Too Much Is Not Enough
In the Endless War on Drugs, We're Filling the Jails but Losing the
Streets By David Simon and Edward Burns

The war goes on.

Thirty years down this sad stretch of road and the same people are still
peddling the same brand of snake oil, still hawking that elusive light at the
tunnel's end.

There's nothing wrong with the war on drugs that can't be perfected, they'll
tell you. Nothing that can't succeed with just a little finetuning and a
little more money. More cops and more prisons and some new laws and we'll
really start to get at the sources of supply, or attack the demand, or maybe
do both at once. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter who's running for
office they all promise to get things back under control, to spend the
money on a bigger, better campaign. They say it because they know these are
the words that most of us want to hear.

Thirty years after heroin began to flood the urban streets of America, the
drug war is still treated as a viable mission by police commanders,
prosecutors and political leaders. But from the bottom, looking up, the view
is that of an absurdist nightmare, a statistical charade with no other
purpose than to placate a public that wants drug trafficking attacked and
vanquished but not, of course, at the price it would cost to accomplish
such an incredible feat.

But to know any of this, you must first find that bottom. To see the drug
problem as it is, you have to be down in the openair drug markets that
operate in West Baltimore or East St. Louis, North Philly or South Chicago.
That's what we did. We spent more than three years immersing ourselves in the
culture of one street corner in West Baltimore. One of us is, by trade, a
crime reporter who has spent a dozen years chronicling arrests and seizures
and convictions. The other was for two decades a Baltimore police detective,
making narcotics and drugrelated murder cases. What we both witnessed at the
corner of Fayette and Monroe streets is a war that has become endless and,
arguably, pointless.

Consider:

Maryland operates a state prison system that can manage a total of just over
20,000 prison beds for prisoners convicted of every act against the criminal
code in Baltimore and 23 other counties. Yet in Baltimore alone there are
more than 18,000 arrests each year for drug violations, and in all of
Maryland's jurisdictions, more than 35,000 are charged every year with drug
sales or possession.

Build more prisons, you say? How many more? Five? Ten? Keep in mind that
Maryland is no slacker when it comes to locking people up; the state ranks
10th nationally in its rate of incarceration. You could bankrupt the state
government by doubling the existing prison space and still not have enough
space to hold Baltimore's estimated 50,000 heroin and cocaine users (the
estimate comes from state officials), not to mention the rest of Maryland.
Moreover, the construction of a prison is only the preamble; what inevitably
follows is the financial drain of feeding and clothing the prisoners, of
maintaining security standards, of running a medical program that the U.S.
Supreme Court says must correspond to outside community standards for health
care. Soon enough, you're spending more to lock down a man than it would cost
to enroll him at Harvard.

More prisons is the impulse answer, the quickanddirty response of so many
politicians and talkshow hosts. It's what the Bush administration told state
governments to do as early as 1989 and what the federal government itself has
done. Leading by example, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has more than doubled
its capacity in 10 years in an effort to keep up with the rising federal
inmate population the logical result of the mandatory sentences and parole
restrictions contained in all those omnibus crime bills.

So what happens in places like West Baltimore? What becomes of all those
bodies thrown into the police wagons, all those manhours of police
enforcement, all the dollars spent on court pay and overtime, all that work
for the courthouse personnel, the pretrial investigators, the public
defenders and prosecutors?

Down at the Baltimore courthouse, anywhere from 16,000 to 20,000 annual drug
arrests will translate to about 800 defendants sentenced to prison. Of that
number, less than half will serve more than a year. In short, for the vast
majority of those arrested, the threat of incarceration is generally limited
to a night or two in jail until a bail review hearing or, in the rare
instance in which a money bond is set and a defendant can't pay, a month or
two of pretrial detention.

It can't be otherwise. Whatever prison space is available is required for the
thousands sentenced every year for violent crimes and other felonies. The
state judges have known this for years now. The lawyers know it as well. So
do the police. And the learning curve reaches all the way down to the corner
of Fayette and Monroe itself: By 1991, 61 percent of the felony cases brought
into Baltimore Circuit Court involved drug violations. Of those, 55 percent
involved defendants with at least one prior conviction. Thirtyseven percent
had two prior convictions; 24 percent had three.

By contrast, the federal system is handling only a handful of prosecutions:
the major offenders, the headline cases and the crimes that happen to occur
in federal jurisdiction. The variance between courthouses has produced an
institutional schizophrenia in drug enforcement. Addicts and smalltime
dealers sometimes take three or four state charges, then get caught up in a
case that goes federal. Suddenly, the man in the black robes is running wild,
talking 15 years and no parole. Say what? Who changed the rules?

But federal sentencings are the odd, angry shot in this war. It's at the
local level where the limits have been reached: There are now a million
Americans in prison and it still isn't enough to close the corners. Should we
lock up a million more? Two million?

Meanwhile, on Fayette Street, the absence of a real deterrent has been
factored into the psychological equation. As the cocaine epidemic has
expanded the addict population, thousands more have flocked to the corners
and the drug slinging has become more brazen. There is still some
catandmouse with the police; no one wants to go to jail, even for an
overnight humble, nor does anyone want to be among the unlucky handful who
catch a threeyear sentence from some dyspeptic judge. But in terms of real
estate, the war is over; by the numbers, the drug trade has proven itself
invincible.

Yet who can argue with a moral crusade? If we give up, they assure us, it
will be worse. And, in one sense, they're right: It will be worse in places
where poverty is limited, where the demographics prohibit the growth of a
ghetto underclass. Call off the drug war and it will be worse in Pittsburgh,
or Kansas City or Seattle. It will be worse in Nassau County, or Dearborn or
Orange County. In any place where the deterrent is still viable, where the
lid is still being held down, a cessation of hostilities will result in
greater damage.

But at the very frontiers of the American drug culture, it won't make any
difference. War or no, 50,000 addicts are going to go down to Baltimore's
street corners tomorrow for their daily blast. Against that fact, the drug
war stands as a useless and unnecessary brutalization, an unyielding policy
that requires our government to occupy our ghettos in much the same way that
others have occupied Belfast, or Soweto or Gaza.

True, a policy of repression was never the intent. But greater ideals are
soon enough lost to the troops on the ground. For the younger police the
ones who never knew the neighborhood when it was worth protecting, the ones
for whom the drug fiends were always drug fiends there is little
connection to the streets or the people who live there. They are not serving
anyone; they are answering radio calls and running up the daily arrests,
pulling in that court pay for jacking up one or two souls a day.

Gone are the days in Baltimore when the police were judged by how they
controlled their posts, when a beat cop culled information and tried to solve
those genuine crimes that ought to be solved, when detectives still bothered
to follow up on robberies and assaults. Now, the worst of the West Baltimore
cops have become brutal mercenaries, cementing their streetcorner reps with
crushed fingers and broken noses, harvesting the corners for arrests that
serve no greater purpose than to guarantee hour after hour of paid court
time.

It is not only that the streetlevel drug arrests have clogged the
courtrooms, devouring time and manpower and money. And it's not only that the
government's inability to punish so many thousands of violators has stripped
naked the drug prohibition and destroyed the government's credibility for law
enforcement. More than that, in cities like Baltimore, the drug war has
become so untenable and impractical that it is slowly undermining the nature
of police work itself.

Stupid criminals make for stupid police. This is a stationhouse credo, a
valuable bit of precinctlevel wisdom that the Baltimore department ignored
as it committed itself to a streetlevel drug war. Because on Fayette Street
and a hundred corners like it, there is nothing for a patrolman or
plainclothesman that is as easy, as guaranteed and as profitable as a
streetlevel drug arrest. With minimal probable cause, any cop can ride into
the circus tent, grab a vial or two, arrest a tout or runner and be assured
of making that good overtime pay at the courthouse. In Baltimore, a cop
doesn't even need to come up with a vial. He can simply charge a suspect with
loitering in a drugfree zone, a city statute of improbable constitutionality
that has exempted a good third of the inner city from the usual constraints
of probable cause. In Baltimore, if a man is standing in the 1800 block of
Fayette Street even if he lives in the 1800 block of Fayette Street he
is fodder for a street arrest.

As a result, police work in innercity Baltimore has been reduced to
fishinabarrel tactics, with the result that a generation of young officers
has failed to master proper investigation or procedure. Why bother to learn
the intricacies of probable cause when an antiloitering law allows you to go
into anyone's pockets? Why become adept at covert surveillance when you can
just go down to any corner, line them up against the liquor store and search
to your heart's content? Why learn how to use, and not be used by, informants
when information is so unnecessary to a streetlevel arrest?

Not surprisingly, as streetlevel drug arrests began to rise with the cocaine
epidemic of the late 1980s, other indicators of quality police work and of
a city's livability began to fall in Baltimore. The police department
began using more and more of itself to chase the addicts and touts, so there
were fewer resources available to work shooting, or rapes or burglaries.

>From 1988 to 1993, arrest rates for felonies began falling below national
averages. In that span of time, the clearance rate for shootings fell from 60
percent to 47 percent, just as the solve rate for armed robbery fell below 20
percent for the first time ever. Arrests for rape declined by 10 percent, and
the percentage of solved burglaries fell by a third. Alone among felonies,
the arrest rate for murder remained constant in Baltimore, mostly because the
highprofile aspects of such crimes prevented department officials from
gutting the homicide unit as every other investigative unit had been gutted.

In those five years, the city's crime rate soared by more than 37 percent.
Baltimore became the fourth most violent city in the nation, and its rate of
cocaine and heroin use as measured by emergency room statistics was the
worst in the United States.

Thirty years. And now, all that's left of our drug war is failure on a grand
scale, a tainted political inheritance that is backhanded from one
administration to the next. Moreover, the crusade has collapsed without the
loss of a single significant battle. To the contrary, the reckoning already
at hand in the West Baltimores of this country comes replete with a string of
seeming victories: tens of thousands warehoused in prisons; millions of
contraband dollars confiscated; generations of police commanders and lawyers
compiling impressive stats. Most dramatic of all, perhaps, we have continued
to escalate this war of occupation in our inner cities, until more than half
of the adult black male population in places like Baltimore are now in some
way under the supervision of the criminal justice system.

This is us, America, at war with ourselves. What began 30 years ago as a
wrongheaded tactical mission has been transformed into a slowmotion civil
war. If we never seriously contemplate alternatives, if we forever see the
order of battle in terms of arrests and prisons and lawyers, then perhaps we
deserve three more decades of failure.

David Simon, a journalist, is the author of "Homicide: A Year on the Killing
Streets." Edward Burns, a retired Baltimore homicide detective, now teaches
in the Baltimore public schools. This article is adapted from "The Corner: A
Year in the Life of an InnerCity Neighborhood" (Broadway Books), published
this week.

HIGHS AND LOWS IN THE U.S. WAR ON DRUGS

Some say that this country's war on drugs began with the passage of the
Harrison Act in 1914 which outlawed the use of heroin and cocaine, although
presidents of the modern era have continually renewed the fight with stirring
words, more bureaucracy and bigger budgets. Here are significant statistics
and events of the past 15 years:

1982 The Reagan administration intensifies the war on drugs, aiming to
reduce illicit drug use among middleclass Americans.

1986 The Omnibus Drug Enforcement, Education and Control Act was passed,
authorizing $3 billion over three years for antidrug programs, increasing
penalties for drug offense.

In a U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services household survey, there were:

1.2 million firsttime cocaine users

1.9 million marijuana users

83,000 heroin users

1987 Annual federal, state and local government expenditures on the drug war
total $5 billion.

1988 Annual total arrests for drugabuse violations in the U.S. reached
1,155,000.

1989 The Bush administration launches its own offensive, The Office of
National Drug Control Policy is established; former Secretary of Education
William Bennett is named drug control policy director.

The National Defense Authorization Act gives the Department of Defense
responsibility for certain aspects of drug enforcement, including detection
and monitoring and "commandcontrolcommunicationsintelligence," a military
term for the integration of the various procedures for commanding
operations). It also authorizes the use of the National Guard in drug
enforcement.

1990 Gallup Poll finds reports that 4 percent of Americans believe that
"arresting the people who use drugs" is the best way for the government to
allocate resources.

Domestic production of marijuana has doubled since 1985, an estimated $20
billionayear industry.

Annual drugrelated deaths (accidental, suicides and other) at 5,500.

Former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez succeeds Bennett as national drug control
policy director.

1993 Former Houston police chief Lee P. Brown succeeds Martinez as national
drug control policy director.

1994 Annual drugrelated deaths reach 7,000.

In the followup HHS household survey, there were:

500,000 firsttime cocaine users

2.2 million marijuana users

122,000 heroin users

A National Institute on Drug Abuse report finds a rise in the use of
marijuana, LSD, stimulants and inhalants among teenagers, reversing a
twoyear downward trend.

1995 Total arrests for drugabuse violations at 1,476,000.

1996 Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey becomes fourth drug control policy
director.

1997 The federal government's total expenditure on the drug war under the
proposed budget exceeds $16 billion.

SOURCES: Center for Defense Information, Rand Corp., FBI, Drug Policy
Foundation

_ Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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