, it involves little risk of serious addiction or life-threatening overdoses. Equally, the sheer extent of drug use, having quadrupled over the past decade – four million cannabis smokers; one million cocaine users – of itself refutes the notion that lightweight narcotics lead inevitably to crack and heroin. But while we tut over alcohol and frown over tobacco – both proven yet legal killers – the business executive with his line of Charlie or the teenager with his spliff are held to represent a menace to society itself.

Drugland's central purpose was simply to prove how ubiquitous drugs have become. Its first episode tracked the trade in London where, as Newcombe noted, many among the professional middle class use cocaine "like a double espresso, to give themselves a little boost". This is the city of Dial-a-Gramme and door-to-door delivery, where the quality of customer service to leafy suburbs or Chelsea flats can make or break a dealer's business, where coke is "part of the landscape now". It is no different in kind, as it happens, from the trade in Edinburgh or Glasgow, where you can also order marching powder as easily as pizza, but the scale of the metropolitan phenomenon beggars belief.

One counsellor called it an epidemic. That was not clear, however, from Drugland's dispassionate reporting. The people who acquire problems with their habits, it seems, are generally people with problematic personalities, people like Georgie. Clearly, she was a gel from an affluent background. Equally clearly, she took no moral position where the habits of others were concerned. Given an ability to exercise self-restraint, she would still be doing coke. Her moment of truth came, nevertheless, when she realised that she could not stop, that one line of powder would always lead to another, and another still.

One anonymous City type said, blithely: "I take drugs in the same way that people smoke a cigar after a nice meal." Georgie lacked his luck. She was like Paul, another thrusting City executive who had once worked all day, made a lot of money and stuck most of it up his nose. "It's not even a particularly enjoyable experience," he said, with the wistful air of one reformed. He was talking, as it happened, of being alone and "completely paranoid".

For all that, Paul and Georgie were in the minority. In a country obsessed with the feral behaviour of binge drinkers, it should long ago have been obvious that, if drugs constitute a serious problem, five million users would have shown up on the radar long ago. Patently, this isn't the case. "Montana," a small-time dealer making £1500 a week with his door-to-door service, spoke of all the "doctors, lawyers, and City types" who called on his services. He was delivering to "some of the most famous addresses in London". Social breakdown had yet to ensue.

Montana would not accept that he might be the source of anyone's problems. In his trade, there is no need, these days, to push drugs, such is the demand. As Newcombe meanwhile argued, the biggest problem for a dealer is staying away from his own product, not the law or moral dilemmas. So did Montana have qualms? "Bollocks," said the disguised silhouette of a chubby little bloke. "Personal responsibility. Why am I responsible for your ****-ups in your life?"
Drugland's second and third episodes looked a little harder at this embodiment of laissez faire capitalist attitudes. Snorting coke without culpability after a Hampstead dinner party is one thing; crack and smack on the housing schemes of greater Manchester may be quite another. As reporter Sarah O'Connell discovered, the trade loses whatever glamour it might have possessed when poverty, crime and violence combine.

Her report had undoubted force. In such circumstances, indeed, drugs begin to resemble the cheap gin that cut a swathe through the British working class in the nineteenth century. Watching some grim footage you wondered, despite it all, if society isn't looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Would legalised drugs have the same effects on the poor? If the trade is parasitical, feeding on the vulnerable, what would happen if you deprived the criminals of their meal tickets and their motive for turf wars and gun crime?

The final programme, concentrating on the island of Ibiza, seemed to suggest that illegality was itself the real drugs problem. "Sure, we will win this war," said the chief of police with a bright smile and no conviction whatever. The truth revealed by undercover filming, old news to Europe's clubbers, is that the resort is awash with every intoxicant you care to name. The Spanish police are lenient towards possession for personal use; punitive towards dealers; but they rarely catch sight of the big traffickers. Ibiza has become a honey-pot for the continent's recreational users, and horribly tawdry into the bargain. But how would it seem, you wondered, if it was not involved in "this war"?

Whose war is it, in any case? Why does the use and abuse of narcotics propel a moral crusade when humanity's taste for getting out of its collective skull is as old as the species, when hashish is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol, when the failure of prohibition in the eternal business of human desire is beyond argument? Journalism, TV journalism least of all, does not often promote rational ethical debate, but Drugland left you to ponder a final dilemma. Could it be possible that the fruitless war on drugs is actually more damaging to society than any drug ever devised?

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/31038.html

 

Get off of t_j for that stuff. Everyone needs to get sex somehow.

 

Drugs legalisation: 'when, not if'
By Danny Kushlick
Director, Transform Drug Policy Foundation

Danny Kushlick: deregulation spawns violence and corruption
The chances are that most of us will live to see drugs prohibition replaced with a system of regulation and control.

By 2020, if Transform's timeline is right, the criminal market will have been forced to relinquish its control of the drug trade and government regulation will be the norm.

Users will no longer "score" from unregulated dealers.

Instead, they will buy their drugs from specialist pharmacists or licensed retailers.

Or those with a clinical need will obtain them via a prescription.

At its simplest, this is all legalisation, control and regulation will mean - shopping and visiting the doctor.

It is simply a question of transferring the policy paradigm of management to currently illegal drugs.

Cut the drama

One of the problems for those wanting to dramatise a world where currently illegal drugs are legal is the distinct lack of drama involved.

Drug prohibition, in collision with vast numbers of users, creates a situation where drama underlies the entire business.

By abrogating responsibility for the trade through the failure to prohibit it, the market is gifted to organised criminals and unregulated dealers.

The UK drug market is valued at £6.6 bn.

The global market could be as much as £100bn, dwarfed only by the trade in oil and arms.

The consequent deregulation of the market at the international level spawns violence, corruption and political and economic destabilisation - witness Afghanistan, Latin America, the Caribbean and south east Asia.

At a national level, our prisons are twice as full as they would be without prohibition, property crime is doubled, and the cost of prohibition-related crime is £16bn a year (more than the entire Home Office budget).

Your taxes - that the government spends on prohibition - actively make your environment a worse place in which to live.

And you are being duped into supporting a policy that makes drugs more dangerous and more chaotic.

Misery

At a community level prohibition-related street prostitution is endemic, street dealing and turf wars are the norm in larger cities, and prohibition is responsible for more than half of all burglaries, shoplifting, thefts from vehicles and robberies.

Drugs and their misuse are not responsible for this mayhem and misery.

Prohibition is.

(Note that there is no property crime related to fundraising to support a tobacco habit, even though users require up to 60 hits a day and tobacco withdrawal and abstinence are difficult to deal with).

Politics, not evidence, drives the war on drugs

With regard to tobacco, gambling and drinking, both John Reid and Tessa Jowell have clearly stated recently that prohibition doesn't work.

A useful question to ask is: what are the successful commodity prohibitions of the last hundred years?

If you are struggling to remember any successful prohibitions, it may be because there are none.

Politics, not evidence, drives the war on drugs.

You may well ask why we persist with prohibition if there is no evidence that it is effective.

In short, the answer is politics - with a very big "p".

The war is not fought because it is effective; it is fought because it suits politicians to fight it.

US and UK domestic and foreign policy are now intimately intertwined with prohibition.

With regard to domestic policy, prohibition identifies convenient scapegoats and drug-war enemies to rally the electorate around.

Many law enforcement agencies have an investment in prohibition.

Prison builders, police, customs, CIA, MI5, and the FBI are funded to a great extent to fight the war on drugs.

Breaking point?

The drug war is also enormously useful to the US in continuing its adventures in foreign countries in which it has an interest - see Latin America, Afghanistan, the Middle East, south east Asia and the Caribbean.

Global prohibition is enforced through the UN (for which read US). It is supported by more than 150 UN member states, many of whom - including the UK - do not wish to fall foul of the US.

Prohibition will end when the enormously destructive consequences of its continued enforcement become too much for the system to bear, despite its attractive political benefits.

And all the evidence points to the fact that we are approaching that point.

Transform estimates that 15 years maximum is as much more prohibition as we can all stand.

When it goes we will wonder why we did not end it earlier, and our trust in our politicians will take yet another dive.

We can only hope that it happens sooner rather than later and that we can pass on a less melodramatic drug policy to our children.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/if/4152375.stm

 

The War On Drugs: An Injection Of Sanity

By Andy Moon
Jan. 11, 2005

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia when I read the articles by Max Burns regarding the War on Drugs (http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/jan/article048.html and http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/jan/article057.html). I very vividly remember feeling and thinking many of the same things that he wrote about and I recall thinking that we needed to get even tougher on drugs than we already were. In addition, it struck me that I was of that opinion when I was the same age as Mr. Burns. That was during the 1980s, when "Just Say No" was the message the government (through Nancy Reagan) was trying to get out to kids. Since then, this country has ratcheted up the rhetoric, vastly inflated the funding, and drastically increased the number of people incarcerated for drugs to no avail.

I further agree with Mr. Burns that the single biggest problem with regards to drug use and abuse in our society is the easy access that our young people have to drugs. In fact, since Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs," over half of our young people have used illegal drugs before they leave high school in every single year since statistics have been collected. This is a massive problem, particularly when you consider that one of the major risk factors for problem drug use and addiction is age of first use. The younger you are when you first use drugs, the more likely you are to experience problem use later in life. Despite the funding increases, militarization of our police force, and ever more draconian laws, we have seen no drop in overall teen drug use and any "gains" we have made on some drugs (LSD, heroin) have been more than offset by increased usage of other drugs (MDMA, inhalants).

During my time as a drug abuse counselor, I have seen thousands of people who have experienced problem usage and addiction. I have helped many of those people to recover from their addictions and go on to live happy, productive lives. During that time I also found that education, particularly open, completely honest education about the effects of drugs, is one of the other things that is positively correlated with avoiding problem drug use. It is amazing how many people (especially young people) are not educated in the least about drugs and parents' level of ignorance about drugs is stupifying. It is incredible how much good simple education does, but I have seen it over and over again in the various treatment facilities I have worked in. People who are educated as to the effects and risks of drugs will choose to avoid the more dangerous ones. This is another area in which Mr. Burns and I are in complete agreement.

Unfortunately, the strategy that Mr. Burns espouses for dealing with drug use and abuse in our society strikes me as quite naive. I think that the fact that I am exactly double his age has given me some perspective that, being in his early adulthood, he simply does not have. In his first article, it seems to me that he is encouraging people to turn in all of the drug users they know. This seems to me to be way too much like a Gestapo tactic. It is estimated that over thirty million people in this country use illegal drugs once a year or more and incarcerating even half of those people would be a Herculean task, but would probably be necessary to drastically affect the number of people using drugs. Even if we were to jail that many, we have found it impossible to keep drugs out of our jails and prisons, which are supposed to be the most secure environments we can create. If we cannot even keep drugs out of our prisons, how are we realistically supposed to keep them off of the streets in a free society?

This is not to say that we cannot keep drugs out of the hands of our children, which in my opinion should be the single biggest consideration when it comes to our drug policy. We have been able to limit our young people's access to other substances and we could use that model for our drug policy. In the '90s, the "We Card" program started and since its inception, we have seen teen use of alcohol and tobacco drop dramatically. In fact, in a recent study, teens report that it is easier to access illegal drugs than alcohol. We are making headway with tobacco and alcohol because we have a regulated market where only legitimate businesses are allowed to sell those substances. We could enjoy more success keeping currently illegal drugs from our young people if we set up a strong regulatory scheme and treat some drugs more or less like we do alcohol (albeit with stronger controls).

Such a drug policy, centered around education and healthcare, could do far more to reduce the harms created by drug use and abuse than the prohibitionist approach we have now. In addition, all of the harms directly created by prohibition (violence, billions of dollars flowing to criminals and terrorists, tens of billions per year in funding, etc.) would begin to subside virtually overnight. Tax receipts would easily be able to fund treatment centers for people who experience problem usage, education programs for kids, and a licensing system for adults. Sales data could be combed by a computer to identify probable cases of abuse so that healthcare professionals can be alerted and the buyer can have treatment options presented to them. Overdose and cross reaction deaths would plummet as a result of the combination of clearly labeled, pure substances and education. Gangs, the Mafia, and other criminal organizations would lose $50 to $100 billion per year in funding. The violence created by our prohibitionist approach would ebb and the police would no longer be at war with many of the neighborhoods they are charged with protecting. The list of benefits to a regulated system is long and persuasive, but the number one benefit would be reducing the access that our young people have to some of the more dangerous substances known to man.

http://www.useless-knowledge.com/politics/index.html

 

Many of the founding fathers including George Washington also grew hemp. Hemp paper was used on all of the drafts of the Declaration of Independence and most of the first American flags were made out of hemp. There is very little evidence that they smoked the hemp flowers, but most of them smoked tobacco so it wouldn't surprise me in the least.