SHOCKING TOLERANCE OF DRUG-WAR CASUALTIES

In the 1990s in Chicago, it was not uncommon to read the Monday
newspapers and learn that 12 kids had been shot and killed over the
weekend, compliments of the drug war and the turf wars caused by drug
prohibition.

This past weekend, the drug war took us to a new low when 13 of its
victims were paralyzed and killed in Chicago from its newest rage --
Fentanyl-laced heroin. Reportedly, Fentanyl-laced heroin produces a
better high sought by addicts in an effort to repeat the euphoria of
their first use of heroin.

Of course, you're only a heroin virgin once, and once you eat of the
forbidden fruit, you have knowledge, and heroin never tastes as good
again. In time, a hardcore heroin addict needs his dope just to feel
normal and function -- legal or not, expensive or not.

So what does U.S. Drug Czar John Walters do now, and habitually, to
fight the new craze of Fentanyl-laced heroin? Does he come to Chicago
to offer heroin addicts untainted heroin taken from drug-war evidence
vaults? Does he say, "Suffer the little addicts to come unto me,
Uncle Sam, and get a safer untainted heroin fix"? Does he compete
with Chicago drug gangs financially by offering free,
laboratory-tested, uncontaminated heroin of known potency to drug
addicts to lure them from street poison and into government-sponsored
and regulated heroin maintenance clinics with treatment options and
addict free will?

No, the drug czar does none of those things. Instead, he and his
drug-war cohorts advertise the bad heroin to the general public in
frightful terms like: "Why this heroin is so strong, so tainted, so
bad, it can kill you."

And the result? Addicts are heard to say, "Please pass the 'really
good stuff.'" For decades, drug addicts have responded to anti-drug
warnings by doing the opposite of what the anti-drug advertising was
intended to accomplish.

Like the DARE stickers on Cook County sheriff vehicles and anti-drug
public service announcements of the past, the Fentanyl-laced heroin
anti-drug advertising of today boosts drug sales, contaminated or not.

Last weekend, I visited my daughter and grandchildren in D.C. The
Chicago Fentanyl-laced drug story is so big, I read about it in
section one of the Sunday Washington Post. Back home in Chicago on
Tuesday, I read the page-one Chicago Tribune story about a U.S. drug
policy that is so bad that it has caused the international production
of Fentanyl-laced heroin that has killed people in eight states!

But no drug-horror story surprises me anymore -- police planting
evidence, stealing drugs from the evidence vault, aligning with drug
cartels and drug gangs, drug czars going to prison, innocent toddlers
shot in turf-war crossfire, airport strip searches, drug police
bashing down doors, drug dogs in schools, addict crime,
prison-building mania, outlawing clean needles in the face of an AIDS
epidemic, correctional officers smuggling drugs to inmates, killings
over $25 drug debts, drug tunnels, baby-formula smuggling schemes,
dealers ratting on one another to save themselves at the expense of
others, mandatory minimum sentencing injustice, drug-profit funding
of terrorism ...

But I admit that the public's continued tolerance and silence in the
midst of a murderous and brain-cramped U.S. drug policy continually
astounds me. Fentanyl-laced heroin only paralyzes the respiratory
system and kills addicts by suffocation one at a time. Drug war, on
the other hand, is choking the world to death and amorality.

James E. Gierach is an attorney from Oak Lawn.