LOSING BATTLE

City Officials Question Success Of Ongoing Battle With Drugs

While Richard Nixon was a central figure to the Vietnam War - one of
the most unpopular and divisive conflicts in the history of the United
States - another battle he began rivals its reputation.

The war on drugs has been a continuous force in American politics and
justice for the past 30 years, at a cost of over half a trillion
dollars, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. But as drug-related
cases crowd jails around the country and a seemingly endless supply of
illegal drugs and drug dealers rush to satisfy the black market, the
fight is accumulating a long list of casualties and few victories.

Concerns peaked in Syracuse, however, after the Report on the Syracuse
Police Department Activity for 2002 revealed that the drug war
consumes a large portion of the department's resources.

"The catalyst was the budget hearings where the police, year after
year, reported that they had 280,000 calls. That's sort of an
unbelievable number," said Minchin Lewis, former city auditor. "I
started with a simply inquiry: How many arrests are there, and is that
number reliable?"

Despite a record number of arrests, the resulting report found that if
the strategy were successful in ending the drug war, the police would
already have run out of Syracuse citizens to arrest.

(Insert) "Our city is a frontline victim in the war on drugs." -
Minchin Lewis, former city auditor

For eight years, Lewis attended neighborhood meetings, speaking to
city residents about their concerns.

During that time, Lewis said the universal concern was not the use of
drugs, but the problems that accompany the drug trade and affect the
rest of the community.

"People talk about the violence, the disruption of the neighborhood,
the cars driving up and down the streets," Lewis said. "There's
nothing scarier than having people outside your house at 3 o'clock in
the morning, yelling and fighting."

The study, conducted by the Department of Audit, concluded that
drug-related incidents result in the largest category of police
arrests in Syracuse, numbering over 6,300 in 2002 and accounting for
about 22 percent of the total, with 11 in the Syracuse University area
bounded by Westcott Street, Comstock Avenue and East Genesee Street.
The majority occurred in poor, mostly black areas of the city, where
police anti-drug activity has focused.

The long-standing policy of the police has been to shut down "drug
houses," either due to community complaints or an investigation. In
doing so, however, the study found that another house would simply
open up, putting police back at square one.

Even more tragic, Lewis said, a drug conviction removes eligibility
for affordable housing, forcing many low-income families to split up
or move to non-public housing.

"The policy has led to the breakdown of families that might otherwise
make it," Lewis said.

In the process of raids, many of the houses were also simply made
unusable, Lewis said. A police raid structurally damages the building,
and those inside would flush drugs down the plumbing, ruining it, and
leaving more government-owned vacant housing in low-income
neighborhoods.

"They're doing an incredibly difficult job," Lewis said. "The problem
is that the job we're asking them to do - which they're doing
heroically - is the wrong job."

(Insert) "The main effect of prohibition is to drive the market
underground." - Jeffrey Miron, free market economist

Like the alcohol trade of the roaring '20s, an underground market for
illegal drugs has developed that is lucrative and completely
uncontrollable by the federal government, according to Miron, a Boston
University professor, who has studied drug markets for the last 15
years.

The higher prices offered on drugs create not only a supply of readily
available narcotics, but also a labor market for traffickers and
dealers interested in getting a share of the $65-billion-a-year
nationwide demand, Miron said. As this underground market develops,
competition and the hope for profits drive down the cost of creating
and distributing the drugs, while the purity and potency go up.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, the estimated mark-up on
drugs in underground markets approaches 1700 percent of what the cost
would be if it were legal.

"There is such an obscene profit motive that we believe an army of
police officers will never arrest our way out of it," said Jack Cole,
executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a former
undercover narcotics officer. "Every arrest is a job opening."

As competition intensifies among dealers, the effects are felt by the
community: Crime increases, money is diverted from social spending to
the war on drugs, civil liberties are reduced and society loses, Miron
said.

"The answer is to legalize it," Miron said. "Then you don't have to go
to some dealer to buy it. You can buy it at the corner drug or hemp
store."

Miron estimated that if the Syracuse Police treated marijuana like
alcohol - only issuing appearance tickets and fines for having or
using the drug in public - it would save the city $500,000 a year. If
the policy were broadened to include all drugs, it would approach $1
million.

Courses of action, however, are limited.

"The problem is that from a policing model, we enforce laws we're
given," said Chief of Police Steven Thompson. "Until laws get changed,
we have to continue to do what we do."

Even more challenging is the task of dismantling the drug war
regime.

"There's something in the war on drugs for everyone - not just the
dealer," Cole said.

An undercover narcotics officer for more than 20 years, Cole was among
the first crop of officers hired after Nixon prioritized the war on
drugs and provided funding for police departments across the country
to strengthen anti-drug units.

As a result of funding, the size and aggressiveness of anti-narcotic
units exploded, Cole said. To justify the spending, police began
pursing strategies to boost arrest figures, including racial profiling
and the infiltration of social circles.

While the strategies were effective in boosting arrests, Cole alleges
that it did nothing more than create the drug problem that prevails
today, and now that the "war" is entrenched in American life, removing
it will be a battle of its own.

According to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
United States spent $167 billion on policing, corrections and judicial
and legal activities in 2001. In the 21 years between 1980 and 2001,
spending on prisons rose from $541 million to almost $5.2 billion,
which corresponds to an 850 percent increase in those serving prison
terms on drug charges.

Federal drug offenders accounted for about 56 percent of the total
federal prison population, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

But for many, the most disturbing aspect of the prison trends is that
blacks account for 42 percent of those in prison on drug charges,
according to the Federal Household Survey.

(Insert) "The people that we're arresting don't seem to be from
Manlius or Liverpool. There's a racial component, and we need to look
at this." - Tim McCarthy, jail ministry

Lewis said exact statistics were not available to describe how race
plays into the drug war in the city, but he said the majority of those
arrested were black.

"There was a very strong correlation between areas that were
low-income African-American populations and arrests," Lewis said.
"Ninety percent of the people who use drugs are not from the inner
city."

The audit showed that drug arrests occurred mostly in six
neighborhoods: the South West side, Valley West, Central Business
District South, South East Side, Near South West Side and Near West
Side, which are located in the "urban core of the city" and composed
primarily of minorities.

Mark David Blum, a local lawyer who graduated from Syracuse
University's College of Law in 1991, has practiced in the city for
almost 10 years, handling civil rights and drug-related cases.

For him, the drug war is an ongoing struggle to maintain the rights
and liberties of those who live in the city.

"The reason that profiling is relevant is that you have to understand
the environmental psychology of what's going on," Blum said. "When you
live in the city - places like Kennedy Square, Cherry Hill - you have
a lot of blocks stacked up on top of one another and nowhere to go."

Blum said that those arrested on drug charges are often groups of
young blacks socializing in the only environment available. The police
stop them for loitering or a similar charge, and upon searching them,
it escalates into a drug misdemeanor or felony.

According to the audit, 595 arrests of this nature occurred in 2002.
These cases were instead considered by police as "suspicious persons"
incidents or a similar, non-drug-related category.

Even more telling of the widespread effect of the drug war on city
residents is the fact that the majority of young men in the
alternative education programs of the Syracuse City School District
have fathers that are incarcerated, according to the audit.

"There is a pattern of drug-related crimes, violence, arrests,
incarceration and life on the streets," according to the audit. "And
then the cycle repeats itself in the next generation."

Life beyond incarceration can be just as bleak as a prison sentence,
Blum said, pointing out that even after serving a sentence, many
convicted on drug charges are denied or ineligible for public housing,
student loans and other opportunities for assistance.

"People who did their time, paid their debt to society, are not
criminals," Blum said. "But once they get that conviction, that's it,
they're not going to get hired."

Still, Blum is optimistic that options are available. He urged the
city to "opt out of the drug war" by decriminalizing drugs as much as
possible by directing police to avoid any misdemeanor drug violations,
which are legally left to the officer's discretion.

By condemning the drug war, just like it condemned the War in Iraq,
the Common Council could take the initiative, he says, or even set an
agenda for other cities to follow.

"It isn't a question of how you want to change the Rockefeller drug
laws," Blum said, "but how you want to get rid of them."