And guess who comes second? Ready? It's Phoenix, Ariz.: 370 recorded
cases in 2008 alone, and who knows how many unrecorded cases.
When you think Phoenix, you may think of retirees and golf courses.
But here's what the late Paul Harvey used to call "the rest of the
story," courtesy of the Web site Stratfor.com:
"Late on the night of June 22, [2008] a residence in Phoenix was
approached by a heavily armed tactical team preparing to serve a
warrant. The members of the team were wearing the typical gear for
members of their profession: black boots, black BDU (battle dress
uniform) pants, Kevlar helmets and Phoenix Police Department (PPD)
raid shirts pulled over their body armour. The team members carried
AR-15 rifles equipped with Aimpoint sights to help them during the
low-light operation and, like most cops on a tactical team, in
addition to their long guns, the members of this team carried
secondary weapons --pistols strapped to their thighs.
David Frum thinks that people just need to stop buying drugs and the
violence associated with drug prohibition will disappear. True, as far
as it goes -- which is to say, not very far at all.
Perhaps Mr. Frum has never acquainted himself with the concept of drug
addiction. Addicts' addictions, coupled with our illogical and
wrongheaded insistence on prohibition, are what create the vast
profits and violence in the drug markets.
I would remind Mr. Frum that "Just Say No" has been around since the
mid-'80s.
It is the policy of criminalizing distribution, not the act of
drinking (or smoking or sniffing) that leads to violence. It is a
shame that there are still some intelligent people who attempt to
confuse the issue by offering solutions that go against everything we
know about human nature.
David Frum would have as much success fighting AIDS with a plea for
sexual abstinence as he would fighting gang violence through drug
abstinence or attempting to put Al Capone out of business with a plea
for alcohol abstinence. Let's end the War On Drugs now and see what
effect that has on the violence.
