'PROHIBITION' FORCES POLICE TO WASTE RESOURCES

I commend the work of all the agencies involved in the March 26 drug
bust in Erie and Niagara counties. I'm a retired police captain from
the Town of Tonawanda, and I understand the difficulty of the job
they have to do. But I do have one question: Why do we put our police
officers in this position?

Look at the manpower used in this drug bust. The agencies used 100
officers to track down 36 suspects. They also say that at 4 a.m. they
used 300 officers, so that's using 8.3 officers per arrest. There's
nothing wrong with that except that while those 300 officers are
doing that, what other jobs aren't being done? You've got 300 of them
pulled off the streets for a day.

Also, these arrests were preceded by an expensive and lengthy
investigation. What will be the result of all this hard work, money
and time spent? Will we have fewer drugs in our community? No. Will
it be harder for people to get drugs? No. Will it keep drugs out of
the schools? No.

Nancy Cote, of Buffalo's office of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, was careful to report that, "There [were] no
incidents. Nobody hurt. No dogs killed." The whole idea I got from
this article is that this drug bust was a kinder, gentler drug bust.

Here's an idea for a kinder, gentler drug bust: How about simply not
arresting people for doing drugs? I'm not talking about not arresting
criminals. I'm talking about why we criminalize behavior that simply
isn't criminal.

If you're an alcoholic in this society today, and you don't drink and
drive, and you don't hurt other people or their property, what do we
do to you? Nothing.

If you're an alcoholic in this society today, what do we do for you?
Most people respond nothing, but that's not true. We have treatment
on demand for the alcoholic. There's no waiting list for Alcoholics
Anonymous; anyone who wants to come in gets treatment.

Another thing we do for alcoholics is guarantee to them and the
casual alcohol user, as much we're able, a purity of product. And we
provide them, as much as we can, with a safe place to purchase and
use that drug.

But when we catch heroin addicts using heroin, we arrest them. We've
cut back on treatment for drug addicts to build prisons, so we don't
have treatment on demand for the heroin addict. And as far as purity
of product and a safe place to buy or use that drug, it's ridiculous.
We all know what we get in an underground marketplace.

We claim that we're trying to help drug addicts. But if we really
want to help drug addicts, let's help them like we're helping alcoholics.

The only way to have a kinder and gentler approach to dealing with
our drug problems is to have a regulated and controlled marketplace.
And the only way you can control and regulate the marketplace is to
legalize the drugs. All of them.