THERE'S NO APPARENT VALUE IN REPEATING THE DRUG WATCH EXPERIMENT

You don't have to sit for long in the editor's chair to understand and
share Jim Ragsdale's rage at drug trafficking and what it did, and
continues to do, to this city.

Out of my predecessor's rage came "Drug Watch," a daily portrait gallery of
the men and women hauled into 3rd District Court on narcotics charges. The
feature's daily message was clear: Addicts caught with drugs or in a drug
transaction faced the public shame of having their picture published in the
paper.

I discontinued Drug Watch shortly after arriving at this paper three and a
half years ago. Every now and then, I hear from people who want me to bring
it back. The latest request was voiced at a recent meeting of the Bullard
Street Neighborhood Association.

I'm not going to do it, as much as I share the feelings of outrage over the
destruction wrought by drugs in this city's neighborhoods.

I'd like to believe that Jim Ragsdale would have discontinued Drug Watch
himself had he lived a little longer.

Jim Ragsdale had made his point. It was time to move on.

By the time I arrived on the scene, it was obvious that public shaming was
the last thing most addicts worried about. Besides, the shaming inflicted
by Drug Watch could so easily be avoided. We had and have only four very
busy staff photographers. On many days, a drug defendant with a lawyer who
knew the scene could dodge our photographers, or stall until afternoon when
the photographer had to move on to another assignment. To do Drug Watch
right required a daily commitment of one-fourth of our photographic
resources. It was a heavy price to pay and there were days we could only
afford to hit and run at the court house. On those days, we photographed
only the people at the bottom of the barrel, the defendants too dazed, too
drugged, too nodded out to get out of the camera's way.

That compounded an unfairness built into Drug Watch.

The men and women pictured had only been accused of drug offenses. They had
not yet been convicted. Drug Watch stood due process on its head.

It also turned the image of New Bedford on its head. The casual reader of
The Standard-Times could well come away convinced that drugs and
prostitution were what the city was all about, so much disproportionate
space and attention was being paid to drug addicts.

New Bedford had and has problems, including drugs and prostitution, but it
remained a city rich in human resources, in natural and architectural
beauty, in ethnic cultures, in historic and artistic heritage, and, yes, in
economic possibilities.

Drug Watch was sending out a message that it was a city of menace better to
be avoided.

That was simply untrue.

An argument could be made that Drug Watch would still have been worthwhile
were it having a deterrent effect and driving drugs and drug addicts out of
New Bedford. But if there was a deterrent effect from Drug Watch, it didn't
show. My guess is that the men and women typically pictured in Drug Watch
were too deep into their addiction to even notice their picture in the
paper.

During the years of Drug Watch, the drug trade kept flourishing.

Drug Watch also turned coverage of the drug trade upside down. Missed
entirely by Drug Watch were the invisible people, the high-rolling
manipulators behind the scenes, the dealers, the fixers, the profiteers:
all the carrion-eaters caught up in the business of supplying drugs and
protecting drug distribution. You'd never find a drug lord or an enabling
barkeep in Drug Watch; you'd never find the people looking the other way
when the deal went down, the people too scared or too corrupt to blow the
whistle or enforce the law.

The life's losers depicted in Drug Watch weren't the drug problem; they
were the product of the drug problem, people kept trapped in their habit by
the managers behind the criminal enterprises that imported drugs by the
barrel into this country and this city.

On the rare days those folks get nailed, the media is in court, getting the
pictures.

A major shortcoming of Drug Watch was the way it misplaced responsibility
on the addict and ignored the supplier.

Drug Watch also misplaced journalistic energy. We have to do a better job
of reporting on how drugs get into this city and why they can't be rooted
out. We have to keep the heat on federal, state and local law enforcement;
we have to address the problems of joblessness and poverty that open the
way to the drug trade and we have to do our best to support neighborhood
groups like the Bullard Street Neighborhood Association in their fight
against drugs.

That's the ongoing responsibility of this newspaper and its editor. We take
it quite seriously.

In my opinion, bringing back Drug Watch would be pretending that we were
taking effective action to support a community struggle and we'd be doing
nothing of the kind. What we'd actually be doing is taking a step backward,
while diverting precious resources on a tactic that didn't work then and
wouldn't work now.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)