IN THE WAR ON DRUGS, WE ALL SEEM TO BE ON THE LOSING SIDE

Dope-Sellers And Dopes

Responding to a story in this newspaper, the U.S. Justice Department
has suspended superstar informer Andrew Chambers.

He's the University City man who went around the country setting up
bogus drug deals. According to the story, he would often lie in court.
And why not? He had a good reason to lie if the perjury helped secure
a conviction. As a paid informer, he was compensated for his
successes. The more time he could slap on a guy, the higher his fee,
and apparently he gave a lot of guys a lot of time. The government has
paid him an estimated $4 million for his work.

I wrote about one of Chamber's cases in 1996. In that one, he
pretended he had 10 kilos of cocaine that he wanted to sell cheap.
Cheap cocaine. Fast money. Big temptation. None of the fellows
Chambers talked to could come up with the kind of money you need to
buy 10 kilos of cocaine -- not even at discount prices -- but pretty
soon a little syndicate was put together to buy two kilos.

Of course, there was no cocaine. It was all make-believe. Not the
time, though. That was real. Three fellows went away to prison. The
fourth was acquitted. I remember talking to this fourth guy. His name
was Jermaine, and his lawyer was Irl Baris. I asked if this had been
one of those crimes that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for
the government.

Exactly right, said Jermaine.

Wait a minute, said Baris. Our contention is that Jermaine didn't know
anything about a drug deal.

Well, it sounds like one of those cases, said Jermaine.

Ah, the drug war. What a crazy beast it is. Let's assume that Jermaine
did know about the drug deal -- even though, of course, there weren't
really any drugs. If he did know, why did he get involved? For the
money. That's the very reason that Chambers put together the
make-believe deal in the first place. For the money.

It brings to mind Jim Gierach. He's the former assistant state's
attorney for Cook County who ran in the Illinois Democratic
gubernatorial primary in 1994. He was a law and order guy who figured
that the war on drugs had been a costly failure. He didn't want to
completely legalize drugs -- he and I disagreed on that point -- but
he favored a new approach. He thought that people who were medically
certified as drug addicts should be able to receive their drugs by
prescription from drug treatment centers.

"You've got to take the profit out of the illegal drug business," he
said.

Indeed, we should. Now it turns out we ought to take the profit out of
the war against drugs, too.

Gierach, by the way, was guilty of actually thinking about the drug
problem. He wondered aloud what we could do with the money that we're
spending chasing, trying and incarcerating druggies. He was way too
thoughtful. The party decided he was to be treated as a nut. He wasn't
even allowed to participate in the debates.

And where are we now? The government's most successful informer turns
out to be a perjurer. He's accused of lying for money. He was
suspended last week. In a strange sort of coincidence, our prison
population hit the 2 million mark this week. Harmonic convergence, and
congratulations to us.

Meanwhile, a new book is claiming that Al Gore used to smoke pot on a
daily basis. George W. Bush refuses to answer questions about cocaine
except to say that he hasn't done any illegal drugs in years. John
McCain's wife has admitted that she used to be addicted to
prescription drugs.

My goodness. You wouldn't have needed an Andrew Chambers to make stuff
up on any of these people.

Like it or not, the baby boomers are in charge these days. Given our,
uh, experiences, I sometimes think that a serious discussion about
reforming our failed drug policy is inevitable.

Then again, maybe I'm just hallucinating.