SLOWLY UNRAVELING

Our Chief Justice is a prescient person. In her "State of the
Judiciary" address before the South Carolina General Assembly
yesterday, she said our criminal justice system is "slowly
unraveling." Prisons are burgeoning. Backlogs are exploding. She's
right-our system is unraveling. And the thread that broke first and
hangs loosest and longest, in my opinion, is the one called "drugs."

Drugs are everywhere. After a speech this week, a businesswoman asked
me what percentage of my work is drug related. "Conservatively," I
answered, "about 90 percent." To be sure, only about one-fourth of my
backlog is bona fide drug cases: possession, possession with intent
to distribute, distribution, and trafficking. But drug-related?
Almost everything is drug-related.

Jeffrey Motts missed death row by a vote or two. He wrote yesterday
from prison. He's there for killing two relatives for money. To
invest? To buy a book? No, he did it for a thirty-minute high. He did
it for crack cocaine. Two lives for a rock of crack cocaine.

Burglaries. Larcenies. Shoplifting. They all clog our docket. Many,
if not most, are drug related. Criminal domestic violence. Felony
DUI. Drugs are somewhere at the root of most crimes. FBI agent Jim
Lannaman theorized that 80 percent of the bank robberies in our area
are drug related. I disagreed. It's more like 90 percent.

I got a letter this morning from my best friend from elementary
school. We sang Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" together in a
6th-grade talent show. We lost, and then we lost touch through high
school. He wrote from state prison. You guessed it-drugs. He wants
"his old buddy" to help him sing another verse of freedom. Can't help
you, Victor. Mandatory minimums are rather inflexible.

We've been fighting a war on drugs for more than 20 years. Casualties
are everywhere. In prisons. In foster homes. On government subsidy.
In graveyards. On trial dockets. In state budgets. Hanging on the
wall in the DEA office in Greenville, S.C. is my most poignant
reminder of this war. It's a picture of all the DEA agents killed in
the line of duty across the world. I saw it last year preparing for a
cocaine conspiracy trial. There was Enrique Camarena. His death
spawned a movie that first introduced me to the drug war 11 years
ago. I bet cocaine is cheaper and more readily available now than it
was when the Mexican government aided and abetted Camarena's death.
Wonder what he would think about NAFTA.

Another meeting in Cherokee County Friday afternoon on yet another
murder involving drugs. Some parents call about their kid being
picked up with marijuana-the selling kind, not the smoking kind. They
think he deserves a third chance. Why not, I ask my deputy solicitor
facetiously. What difference does it make? If someone wants to buy
marijuana tomorrow they'll get it whether this person is in jail or
not. So too with crack cocaine and LSD and heroin.

At the U.S. Attorney's Office I prosecuted over 300 drug dealers. The
sentences ranged from probation to life without parole. The local
media was so bored with drug cases that it virtually took life
without parole to generate interest. I didn't even begin to make a
dent in the availability of drugs.

I used to watch William F. Buckley Jr. debate Michael Kinsley-and
cheer for Buckley, of course. That is, until he advocated the
decriminalization of drugs. I can't bring myself to wave the white
flag in this war-despite the casualties. I'm afraid if we pull this
thread the whole fabric will come unraveled.

Our legislature may well decide to build new courts and add judges.
Later they'll have to build more prisons. And then do it all again.
It's easier than solving the problem of drugs. We need a larger plan
in our culture and in our court systems. Larger than
decriminalization. Larger than the biggest prison we can build.
Before we effectively teach our children that drugs are illegal,
maybe we should convince ourselves they're wrong.