DRUG WAR BANKRUPTCY

If violent crime is down significantly, as last week's reports
suggest, why are our prisons filling up? One broad answer is the drug
war, and less-healded statistics also released last week paint an
alarming picture of who is being arrested, imprisoned, how often and
why.

Let's start with marijuana. A closer study of the FBI report by Chuck
Thomas at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. shows that
the total number of arrests for marijuana offenses in 1998 was
682,885,88 percent of them for possession, not sale or manufacture.
That is down slightly from the record number of marijuana arrests of
1997, which was 692,200.

Since Bill Clinton became president there have been nearly 3.5 million
marijuana arrests. In 1998 more people were arrested for marijuana
offenses than for murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault combined.

What a waste of law enforcement resources. Concentrating on arresting
marijuana users has almost no impact on the number of people who use
it, studies have long shown. But insofar as enforcement activities
raise the cost to users and push them into a criminal subculture, they
increase other categories of crime such as theft, burglary and
mugging, a high percentage of which are committed to raise money to
buy drugs.

If anything, the situation was worse in California. According to
statistics from the state Department of Correctins and compiled by the
Drug Policy Forum of California, as of June 1999 the state prison
system held 45,874 drug offenders of all kinds, a record 28.3 percent
of the prison population A record 12.2 percent of all prisoners -
19,743 in all - were being held for simple possession, not sales, of a
variety of illicit drugs.

The number of drug prisoners in California has increased more than
fivefold since 1986; their proportion as a percentage of the total
prison population has doubled.

Keep in mind, too, that there are few prison treatment programs for
those who are addicted - and that drugs typically are easily
attainable in prison. Ex-cons are likely to re-enter society with the
same drug-related troubles with which they left.

Interestingly, the number of prisoners held on marijuana charges in
California (all for sales or cultivation, since simple possession is a
misdemeanor in California) has increased by 12 percent since the
passage of California's medical marijuana law in 1996. Nearly 20 times
as many people are in state prison on marijuana charges as 20 years
ago. What these figures demonstrate, as Drug Policy Forum spokesman
Dale Gieringer explained to us, is that "the war on drugs is bankrupt.
California taxpayers are spending over $1 billion a year to
incarcerate people for inherently non-violent drug crimes, with no
evident public benefits."

Yes, it is good news that violent crime is declining, acknowledging
that such statistics warrant a certain degree of skepticism. (A new
book from George Washington University criminologist William J.
Chambliss, "Power Politics, and Crime" delineates how shaky the FBI's
Uniform Crime Reports can be, especially for year-to-year
comparisons). But the trend has been strong enough in recent years to
establish credibility.

Such a decline in violent crimes makes the growing share of
drug-related arrests in this year's crime statistics all the more tragic.

Gary Johnson, The Republican governor of New Mexico, is only the most
recent public official to remind us: It is time to rethink the war on