LOCAL VIEW - THE YEAR IN DRUG WARS

Expensive Drug War Still Not Working

Well, it's the end of another year and time for what has become for me
an annual update on our glorious "war on drugs." Before I begin my
usual summary of the amount of money spent and the number of people
arrested and other "hard data," I thought I would first offer a few
headlines and news items that I have collected.

One headline, dated Nov. 12, was "Austin, Texas, Cop Killed Enforcing
Marijuana Possession Law." This one is from the website
www.stopthedrugwar.org. This group began to keep tabs on the number of
police officers killed each year while enforcing the drug laws. They
found that last year there was an average of just more than one per
month.

Then there was a Nov. 13 story about a vote in Ann Arbor, Mich., in
which 74 percent approved "an amendment decriminalizing the use of
marijuana for medical reasons." However, the local police chief said
his department would ignore the new law and continue to enforce all
marijuana laws as it always had.

Meanwhile, another kind of drug "trafficker," Merck, was under
investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning
Vioxx, a painkiller, which was withdrawn from the market this past
March because it increased the risk of heart attacks in long-term
users. A story in the New York Times ("Justice Dept. and S.E.C.
Investigating Merck Drug," Nov. 9) said the company had received a
subpoena from the Justice Department "requesting information related
to the company's research, marketing and selling activities with
respect to Vioxx." It said the request was related to a "federal
health care investigation under criminal statutes."

We know a lot about drug companies and the dangerous drugs they
produce doing far greater harm to people than the so-called
"narcotics" that have been targeted in the "war on drugs." However,
our "drug warriors" continue to engage in all sorts of predawn raids,
busting down doors and searching for drugs, in an obsessive manner not
unlike Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. All of this is underscored by
rampant racism.

A story out of Texas is illustrative.

The headline reads "The Usual Suspects" (Texas Observer, Nov. 5), with
the subhead, "Were There Really 72 Crack Dealers in Rural Anderson
County?" I'll quote directly from the story: "It began, as many drug
stings do, with a lucky break.

In November 2002, a traffic cop pulled over a driver ferrying crack
cocaine on U.S. Highway 79 into the small East Texas town of Palestine
[population 17,000]. Police believed they had caught a glimpse into a
drug ring that was smuggling crack from Houston and Dallas into rural
Anderson County, 40 miles southwest of Tyler. The Dogwood Trails
Narcotics Task Force, a regional alliance of local, state and federal
law enforcement, promptly launched an investigation." It just so
happens that all 72 "crack dealers" are black. While it is true that
there were a few dealers (four were among those arrested), but all the
rest merely possessed small amounts and yet were charged as being
"dealers." A third of the defendants had no priors and were "charged
with delivering crack to a single confidential informant.

None of the deliveries exceeded four grams.

In some instances, it was less than a gram. That's about the size of a
Sweet'N Low packet. Many of the suspects appear to be poor crack
addicts swept up in the drug sting.

Charged as dealers, they now face sentences of 20 years to life in
state prison." The ACLU has discovered wrongdoing all over the state
by the "Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force," which was involved in
this bust. According to an ACLU study, while blacks represent 12
percent of Texas' population and are no more likely than whites to use
drugs, 70 percent of drug offenders in Texas prisons are black.

Speaking of prisons, several reports during the year have noted that
the incarceration rate keeps going up. In November the Justice
Department released figures showing almost 1.5 million in prison, with
the largest growth coming from women.

In California it was recently noted that more than 1,000 are serving
life sentences for drug offenses because of the notorious
"three-strikes" law (a reform of this law went down to defeat last
month).

Meanwhile, ignorance continues to run amok concerning medical
marijuana, as Oregon became the latest state to strike down an
initiative that would have increased access to medical marijuana by
increasing the amounts patients and caregivers could possess and by
creating a system of state-regulated medical marijuana dispensaries.
It would also have directed counties to make free medical marijuana
available to indigent patients.

Finally, we come to the year-end statistics on the drug war. The
latest figures show that we spent just more than $50 billion on this
"war" in 2004, while more than 1.5 million people were arrested for
drugs (more than 726,000 for pot, almost all for mere possession) and
more than 10,000 were sent to prison on a drug conviction. For all
this money and effort we find that illegal drugs are about as easy to
get as ever and the percentage of those experimenting with drugs
remains about the same, while the illegal drug market remains a
worldwide bonanza for profits--and this includes the money flowing
into the coffers of the criminal justice system, as total expenditures
for the system approach the $200 billion mark and career opportunities
grow. Happy holidays!

Note: Randall G. Shelden is a criminal justice professor at UNLV. His
website is www.sheldensays.com