AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS SIMPLY FEEDS THE CORRUPTION

If there were no other arguments for the legalization of drugs, the
corruption in the Los Angeles Police Rampart Division should certainly
convince the unconvinced.

This corruption is (a) primarily drug related, and (b) only the tip of the
iceberg of what takes place in the rest of the country. That the problems
in Los Angeles are not limited to the Rampart Division is evidenced by the
O.J. Simpson trial, in which five black female jurors were chosen by the
defense simply because they had witnessed police corruption in West L.A.
where they lived and were, therefore, suspect of the police in the first place.

When local police corruption is considered with the CIA's involvement in
poppy growing in Southeast Asia to fund overseas covert projects, the death
and devastation going on this very minute in Colombia and Mexico as a
result of drug sales to this country, the compromised judges, the
stockpiling of arms by domestic drug lords and dealers, the people -- many
innocent bystanders -- who are killed every day by over-zealous drug law
enforcement people, prison guards who provides drugs for prisoners for
money or because of threats to their loved ones on the outside -- it has to
be obvious to anyone and everyone who has the God-given capacity to think.

And there remains to be justified a prison population which threatens to
overwhelm the prison system, the incarceration in prisons of mentally ill
people for drug-law violations who need to be hospitalized, searches and
seizures of thousands of innocent people, confiscations of property where
no charges are ever even filed -- probably one of the most abused laws
stemming from the drug war -- and a general disintegration of individual
rights.

When you add to all this the cost of the drug war in dollars, by some
estimates, $75 billion a year in public money with an additional $70
billion in consumer money -- the value of such things as burglaries,
muggings, car thefts, etc., to pay the billions of dollars the drug dealers
are charging for their products -- pretty soon you're talking about real
money. How can anyone not see that this is a roller-coaster running out of
track?

I have heard and read the arguments that most of the people in prisons are
not there for simple drug possession but for felonies, and if their crimes
had not been drug-related, it would have been some other crime. I have to
ask how many of your grandparents could have been convicted of a felony for
making or selling hooch? Had they been sent to prison, all their property
confiscated and your mothers reduced to welfare, where would you be today?
If your grandfather had not, if he were a hooch maker, been caught and
convicted of making hooch, would he have committed some other crime?

Besides police corruption, there are other arguments for the use of common
sense on this issue. There is history. Lest we not forget: Beginning in the
1870s in the United States, recreational use of drugs became fashionable
and something of an epidemic ensued. The individual states experimented
with solutions. Some gave control to doctors, some to pharmacists. Most
states settled on education as the best remedy.

It worked. By the 1920s the drug problem had receded from an epidemic to an
irritation. However, U.S. foreign policy was making an issue of drugs with
China and, irony of ironies, Southeast Asia. Politicians concluded that
this policy required setting an example at home, hence, after-the-fact
federal drug laws.

Added to the laws was a policy of pretending drugs did not exist. The drug
czar of the time, Harry J. Anslinger, resorted to manipulation of
statistics, innuendo and untruths to encourage Congress to pass more and
more laws to suit his agenda -- not unlike practices rampant today
regarding this issue. Movies, which were censored at that time, were
forbidden to mention drugs. Radio shows, celebrities and school teachers
were discouraged from mentioning them.

It is also ironic that in the 1930s our government was insisting that China
pass laws against the use of drugs when a century before many of the great,
old-money families had made their fortunes transporting drugs from India to
China. They were supported, no less, by gunboats from this country's Navy
and Marines shelling and occupying Chinese river ports. Families, including
the Peabodys, Russells, Forbeses, Lows and, as in Franklin Delano, Delanos.

Oh, The History Of Drugs

In any event, people who grew up between the years 1934 and 1960 seldom
learned anything about drugs. When members of the "turn-on, drop-out"
generation of the 1960s was exposed to recreational drugs, they had no
reference as to the harm drugs can do and, predictably, another epidemic
resulted.

I'm sure it was a coincidence that the federal government became enamored
with anti-drug laws at the same the 18th Amendment was repealed. There was,
I'm sure, no consideration of the fact that the FBI had all these muscle
and gun men, along with their nemesis, the Mob, left over from prohibition,
standing around with nothing to do and no reason to shoot at each other.

So here we are, spending billions of dollars attempting to stifle a
business that is netting billions for the drug lords. All the while large
sums of both billions are lining the pockets of less than forthright
politicians, enforcement agents and their friends. And corruption is, but
for the famous code of silence, everywhere.

The question, then, is not whether or not there would be more or less
addicts with the decriminalization of drugs. The question is: Are we
content with the knowledge that such a lucrative source of income as drug
money is available to, offered to, forced upon, accepted by the people we
elect to office and the people they hire to enforce the laws they pass?

If legalizing drugs resulted in more addicts, could a few more addicts --
who are not necessarily unproductive or menacing to society by themselves,
if they did not have to resort to crime to pay for their habit -- be worse
than the price we are paying for the war on drugs?