SPEAKERS AT CONFERENCE URGE DRUG LEGALIZATION; LAW OFFICIALS OPPOSED

HARTFORD - More than 40 years ago, a police officer led Cliff
Thornton from his city home to an abandoned lot where his mother -
after a drug overdose - had been found dead and naked under a junked
car.

Thornton vowed that day to support the outlawing of all drugs. But
more than 30 years of watching America wage its "war on drugs" made
him change his mind, he told a crowd of about 100 at a two-day
conference about illegal drugs at Trinity College.

"Drugs are not the problem. Drug prohibition is the problem," Thornton
said.

Over the two days of the conference, presented by the city and
sponsored by Aetna, Thornton and several other speakers declared war
on the war on drugs, saying the problem of addiction is a medical
issue and not a matter for the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, law
enforcement officials speaking at the event -- while advocating more
treatment options for addicts -- seemed to bristle at that idea.

Advocates of legalization, such as Jack Cole, a former narcotics
officer and 26-year veteran of the New Jersey State Police, pointed to
government statistics they claim show the ineffectiveness of the war
on drugs, officially begun by President Richard M. Nixon in the early
1970s.

In 2001, for instance, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration
published a chart that showed heroin price and purity between 1980 and
1999.

According to the DEA statistics, a heroin user would pay about $4 in
1980 to get high from a 3.6 percent pure dose of heroin. By 1999, the
price of the drug collapsed to 80 cents, but the purity had escalated
to 38.2 percent, according to the DEA.

Cole says statistics like that show the war on drugs is clearly being
lost, and vested interests at the heart of enforcing drug penalties
are the real beneficiaries.

"The worse the problem gets the more police and money we throw into
the mix," Cole says.

The cheap price and easy availability of such drugs is especially a
danger to vulnerable youths, speakers said.

In a session about "At-Risk Greater Hartford Youth," Jane Ungemack, an
assistant professor at the University of Connecticut medical school,
said young people often are exposed to drugs such as marijuana, which
acts as a "gateway" to other, harder drugs.

Scarlett Swerdlow, executive director of Students for a Sensible Drug
Policy, agreed, saying it's often easier for youths to get marijuana
than alcohol. Many speakers, including Swerdlow, advocated
decriminalizing marijuana, so its production and distribution would be
taken out of the hands of criminals.

But Hartford Police Chief Patrick Harnett said the prospect of drugs
being freely available to addicts, without treatment programs keeping
up, would not be advisable.

"Be careful if you let that genie out of the bottle, because you won't
get it back in," Harnett said on the first day of the conference.

Herbert Carlson Jr., a prosecutor in Hartford Superior Court, agreed,
saying that as long as drugs are prohibited by law, offenders should
and will be prosecuted. The elected officials responsible for making
those laws were a target of several of the reform-minded speakers.

"We need politicians who are so committed to their jobs that they are
willing to lose them to make the right decision," Thornton,
interrupted by applause, said Saturday. "Any politician not willing to
risk re-election is not worthy of the job in the first place."

One of those politicians, Robert Painter, a retired surgeon and
minority leader of Hartford's City Council, helped organize the
conference. He said that the city's problems with drugs -- and the war
that has made drugs "of a higher quality, lower costs, more addicts,
and more people in prison" -- necessitated an open forum about the
problem.

Arthur Burnett, a retired Superior Court judge from Washington, D.C.,
and director of the National African American Drug Policy Coalition,
concurred, and said voters should decide how the country deals with
illicit drugs.

"The system in fact breeds crime and brings more people into our
criminal justice system," Burnett said. "We have to deal with that
problem, and make sure people aren't sucked into that system. We need
to medicalize the problem of drugs in America, and decriminalize them.

"We need to have an honest press to tell the American people what the
real facts are, and let the people decide," Burnett added.

Another opponent of prohibition, Nick Eyle, who heads a non-profit
group that focuses on the failures of the U.S. drug policy, likened
contemporary drug lords to the most infamous figure during the
country's last foray into prohibition, Al Capone.

Capone killed hundreds of people to consolidate his bootlegging
empire, Eyle said. "Did he kill them because he was drunk? No. It was
because of business.

"The violence we're told is drug-related is actually drug-business-
related," Eyle said, pointing out that the illegal drug trade is a
$321 billion per year industry worldwide, with profit margins of up to
17,000 percent. "When people can make that kind of money, they will
kill for it."

Thornton concurred, saying the "only thing accomplished by arresting a
drug dealer or smashing a drug cartel is creating a job vacancy.

"Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders,
burglaries, and robberies," Thornton added, referencing a May speech
given by Judge Howard Scheinblum in Enfield during which the judge
estimated 90 percent of crime is somehow drug-related.