Pubdate: Sun, 12 Oct 2014
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2014 The Sacramento Bee
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/0n4cG7L1
Website: http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: Dan Morain
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?159 (Drug Courts)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

GEORGE SOROS OUGHT TO FIX THE DRUG INITIATIVE MESS HE MADE IN 2000

To no one's surprise, Alisa Marie McFarlin failed to show up in Yolo
County court last week.

McFarlin, 33, is a methamphetamine user who has a tattoo on her chest
that reads "Johnny's Girl" and often is homeless, wandering the
streets of Sacramento and West Sacramento.

She has been passing through the courthouse doors since December 2012,
when she was arrested at the Cache Creek casino for possession of
meth. She was arrested in June 2013 in Davis for loitering and
possessing drug paraphernalia, and again on the 4th of July, 2013, in
West Sac for meth.

A note in her criminal case file reads: "Client screened and given
opportunity to engage in treatment despite having several past
treatment episodes in which client did not attend regularly and
subsequently discharged due to continued use and instability."

McFarlin is caught up in the non-system created by Proposition 36, an
initiative approved 14 years ago. Under Proposition 36, drug users are
arrested once, twice, three times and more. They spend little time in
county jail and no time in state prison. Worse, they are not compelled
to confront their addiction.

The initiative promised voters that drug users would be treated. Ask
anyone involved  judges, probation officers and addicts  and you'll
hear that Proposition 36 is a lie.

"The idea of a Proposition 36 drug court is a fallacy," Yolo Superior
Court Judge David Rosenberg said.

In June, after McFarlin failed to show up for what passed as
Proposition 36 treatment and tested dirty for meth and marijuana,
Rosenberg ordered her arrested and jailed.

Authorities caught up with McFarlin last month, but she didn't stay in
jail long. Yolo County jailers freed her Sept. 28 because of
overcrowding, and told her to return to court for a hearing on
Tuesday. When her name was called in court, there was silence.
Rosenberg issued a new warrant for her arrest. This time, he added the
condition that she be held without bail  if she's found.

Not to lay the sins of parents on their offspring, but Proposition 36
of 2000 and Proposition 47 on the Nov. 4 ballot share certain facial
features. Proposition 47 would reduce penalties for drug possession
and property crimes to misdemeanors, instead of allowing prosecutors
the discretion they have now to charge them as misdemeanors or felonies.

Backers of Proposition 47 say it is far more tightly written than 36.
But then as now, there's a common sugar daddy, New York billionaire
George Soros, probably the world's richest advocate of drug
legalization.

Soros' Open Society Policy Center donated $1.2 million to the "Yes on
47" campaign. He gave $1 million to the Proposition 36 effort in 2000.

In 2000, the argument in the voter handbook in favor of Proposition 36
read: "California prisons are overcrowded. We don't want violent
criminals to be released early to make room for nonviolent drug users.
We must keep violent criminals behind bars and try a different
approach with nonviolent drug users."

The argument for Propositon 47: "Stops wasting prison space on petty
crimes and focuses law enforcement resources on violent and serious
crime by changing low-level nonviolent crimes such as simple drug
possession and petty theft from felonies to misdemeanors."

In 2000 and in 2014, the Legislative Analyst predicted hundreds of
millions in savings. Back then, legislators were supposed to put the
money back into treatment, but soon found better uses for the money.
There's a similar promise with 47.

The biggest problems with Propositions 36 and 47 is that they're
initiatives. Virtually all initiatives are flawed. But initiatives can
be amended in significant ways only by new initiatives.

"I'll be blunt. It is a failure," Lee Seale, Sacramento County's chief
probation officer, said of Proposition 36.

Seale, Rosenberg and other experts point to programs that work, like
actual drug courts. In drug courts, judges directly supervise
defendants and require treatment, while probation officers closely
monitor progress. If the addicts slip, judges can immediately send
them to jail. Proposition 36 provides no treatment, no drug testing
and no threat of jail.

Consultant Jim Gonzalez helped run the "Yes on 36" campaign: "It sure
worked when it had funding," he said. Any failures "are not the fault
of the public policy. It is the fault of the Legislature for not
making drug policy a priority."

Gonzalez pointed to studies, rather dated, suggesting Proposition 36
is a success, and to the most famous person to benefit from it, actor
Robert Downey Jr. Downey pleaded no contest to charges of possession
of cocaine in 2001, and avoided prison, thanks to Proposition 36. He
had plenty going for him and could pay for treatment.

Cynthia Jentes is far more typical of the people who pass through the
Proposition 36 non-system. She smoked marijuana for the first time
when she was 10, dropped out of Sacramento High School in the 9th
grade and was using crack by 17.

By her 20s, she was in Nevada, plying the oldest trade at Mustang
Ranch. She was arrested for the first time at 28 in Reno for passing
bad checks to feed her addiction, made her way back to Sacramento, and
kept using and getting busted.

Arrested again in February 2013, she was shuffled into the
dysfunctional Proposition 36 system, kept using and was arrested again
for meth in Oak Park in May 2013.

"Prop. 36 is something we do just, I hate to say it, but we do it to
beat the system," Jentes told me.

Her life didn't start changing until an arrest in September 2013.
Sacramento County Judge Laurel D. White, seeing repeated Proposition
36 failures, ordered her into a very different system, drug court.

Probation officers met her at the jail and delivered her to intensive
treatment that lasted for 10 months. When we spoke the other day, she
had been clean for a year. She was living in a duplex off Power Inn
Road and going to school. Who knows what will happen to McFarlin?

"I hope they find her before she harms herself," Rosenberg told
me.

Soros, the true believer in drug legalization, donated $990,000 for
the marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot in Oregon, and
helped fund the initiative that legalized marijuana in Washington
state two years ago. And there is the "Yes on 47" campaign.

Being a billionaire, Soros can afford not to care what other people
think. But maybe instead of funding new initiatives to change the
world in his image, he ought to spend some of his money to clean up
the mess he made with Proposition 36. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard