'WAR ON DRUGS' NOT MEANT TO BE WON

With remarks to a civic group in Enfield recently, Superior Court Judge
Howard Scheinblum engaged in what is seldom forgiven in Connecticut's
public life: candor.

The judge asserted what can neither be denied nor acknowledged -- that
public policy on drugs doesn't work. Speaking from his 15 years of
experience on the bench, Scheinblum estimated 90 percent of criminal cases
in Connecticut are connected in some way to the pursuit of illegal drugs,
and he asserted that society would be far better off to let users of such
drugs obtain them by prescription and to be charged for them according to
their ability to pay.

That is, the judge said, drugs are not the problem, not the cause of
thievery, robbery, and violence; drug prohibitionis.

If now-illegal drugs were available to addicts by prescription, many
addicts would waste their lives away, but at least they wouldn't be robbing
and killing others for money for drugs, and drug dealers would not be
killing others over drug sales territory. Most violent crime would disappear.

Sensible as this might seem -- after all, despite drug criminalization,
illegal drugs are more prevalent than ever; the legal drugs, alcohol and
tobacco, claim so many more lives than illegal drugs; and who really cares
how people waste their lives as long as they don't hurt others?-- the judge
said any departure from futile drug policy would be blocked by "vested
interests." For if drug prohibition crime ended, the judge said,
Connecticut wouldn't need as many police, courts, prisons, drug programs
and so forth.

Judge Scheinblum's analysis only seems cynical, but it has been borne out
by the political action of Connecticut's prison guards union against the
transfer of inmates to prisons out of state where costs of imprisonment are
lower. The families of prisoners have protested as well, but the union
didn't care about prisoner welfare; it cared about losing business.

The judge's analysis also has been borne out by state government's refusal
to audit drug-criminalization policy. The policy's failure is obvious, but
politicians are paralyzed by fear of the policy's financial beneficiaries
and the fear of asking the public to challenge old but faulty assumptions.

As with many other policies in Connecticut that are never evaluated for
results, the "war on drugs" is not meant to be won; it is meant to be
waged. Even its racially disproportionate casualties are not enough to
prompt politicians to engage in candor like Judge Scheinblum's. Indeed,
Connecticut's politicians are happy to put half the state's young men of
color in prison if the other half can be hired to guard them.