Pubdate: Sat, 03 Apr 2004
Source: Listener, The (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2004 Wilson & Horton
Contact:  http://www.listener.co.nz/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/241
Author: Bruce Ansley
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?233 (LEAP)

OUT ON THE STREETS

Growing violence and drug use will be the result of New Zealand's tough new 
stance on illegal drugs, says a former American judge, because this is 
exactly what happened when the US took the same approach.

Judging it time for New Zealand to glimpse the abyss, Eleanor Schockett is 
framing a dismal future for life under existing drug laws.

"New Zealand does not want to go where the United States has gone," says 
the former Florida judge. Next week, she is going to be telling this 
country that, drug-wise, the US is deeply mired in flawed policies 
reflected in New Zealand's tough new stance. The war on drugs in the US, 
she alleges, has simply led to more crime and violence.

Schockett knows quite a lot about both. She quit the bench last year.

Now she has joined an organisation of ex-cops, former prosecutors and 
judges from the US, Canada and Britain called Law Enforcement Against 
Prohibition (LEAP). They argue that using the criminal law to fight drugs, 
like the prohibition on alcohol before it, produces gang wars and random 
violence without reducing drug use. They say the only beneficiaries are 
drug bosses presiding over an illicit trade, that present drug laws have 
choked the court system and jammed the jails. More than 2.2 million people 
are in US jails and each year another 1.6m are arrested for non-violent 
drug offences. The US has five percent of the world's population and 25 
percent of the world's prisoners. Yet, drugs are cheaper, more potent and 
easier to get than they were 30 years ago. Meanwhile, violence is growing.

Schockett recognises an indictment when she sees one. She will be speaking 
to public meetings and Rotary clubs from April 6 in a visit organised by 
the Coalition for Cannabis Law Reform and the MildGreens, urging New 
Zealand not to follow the US down the tough drug road. Instead, she wants a 
dialogue with addicts, who should be able to get government help, use drugs 
in a clean and sterile environment, get counselling if they want it. And 
when they come down from a high and are safe on the streets, they should be 
free to go. Non-violent drug users should have their slates wiped clean.

"Slowly but surely we can wean them off. I'd say that in less than a year 
you could kill the market for illegal drugs."

Arguing that problems are related to prohibition rather than drugs 
themselves will seem a risky business to alarmed New Zealand audiences.

Tens of thousands of kids, according to Customs figures, hook into Ecstasy 
as a routine lifestyle drug, but it remains a class B drug carrying heavy 
penalties. When William Bell guns down three people in the Panmure RSA, or 
Steven Williams kills his six-year-old stepdaughter Coral-Ellen Burrows, or 
Ese Junior Falealii kills a bank teller and a pizza worker, all of them 
after bingeing on pure methamphetamine, or P, it may not be the best time 
for visiting liberals preaching tolerance.

Wait, says Schockett. "I'm not a wide-eyed liberal. I've got solid 
middle-class values." That is virtually a job qualification in Florida, 
Governor Jeb Bush territory, Jeb being pivotal in manipulating the vote to 
have his brother George W elected President.

Schockett brushed with Jeb Bush during the 2000 election for governor. As a 
Miami-Dade County circuit court judge, she delivered a decision sidelining 
a posse of hardline Republican vote-watchers opposed to the Democratic 
candidate and anxious to operate in Florida's malleable voting system. Bush 
was elected anyway.

In cyberspace, she is famous for a case on Internet anonymity and 
"cybersmearing". Most public companies in the US, and many in New Zealand, 
too, are the subject of Internet message boards. Concealing their 
identities with screen names (Schockett's favourite in this case was 
"justthefactsjack"), investors gossip about company practices, prospects 
and management.

In this action, a Fort Lauderdale shipping company executive was accused on 
a message board of being under investigation by the US Securities and 
Exchange Commission, engaging in illegal accounting practices and fraud. He 
was forced to resign.

He went to court to force Yahoo and America Online to reveal the names of 
his accusers. The defence, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, 
argued that this was often the only way of revealing corporate misdeeds and 
predicted the end of uninhibited speech on the Internet.

But Schockett, in a ground-breaking decision that has survived appeal, 
ruled that an anonymous Internet critic was not entitled to any special 
privileges. "Someone badmouthed this man online, to the whole world," she says.

"It wasn't a freedom of speech issue, it was a responsibility for speech 
issue. Do you have the right to say anything you want on a worldwide 
billboard and not be held accountable? Heaven knows there's enough lying on 
the Internet as it is now."

Schockett's message on drugs will clash with New Zealand Government policy. 
Far from being concerned about longer sentences and filling prisons, 
Justice Minister Phil Goff seems proud of it.

Last month, Goff announced that the government's tougher sentencing and 
parole laws would see New Zealand's prison population rise by 20 percent 
over the next seven years. Supported, he claimed, by public opinion, four 
new prisons were under way to accommodate, among others, more convictions 
resulting from a tougher drug stance. Police, however, believe their war 
against drugs is working, citing only a slight increase in drug offences, 
including P, last year.

"Police self-interest gets in the way of common sense," Schockett argues. 
"They maintain the circular argument that drugs are bad therefore illegal, 
but they fail to account for the harms resulting from the enforcement of 
policy.

"The view that drug use is a health issue is held across a broad sample of 
current and former police officers, but the 'tough on drugs' line in the 
sand prevails.

"The drug war has created crime," she says. "[Richard] Nixon put the drug 
war on the front-burner and ever since we've had a drug war, we have 
created a problem. We didn't have that many drug dealers and users in this 
country until 1968, when we made it more difficult for people to get drugs 
and the prices went up. Now the prices are way down. Most kids in schools 
will tell you it's easier for them to buy marijuana and cocaine than it is 
to buy alcohol and tobacco.

"You've got violence in the street, little old ladies being hit over the 
head because someone needs $5 for a cocaine rock.

"How do you deal with it? How do you get the drug dealers out of business?

"First of all, you take away their market and not make a value judgment 
about whether people should or should not use certain drugs. It's demand 
that drives supply and not the other way round. If you ban something, you 
cannot control or regulate it.

"The drug war has done other things. It has undermined the judicial system, 
because it can't handle what it's supposed to. If half of judicial time is 
taken up with issues related to criminal law, it's undermining the civil 
system, because criminal cases have to be filed first.

"I had a caseload of 1500 at a time. Most of them were garbage cases. A 
large number of them involved drugs.

"We're not trying serious white-collar crime cases, because we're too busy 
fighting the drug war. But we're not fighting the drug war. We're fighting 
our own citizens.

"It costs $17,000 to keep someone in prison in Florida for a year. That's 
more than it costs to send them to the University of Florida. We're not 
salvaging people, we're destroying them."

But people who feel under threat demand ever more repressive laws?

"That's the problem. People are making money on this. Police departments 
get lots and lots of money to fight drugs, and every time they tell you we 
hauled in two tonnes of cocaine in a shipment, they will also tell you that 
they only block about 10-20 percent of what's being shipped in. [New 
Zealand Customs estimate that they get only 15 percent of, say, the Ecstasy 
bound for the street.]

"So the bigger their hauls, the more they acknowledge is getting in."

Schockett says she practised what she preaches.

"Every opportunity where I could get someone into a drug programme or 
treatment, as opposed to sending them to jail, I would. These are long-term 
mental health problems. They don't need to be in jail.

"In Iraq, Bush created a fear, then lied about it.

"The drug war is the same thing. It is founded on a bunch of lies.

"Do I think kids should smoke pot? No. I don't think they should smoke 
tobacco. Should people snort heroin? No.

"I don't have much sympathy with people who go out and get drunk. I'm as 
square as they come. But it's not something you should be putting people in 
jail for.

"There's another solution. We didn't have a drug problem until we passed 
the laws and created it."

The message for New Zealand? Don't fall into the same trap.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom