WAR ON CRIME, NOT ON DRUGS

Editor's Note: The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from
"Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing
(Nation Books, 2005).

I say it's time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement's financial costs, take
a look at DrugSense org's Drug War Clock. To the tune of $600 a second,
taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure added up to
over $20 billion, and that's just for federal enforcement alone. You can
add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement,
and even more billions for U. S. drug interdiction work on the
international scene. We're talking well over $50 billion a year to finance
America's war on drugs.

Think of this war's real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise
innocent Americans incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families
ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city
streets; narcotics officers assassinated here and abroad, with prosecutors,
judges, and elected officials in Latin America gunned down for their
courageous stands against the cartels; and all those dollars spent on
federal, state, and local cops, courts, prosecutors, prisons, probation,
parole, and pee-in-the-bottle programs. Even federal aid to bribe distant
nations to stop feeding our habit.

"Plan Colombia" was hatched under the last year of the Clinton
administration to wage America's drug war on Colombian soil. Costing over
$1.3 billion ($800 million going to the military), the plan sought to
"eradicate" that nation's coca and heroin poppy plants (Colombia supplied
95 percent of America's cocaine). The chemical used was the herbicide
glyphosate, which when sprayed on crops does untold damage to the
environment. When sprayed on water supplies or unprotected people, it
causes a host of serious to fatal medical problems.

Similar efforts in Peru and Bolivia have reduced production only
temporarily, and always at high cost: recall that the Peruvian Air Force,
on the strength of mistaken U.S. drug intelligence, shot down a civilian
aircraft carrying an American missionary and her infant daughter in April
of 2001.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration supported the Taliban to the tune
of $125 million in foreign aid, plus another $43 million for enforcing its
ostensible ban on poppy production--right up until September 10, 2001. (As
Robert Scheer makes clear in his May 22, 2001 column in the Los Angeles
Times--"Bush's Faustian Deal With the Taliban"--the president knew all
along that the Taliban was hiding Osama bin Laden.)

Today, Afghanistan's drug lords give the country's warlords (when they're
not one and the same) a run for their money. The Government Accountability
Office (GAO) in the summer of 2004 issued a scathing report citing the
phenomenal growth in Afghan poppy production--and the Bush administration's
failure to monitor its own anti-drug aid. The United Nations estimates the
value of the 2004 crop at $2.2 billion, with production up 40 percent,
breaking all records for a single year.

According to Peter Rodman of the Pentagon (BBC News, September 24, 2004),
"...profits from the production of illegal narcotics flow into coffers of
warlord militias, corrupt government officials, and extremist forces."

The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political
instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters
around the globe. In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international "War on Drugs"
is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a
dangerous no-win situation.

Another casualty of the drug war: the reputation of individual police
officers, individual departments, and the entire system of American law
enforcement. If you aspire to be a "crooked" cop, drugs are clearly the way
to go. The availability, street value, and illegality of drugs form a sweet
temptation to character-challenged cops, many of whom wind up shaking down
street dealers, converting drugs for their own use, or selling them.

Almost all of the major police corruption scandals of the last several
decades have had their roots in drug enforcement. We've seen robbery,
extortion, drug dealing, drug stealing, drug use, false arrests, perjury,
throw-down guns, and murder. And these are the good guys?

There isn't an unscathed police department in the country. New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Miami,
Oakland, Dallas, Kansas City--all have recently suffered stunning police
drug scandals. You won't find a single major city in the country that has
not fired or arrested at least one of its own for some drug-related offense
in the past few years, including San Diego and Seattle...

Tulia, Tex. offers another example of a cop--and a system--gone bad. Tom
Coleman, an ex-police officer, was hired by the federally-funded Texas
Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Taskforce to conduct undercover
narcotics operations in Tulia in 1998. In 1999, Coleman arrested 46 people
- -- 39 of them black. He put dozens of "drug peddlers" behind bars--for 60,
90, 434 years (we're talking Texas here).

The only problem? Coleman made up the charges. He manufactured evidence.
Working alone, he never wore a wire, never taped a conversation, never
dusted the plastic bags he "scored" for fingerprints. He testified in court
that he wrote his notes of drug transactions on his leg. Who was this Tom
Coleman?

A 1997 background investigation revealed that he'd been disciplined in a
previous law enforcement job, that he had "disciplinary" and "possible
mental problems," that he "needed constant supervision, had a bad temper
and would tend to run to his mother for help."

According to New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, Coleman had "run up bad
debts in another law enforcement job before leaving town abruptly in the
middle of a shift.... Eight months into the undercover investigation,
Coleman's supervisors received a warrant calling for his arrest for
stealing gasoline. They arrested him, let him out on bond and allowed him
to make restitution for the gas and other debts of $7,000. The undercover
investigation then continued."

In August of 2003, Governor Rick Perry pardoned 35 of the people Coleman
sent to prison, 31 of them black.

Thousands of drug cases have been dismissed throughout the country in just
the past few years because of similar police malfeasance. Spurred on by
federal financial incentives, departments exert tremendous pressure on
narcotics units and individual narcs to make a lot of busts, impound a lot
of dope, and seize as much of a drug-trafficker's assets as possible.

Just how prevalent is drug use in America? In 1975, according to the
Monitoring the Future Survey, 87 percent of high school seniors reported
that it was "easy" or "fairly easy" to buy marijuana. At the dawn of the
new century, and millions of arrests later, the figure is at 90.4 percent.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reported in 1998 that
high school students found it a lot easier to score pot than to purchase
beer. In 1988, Congress set a goal of a "drug-free America by 1995." Yet,
according to research of the Drug Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C.
(which in 2000 merged with the George Soros-funded Lindesmith/Drug Policy
Research Institute to form the widely respected Drug Policy Institute), the
number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million and
counting. That's a lot of enemies.

Not that the war on drugs hasn't taken prisoners. The Department of Justice
reports that of the huge increases in federal and state prison populations
during the '80s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980, to 476
per 100,000 in 2002), the vast majority are for drug convictions. The FBI
reports that 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1980. By
1999 that annual figure had ballooned to 1,532,200. Today there are more
arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, and
aggravated assault combined.

Nowhere is this misguided campaign waged more mindlessly than in New York.
The "Rockefeller Drug Laws" call for life in prison for first-time
offenders convicted of possessing four ounces, or selling two ounces, of a
controlled substance. The result? The state's prison system is filled to
the gills with drug offenders, most of them convicted of minor offenses,
most of them nonviolent, taking up 18,300 of its beds.

By any standard, the United States has lost its war on drugs. Criminalizing
drug use--for which there is, was, and always will be an insatiable
appetite--has been a colossal mistake, wasting vast sums of money, and
adding to the misery of millions of Americans.

The solution? Decriminalization. (Not "legalization," which would take
government out of the picture altogether--and doom desperately-needed drug
reform.) Decriminalization means you take the crime out of the use of
drugs, but preserve government's right--and responsibility--to regulate the
field.

How would it work? If I were the new (and literal) Drug Czar, I would have
private companies compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture,
package, and peddle drugs. I'd create a new federal regulatory agency (with
no apologies to libertarians and neo-cons) to: (1) set and enforce
standards of sanitation, potency, and purity; (2) ban advertising; (3)
impose taxes, fees, and fines to be used for drug abuse prevention and
treatment, and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory
agency; and (4) police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control
agencies operate in the states.

But I wouldn't stop there: I'd put all of those truly frightening,
explosion-prone, toxic meth labs out of business--today; make sure that no
one was deprived of methadone or other medical treatment for addiction or
abuse; establish free needle exchange programs and permit pharmacy sales of
sterile, non-prescription needles in every city; and require random,
mandatory drug testing for those workers whose judgment and mental
alertness are essential to public safety--cops, firefighters, soldiers,
airline pilots, bus drivers, ferry boat operators, train engineers, et al.
(Not part of the et al are brain surgeons, mental health counselors, and
countless others whose sensitive work, if botched, would generally not
jeopardize public safety.)

.I would insist on the enforcement of existing criminal laws and policies
against street dealing, furnishing to minors, driving under the influence,
or invoking drug influence as a criminal defense.

Consequently, if someone chose to take a drug, anything they did under its
effects would be 100 percent their responsibility... If they rob a bank,
drive high, furnish drugs (including alcohol) to a minor, smack their
neighbor upside the head, slip Ecstasy into their date's drink, they should
be arrested, charged, and prosecuted. If convicted, they should be forced
to pay a fair but painful price for their criminal irresponsibility.
Moreover, if they've injured or killed someone in the process, they should
be slapped with civil damages. I've never understood defense attorneys who
argue, "Gee, your honor, my client was so loaded she didn't know what she
was doing."

But what of the undeniable harm caused by drugs? Wouldn't decriminalization
make things worse? Who knows? We're too scared to approach the subject in a
calm, open, levelheaded manner. But, I'll tell you what I think would
happen: there would be a slight increase in drug use, and no measurable
increase in drug abuse. Experiences in Portugal and the Netherlands suggest
that decriminalization does not portend a mad rush for drugs among the
currently abstemious...

Handled properly, decriminalization would improve the overall
health--physical, emotional, and financial--of our society and our
neighborhoods.

How? For starters, it would put illicit traffickers out of business; their
obscene, untaxed profits evaporating overnight. Dealers and runners and
mules and nine-year-old lookouts would be off street corners, and out of
the line of fire. It would take much of the fun out of being a gang member
(gang-banging being synonymous these days with drug dealing, "markets"
synonymous with "turf"). Firearms employed in the expansion and protection
of drug markets would go quiet--a welcome change for peace-loving citizens,
and the nation's cops. Drug raids on the wrong house would be a thing of
the past.

And since most junkies finance their addiction by breaking into your home,
stealing your car, or mugging you on the street, crimes like burglary,
robbery, auto theft, and car prowl would drop. A lot. Justice Department
studies linking patterns of property crime and drug use suggest a reduction
of 35 to 50 percent in those crimes alone.

Decriminalization would arguably wipe out at least one variety of
structural racism, as well as class discrimination. A sad but safe
generalization: poor blacks smoke cheap crack, upscale whites snort the
spendy powdered version of cocaine. And who goes to jail, for longer
periods of time? Blacks, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in
Texas where, according to the Justice Policy Institute, blacks are
incarcerated at a rate 63 percent higher than the national rate...for blacks!

(Nationally, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 12 percent of
all African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison,
versus1.6 percent of white men). More than half of these African Americans
are in prison for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. Needless to
say, this same group is grossly underrepresented in drug treatment programs.

.Where do we find the money to treat addiction and other drug abuse
problems when tens of millions of Americans can't even get basic health
insurance, insulin, heart meds or cancer drugs at affordable prices? Law
enforcement officials at every level--federal, state, and local--know the
answer, and it scares them to death: take it from them, the cops.

Use the money now being squandered on drug enforcement, domestically and
internationally, to finance a fresh, new public policy that educates,
regulates, medicates, and rehabilitates.

Opposition to decriminalization runs so deep among law enforcers that many
refuse even to talk about it. And they'll do their best to shut you up if
you so much as mention it... [But] not everyone is frightened of the First
Amendment. Many Americans are speaking up, demanding a new, workable
approach to the drug problem.

An October, 2002 Time/CNN poll showed that 72 percent of Americans already
believe there should be no jail time for possessing small amounts of pot,
and 80 percent support medical marijuana programs; (maybe that's because 47
percent of them had used the weed).

When, as chief of the Seattle Police Department, I made my views on drugs
known at a conference of mayors from Washington, Oregon, and British
Columbia, the response was overwhelmingly positive. In presentations I made
to business groups throughout Southern California in the early nineties,
the typical reaction was, 'Why can't our government see the folly of the
drug war? It's just plain bad business, a gigantic waste of taxpayer money.'

A handful of politicians and even a police chief or two do favor
decriminalization. I know this because they whisper endorsements in the
privacy of their offices or over an adult beverage after a drug conference.
Why don't they speak up? They're scared. They think they'll be voted out of
office or forced to turn in their badges.

But they "misunderestimate" the wisdom, the common sense of their
constituencies. Americans want to see their tax dollars spent on prevention
and enforcement of predatory crimes, crimes that frighten them, take money
out of their pockets, restrict their freedoms and cause them to change the
way they live.