Would Baltimore be better off if we called off the war on drugs? Yes. There would almost certainly be less violence here. The downside: Barring a sudden and significant change in the city's economic base that could lead to more jobs for men who have been involved in the illegal narcotics trade, we would still have too many neighborhoods with open-air drug markets. But first things first. Let's deal with the violence. The violence remains Baltimore's most immediate and pressing problem; we are internationally known for it. [continues 813 words]
The great awakening to the social problems wrought by the long war on drugs and America's epoch of mass incarceration now informs almost every discussion of the state of the union and its future. It's kind of shocking. In a time of hyper-partisanship, I hear Americans from a range of ideologies acknowledge a history of institutional prejudices and misguided policies: Treating drug addiction as a crime and not a condition, ignoring the toxic side effects of zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore and other cities, curtailing efforts to rehabilitate inmates (taking corrections out of corrections), treating juvenile offenders as adults. [continues 743 words]
Legalization of Marijuana Might Make Sense, but Deeper Problems Will Persist Have you heard why the war on drugs will never end? It's because of the enormous number of people involved in it: police officers, federal agents, defense attorneys, judges, prosecutors, wardens, prison guards, parole and probation officers. The nation has made such a huge investment in the war on drugs that politicians will keep it going forever, the theory goes. Disrupt it, and we would lose four decades of sunk costs and a significant part of the public-sector economy. [continues 775 words]
Veteran Senate President Could Show His Chops by Pushing for Legalization Turns out, I am glad that Thomas V. Mike Miller gives no hint of retiring from his position as president forever of the Maryland Senate. I know that sounds odd coming from me, but that's how I feel. And I don't even smoke pot. Miller is 71, and he's been in the legislature since '71. He's been president of the Senate so long no one can even remember the man he replaced in that position. (A hint: It was Mickey Steinberg.) [continues 754 words]
If New York City Ruling Is Overturned, Should Baltimore Police Stop and Frisk? Two weeks after a federal judge declared New York City's stop-and-frisk policing unconstitutional is an odd time to ask the question, but here goes: Would New York-style stop-and-frisk policing reduce Baltimore homicides to such a low level that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's goal of growing the city by 10,000 families would start to look plausible, even overly modest? More directly: Would a general stop-and-frisk order have saved Delmonte Thomas' life? As of Friday, he was Baltimore's latest homicide victim - not even 20 years old, gunned down in West Baltimore a few blocks from Coppin State University, on Westwood Avenue, about 10:20 p.m. Thursday. Had Baltimore police been conducting stop-and-frisks of young African-American men in the most violent sections of this sprawling, under-populated city - East, West and Northwest Baltimore - might they have prevented Thomas' death? [continues 742 words]
Voters in Washington and Colorado Say No to the Long, Costly War on Pot Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its accounting of all arrests made by law enforcement agencies across the fruited plain. Cops and federal agents made 12,408,899 arrests in the USA in 2011. No wonder we're known around the world as Incarceration Nation. Let's walk through the breakdown of that big number: *Of the total, 534,704 arrests were for violent crimes, and that number was down about 5 percent from 2010. [continues 790 words]
Walter Cronkite, once the most trusted man in America and a leading figure in broadcast journalism's Mount Rushmore, believed the nation's war on drugs was unwinnable, and he said so on television. A decade after his years with CBS News, Mr. Cronkite succeeded in raising public awareness of the war's futility and provoking a Bill O'Reilly rant. Of course, Mr. Cronkite is famous for having reached the same correct conclusion about the Vietnam War in 1968. All of his obituaries have recalled Mr. Cronkite's special report from Vietnam, his characterization of the war as stalemate and his call for a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson was famously quoted as saying, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Later that year, Mr. Johnson decided not to seek re-election. [continues 623 words]
Walter Cronkite, once the most trusted man in America and a leading figure in broadcast journalism's Mount Rushmore, believed the nation's war on drugs was unwinnable, and he said so on television. A decade after his years with CBS News, Mr. Cronkite succeeded in raising public awareness of the war's futility - an impressive accomplishment. Of course, Mr. Cronkite is famous for having reached the same correct conclusion about the Vietnam War in 1968. All of his obituaries have recalled Mr. Cronkite's special report from Vietnam, his characterization of the war as stalemate and his call for a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson was famously quoted as saying, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Later that year, Mr. Johnson decided not to seek re-election. [continues 605 words]
Friday marks 75 years since repeal of the Volstead Act, which made the manufacture, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. As the anniversary of the end of Prohibition approaches, modern advocates of a similar repeal are calling again for the decriminalization of heroin, cocaine and marijuana - and this time they've come packing a money argument by a Harvard economist. I like money arguments. They are usually a lot more effective than emotional ones or those that exploit stubborn prejudices with the intent of maintaining the status quo. [continues 864 words]
Given the nature and cost of the war on drugs - to the state, to the counties and the cities, to families, to businesses, to neighborhoods, to property values and insurance rates - nothing in the realm of criminal justice screams for more reform than our approach to drug addiction and related criminality. In some way - directly, or through taxation, or in the costs of insurance for homes and motor vehicles - drug addiction touches the lives of every man, woman and child in Maryland. The same is true on a national scale. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain should all have plans for changing the country's current policies in two wars: the one in Iraq and the one on drugs. Both were launched on bad information, both have gone on longer than anticipated, and both have proved far too costly. [continues 797 words]
What case doesn't have to do with drugs?" a District Court judge said, suggesting that all crimes alleged on his daily docket are in some way related to heroin or cocaine addiction. "So much money is wasted because it's not [politically correct] to advocate for drug treatment instead of prison time," said another jurist. "Politicians want to look tough. But almost everyone we see needs treatment - almost every prostitution, possession and trespassing case." No one in the room dismissed either statement as exaggeration. [continues 901 words]
How is everything on the outside?" Willie Turner asks in a letter from Western Maryland. "I will be an ex-offender when I hit the streets in the year of 2012. So now I need your help please. I was told to write to you for an ex-offender job package that will help me get a job once I am out. I do not want to go back to prison. This is my first time and it is hell. "Well, I did do it myself," he added, not saying what "it" was. "But now I know that crime does not pay off no kind-of-way. And the prisons are gotten [sic] worse. If you have questions, please write, or just send me the job package please." [continues 825 words]
Guys needed. Nothing against the women who have called here to offer to be mentors to people climbing out of drug addiction and incarceration, but we need guys, too. And right now there are about five women offering to help for every guy who's picked up the phone or tapped out an e-mail. A lot of guys, including the governor and lieutenant governor of Maryland and the executive of Baltimore County, have expressed support for the efforts to get recovering addicts and other ex-offenders into the working mainstream. (And if Bob Ehrlich, Michael Steele and Jim Smith are interested in quietly, privately doing a little mentoring on the side, they should give me a call.) [continues 820 words]
There's no question that Michael Rabuck should have been institutionalized. People and their property in the city and Baltimore County were safer with him off the street. But this drug-addicted man ended up in a maximum-security prison, the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, where other inmates were eager to give him heroin - and willing to kill him if he did not get his family to pay for it. So his family paid for it. Money his parents could have spent for something worthwhile - say, their son's drug rehabilitation - went instead to associates of Jessup prisoners who kept Rabuck, 29, supplied with the heroin that ultimately killed him. [continues 1036 words]
Thanks to those who try to make life better for all of us by making life better for themselves. There are still too many homicides in Baltimore - though, at 242, not as many as the 259 last year at this time - and too many men and women addicted to heroin and cocaine. But there are people among us trying to get to a better place in their lives, away from the addictions that create the drug market that begets so much of the violence, and out of unemployment, crime and prison. We should praise and thank them for their efforts, against tough odds, because therein lies the progress of a city, a state and a nation - one man, one woman at a time. [continues 1530 words]
DRUG DEALERS: Your mothers have been calling; your grandmothers too. I speak with them almost daily. The conversations are always pleasant, but the subject is always sad, and the subject is always you - the sons and grandsons who hustle drugs on the streets of Baltimore. Frustrated rowhouse matriarchs watch every day as you go out the door to do what the mother of a dealer named Donyell calls "selling that poison." Donyell, by the way, got out of the game a few weeks ago, after a brief story about him appeared in this column. He enrolled in an electrical technology class at a vocational school. When I called him the other night, he was doing his homework. [continues 783 words]
DEAR Baltimore drug dealers: I promise this will be the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard. Here goes: How about taking the summer off to see what it might be like around here without all the shooting and killing? Serious. How about a cease-fire? A little break could save lives, maybe even your own. I know this is crazy, the idea of drug dealers just shutting down the factory for a few months - too much money to be made, and too many customers to serve. And if you back off, even for a little while, some other guy in a long white T-shirt will take your place, and you'll have to find new work. [continues 722 words]
A little news for the many Jamal Lewis fans -- of whom I am one -- who think the Baltimore Ravens great running back is a victim of an overzealous federal prosecutor reaching too far to make a case out of the word "Yeah," uttered during a cellular telephone call four years ago: We're still at war. In case you missed it, the U.S. government has been engaged in a war on drugs since Jamal Lewis was a toddler. Ronald Reagan declared the war in 1982, and Poppy Bush escalated it in 1989. Congress has increased the legal weaponry of federal agencies and prosecutors, and forced mandatory minimum sentencing on judges. We've put oodles of drug offenders, mostly young African-American men like Jamal Lewis in new prisons from sea to shining sea. [continues 782 words]
I LIKE THE "Believe" campaign. I like what it says and what it asks of the Baltimoreans who live here or within drive-in-and-cop-some-dope distance of the city: Get treatment, if you're among the addicted, and get off drugs; get off drugs and the drug dealers start to disappear, and a lot of the violence with them, and Baltimore becomes a better place. Hard to argue against that one. But it's not so simple, of course. The city's overseers can't just launch a campaign on television and billboards and expect to end a debilitating epoch of human failure, dysfunction, illness, poverty and criminality. But I like the intent, and the execution. It's as if we're trying to plant the seeds for 100,000 individual epiphanies, hoping that those who have not yet seen the light will look up and see how their messed-up lives keep Baltimore down. [continues 861 words]
EIGHTH-GRADE girls from William H. Lemmel Middle School took a bus to Annapolis a few weeks ago to testify in support of a school-safety bill they had helped draft. The state delegate, Lisa Gladden, introduced the bill for them in the General Assembly. The girls had the Columbine nightmare and other school shootings in mind, and they weren't necessarily commenting on conditions at Lemmel, one of 21 city schools that received a nice cash award from the state last year for significant improvements in test scores. [continues 801 words]
Here we have inspiration from the battered, broken junkie streets of East Baltimore. Here, at the center of one of the most depressing tales of city life, is Rachel Rogers. Attention must be paid, and the moment savored, by all who yearn for a new day, when the drug addicts come clean and the dealers disappear and the children play without fear on the sidewalks. Here we have the story of Rachel Rogers, who did the right thing. Maybe it was guilt of having spent, at the age of 28, half her life addicted to cocaine and heroin -- of having been a regular customer of the killer-dealers -- that persuaded Rogers to stop lying and to tell the truth about what she saw. [continues 687 words]
A MAN NAMED Robert pulled up next to me on a courthouse bench to tell how he got into a fight with a guy in front of Lexington Market and wound up at Central Booking and, while going through intake, a surly corrections officer threw away Robert's weekend, take-home supply of methadone. I was sympathetic about the methadone. I don't know why anyone would deprive a recovering heroin addict of that medication, even while incarcerated. We wouldn't deprive him of insulin if he were a diabetic, would we? [continues 496 words]
I heard a woman with many years of experience in the law here describe the effort to make Baltimore safer through get-tough reforms of the criminal justice system -- the establishment of a 24-hour court, the employment of aggressive New York-style police tactics -- as "the attempt to bail out a sinking boat with a rotten hull." The rot, in her metaphor, was drug addiction. Cynical maybe. But who can argue with that? At the core of Baltimore's crime problem is heroin and cocaine. [continues 1035 words]
