Published: February 20, 2008 01:32 pm            

War on drugs: A senseless battle | It’s time U.S. experiment with decriminalization – filling up prisons isn’t working

Periodically, we read about some drug bust by the police or prosecutors, arresting so and so with so much street value of marijuana or cocaine or whatever.

Yet we know these raids don’t change drug availability in the long run. Everything is quickly back on the street, to set up further drug force arrests.

We shouldn’t be sending Americans to jail on drug-use charges, or for distributing them. Why do we suppress certain substances when other legal ones are more dangerous?

Tobacco kills 450,000 Americans a year, alcohol about 100,000, with drug deaths trailing at around 10,000.

We tried suppression of alcohol during Prohibition in the 1920s, and decided it was a mistake. All that we did was create a new criminal class of dealers and otherwise respectable customers of speak- easies.

Crime flourished among distributors, endangering the public, as did untested alcohol products.

Alcohol is a problem, and there are plenty of alcoholics, but we decided to treat the fallout from this kind of drug as a medical, not a police, problem.

The same with cigarettes, our worst drug problem. We don’t harry drinkers and smokers or hunt down the CEOs of major corporations that distribute these, as we do drug pushers.

Drugs do destroy lives (but not as many as tobacco and alcohol), but not everyone who uses is at risk to the extent the authorities claim, depending on the drug and the person. Yet even some casual users of marijuana have gone to jail for 20 years and more, with 40,000 to 50,000 people currently in our jails on marijuana charges.

The biggest danger, though, is the violence by gangs, which fight for territory – just as with alcohol prohibition.

Drugs are more expensive, worth distributing because of the premium illegality adds to them. Drugs don’t make users any more violent than alcohol, despite propaganda to the contrary about crack and such.

Addiction does create violence and crime, though. An addict with a $50-a-day habit may need to steal and fence $300 worth of property in order to buy a substance that is expensive only because it is illegal.

The fact is that prohibiting drugs keeps them expensive. Drugs cost little to produce or distribute. They make large profits for pushers because of the “crime tariff” – illegality keeps them a lucrative trade and provides the incentive for major dealers.

Without this, dealers would not find it profitable to push drugs. Growers in Colombia and Afghanistan, both of which have U.S. troops there fighting a “drug war,” would be farming products more socially useful. And it is unlikely that drugs would, at worst, be any more used than now.

A recent Zogby America Poll reported that 99 percent of those questioned said that if heroin or cocaine were legalized they wouldn’t be likely to use them.

Police repression and surveillance add a further problem. We are imprisoning unheard of totals of Americans for drug violations, and giving law enforcement unprecedented police-state powers to snoop and search our homes, cars, school lockers, and to confiscate property without a hearing.

Doors are broken down by heavily armed SWAT squads, too frequently resulting in the killing of innocent bystanders. Minorities are unfairly profiled and punished more extremely than others. And our police are corrupted by the huge amounts of cash involved.

About one-fourth of the 2 million people in prison are there on drug charges. Yet the drug war is endless.

Employers are forcing us to submit to drug testing, even in the most underpaid clerical jobs, and schools use any excuse to test athletes or academic teams.

Drug dogs are becoming routine in schools that have scarcely a demonstrable problem.

Drugs have become the chief reason for searching autos, homes and people. They provide police with far too much power to suspect and watch citizen activities, to diminish our Fourth Amendment rights to be “secure in our persons, houses, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Our drug war is senseless, and a multithreat. One former police commissioner said: “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem.”

We should experiment with decriminalization, simply not prosecuting use and distribution of drugs, as long as this is informal and not organized for legal sales by businesses (as alcohol and cigarettes are).

The vast amount of criminal networks that support and distribute drugs will diminish, most of the profit being gone.

Street drugs, tobacco and alcohol, when they are problems, are medical, not criminal, problems.



Jim Scofield of Richland Township is an associate professor of humanities at Pitt-Johnstown. His views do not necessarily represent those of the university. He is also president of the local Keystone Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

        

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