Pubdate: Thu, 27 Apr 2006
Source: News Journal (DE)
Copyright: 2006 The News Journal
Contact: http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/opinion/index.html
Website: http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/822
Author: George Jurgensen
Note: George Jurgensen is state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Delaware.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS CREATED MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT HAS SOLVED

I applaud former prosecutor Peter Letang's call for a re-examination 
of the drug war and welcome him to the cause. He is not the first. 
Many other prosecutors, judges, and, most significantly, members of 
law enforcement who conduct the war out on the streets have also come 
forward, risking their careers and reputations. They have come 
together to form an organization to end drug prohibition. The 
organization is known as LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with a decorated member of the 
U.S. Marshal Service, Matthew Fogg. Mr. Fogg began as a marshall in 
1978 and he has worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration and 
other areas of the Department of Justice on numerous drug 
interdiction efforts, including SWAT teams, and participated in the 
arrests of hundreds of drug dealers and drug users.

Mr. Fogg echoes Mr. Letang, observing that despite the massive number 
of arrests, the drug trade, drug availability and drug usage have not 
declined, and far too many lives have been lost or damaged and more 
are drawn into peril each day.

Advertisement

He also points out selective enforcement tactics that tend to target 
lower income neighborhoods and dealers (why do they target East 
Wilmington but not Greenville, Centreville, don't those people do 
drugs?) and the disparate effect the drug war has had in the black 
community, but he gives better voice than I on those issues.

It's now nearly 35 years since President Nixon escalated drug 
prohibition in first declaring the war on drugs and later forming the 
DEA. The drug war has produced the thriving and violent illegal 
market that exists today while drug addiction remains about 1.3 
percent, as it has since 1914, when this prohibition began.

Vast profits in the illegal market draw drug dealers to the trade.

Because they operate illegally, they bear no responsibility for the 
"products" they offer, offer no product labeling, and they enhance 
purity or chemically alter to make transportation easier and 
weight-based penalties easier to avoid. Vast profit leads them to 
aggressively market their wares at street corners, in drug-free 
zones, at workplaces, and in the shadows of even our newest suburban 
plazas, as I recently observed outside Newark.

The dealers, ruthless and fearless, move their wares and defend their 
turf. Should they be removed by police, others spring up to capture 
the profit. Should they be too successful, a dispute with would-be 
competition is sure to result. Denied legal avenues to settle 
disputes, drug dealers, as participants in illegal markets, settle 
disputes violently on the streets.

Today, well over a million more Americans are in prison or jail than 
in 1972 and incarceration rates per capita have increased more than 
fivefold. Hundreds of thousands more have died in the "drug war," and 
either way the cost to lives is ruinous.

Direct financial costs to taxpayers have soared, with increased 
prison population the reflection of increased interdiction efforts. 
Here in Delaware, prison facilities such as the former Gander Hill in 
Wilmington, now renamed the Young Correctional Facility, and the 
high-security prison in Smyrna are overflowing with prisoners and 
hazardous to both prisoners and employees, despite a four-year, $180 
million expansion completed in 2000 and further expansions since. 
These prisons overflow despite the fact that prison capacity has been 
increased at a rate that far exceeds population growth and despite 
the fact that both violent and property-crime-related prisoners are 
given early release so that drug users and dealers can fulfill their 
minimum mandatory sentences.

There are many other arguments to end the drug war. There is the 
corrupting influence on the police, whose departments and governments 
seek financial gain through property seizures even when no one is 
charged with a crime (so the cycle is not broken) and sporadic 
reports of the planting of evidence. There is the fact that the 
government, in declaring that it will control what over 280 million 
people may ingest at any time of any day, has disenfranchised people 
from making choices in their own lives while it has also debased the 
emphasis of the choice each of us faces from being based on the 
natural consequences of drug use on one's life and ambition to simply 
whether one will be caught.

Meanwhile, cancer patients, those with degenerative nerve disorders 
like ALS, and AIDS patients are denied cost effective and natural 
treatment that can improve appetite or relieve pain.

And there are the effects on foreign nations and foreign policy, 
where Colombia is largely controlled by violent drug kingpins because 
of the massive profits involved while at the same time we intervene 
with and condemn peaceful practices in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, 
where locals have for centuries chewed unprocessed coca leaves and 
drunk coca tea to stave off hunger or boost energy with little 
harmful effect. Prohibition can leave even the most casual user or 
one-time experimenter scarred for life with a criminal record that 
will destroy opportunity for a lifetime or unable to seek help or 
treatment for fear of facing the risk of arrest.

The drug war reflects a political arrogance that the government can 
solve bad habits by passing a law and sending police out on the 
streets to arrest the way to an improved society.

The collateral damage of this arrogance is clear. It is time to end 
the drug war, to seek education, treatment, product labeling and 
testing, and a more orderly yet much less profitable market for the 
measure of drug usage, which society cannot stem or prevent, with or 
without force.

The transition will be difficult as people adjust to taking more 
personal responsibility, just as the transition from a centrally 
planned economy did not go smoothly in Russia or Eastern Europe, but 
the end result is a more just, more peaceful and more prosperous 
society. Of course there will be those that use drugs to their 
demise, there always was and there is today. At least there will not 
be vast profits for dealers and the associated violence and property 
crime or the other side effects of the drug war.

Logic compels that we end the drug war and with all my heart and soul 
I believe we must.

George Jurgensen is state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Delaware.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman