GETTING WISE TO STUPID DRUG LAWS

In 1985, Anthony Papa owned an auto repair and radio business in the
Bronx. He played in a bowling league in Yonkers. One of his team
members asked him one day if he wanted to make a quick $ 500 by
delivering an envelope with cocaine in it. He agreed, and that
mistake, as he calls it, cost Papa 12 years in Sing Sing.

The courier who brought the 4.5 ounces of cocaine to Papa was a police
informant. "The more people he got involved, the less time he got,"
Papa says.

Papa had never before been in trouble with the law. But he was
sentenced under New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws, which
mandate a 15-year-to-life sentence for selling two ounces or more of
cocaine or possessing four ounces or more. No leniency for first-time,
nonviolent offenders. No discretion for judges.

Papa earned two undergraduate degrees in prison and a master's degree
from New York Theological Seminary. He became an artist and gained
renown when his work was exhibited in the Whitney Museum. On Dec. 24,
1996, Papa was one of seven prisoners granted Christmas clemency by
New York Gov. George E. Pataki (R). In the years since then, Papa has
been an advocate for drug law reform. He was one of the featured
speakers this week at a drug law reform rally in Albany, the state
capital.

The Rockefeller drug laws were passed in 1973, and they became models
for legislation in other states and for federal mandatory-sentencing
laws. Such laws are one of the principal reasons that the U.S. prison
population has quadrupled, to 2 million, since 1980.

Since 1982, New York has opened 38 prisons, not counting annexes. All
are in rural, mainly white areas represented by Republican state
senators, according to the Campaign to Repeal the Rockefeller Drug
Laws. The prison system employs nearly 30,000 people in those GOP
Senate districts, where the prisons receive more than $ 1.1 billion a
year for operating expenses.

The prison industry nationally has flourished under
mandatory-sentencing laws, and it has become a powerful political
lobby from New York to California. And, of course, the drug trade
continues to flourish.

But change is in the wind. In his State of the State address, Pataki
promised meaningful reform, although his proposals do not measure up.
He would give more discretion to judges than they have now, but he
would eliminate parole for nonviolent offenses and leave it up to
district attorneys to choose drug treatment programs for diverted
offenders. His plan would provide no additional funding for treatment.
Further, he would upgrade certain marijuana offenses from misdemeanors
to felonies, which is a guaranteed way to boost the number of young
people in prison.

Nevertheless, Pataki's timid venture into drug reform has opened the
way for the Democrat-controlled state Assembly to offer its own
package of reforms without being pummeled by "soft on crime"
accusations. There is broad, bipartisan support emerging in the
Assembly for putting low-level offenders into treatment as opposed to
ineffective, expensive jail cells. And in the Senate, some Republicans
have proposed more money for treatment.

Democratic lawmakers are proposing to spend more than $ 100 million a
year on alternative punishment and treatment for drug offenders, but
their proposal falls far short of restoring full discretion to the
judges. Judges still would have no discretion in cases in which the
offenders have a history of violence or in drug cases involving a minor.

Reform advocates believe that the New York proposals do not go far
enough in shifting the power of sentencing and/or treatment away from
prosecutors and back to judges, which is where such power over a
person's life belongs.

The Assembly plan would double the drug weight at which mandatory
punishments for possession and sale kick in and would reduce the
sentences, said Sharda Sekeran, associate director of public policy
and community outreach at the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation, a leading reform advocate. "We are optimistic there could
be even more changes, considering how unprecedented the support is
from the governor and popular support," Sekeran said.

Other signs of hope are coming from New Mexico, which has shifted the
emphasis in drug cases from law enforcement to public health. New laws
provide for increased availability of naloxone, a medication that
reverses the effect of heroin overdoses; distribution of sterile
syringes through pharmacies to users who inject drugs; restoration of
voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences; and
increased treatment services to women drug offenders.

"A year ago, no one wanted to talk about this issue at all," New
Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R) said in a statement at the end of the
legislative session. "Now both Democrats and Republicans have
committed to common-sense ways to reduce the harms associated with
drug abuse and with our current drug policies." A statewide poll
conducted in early March found widespread support for eliminating
criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana and for
providing treatment to low-level hard-drug users.

Drug reform advocates believe that their cause got a big boost from
the movie "Traffic," which dramatized the folly of the war on drugs
and its huge cost to families. What is becoming clear is that the
public wants no more of the inhumane idiocy that castrated the
judicial system, stole years from the lives of people such as Anthony
Papa and squandered billions on building and maintaining prisons
instead of helping people sort out their lives.

Sometimes it takes years to find out an experiment doesn't work, but
when the public realizes that it is paying for a simple-minded failed
solution to a deeply complex problem, change can come very quickly.