IT'S ALL ABOUT THE DRUG MONEY

People who have worked in the news industry a long time like to think
they're street smart when it comes to crime and cops.

That includes me.

Until last week, I had always assumed undercover police officers went
out of their way to avoid detection, operating like cats in the night,
so that nobody knew who they were or what they were doing.

That assumption went out the window last week.

For two days I watched Chicago police tactical officers wage their own
war on drugs on the West Side in the Harrison District, where
historically the crime rate is the highest and the streets the most
dangerous.

The experience not only exposed certain gaps in my own education, it
made me question more than ever if we will ever make a dent in the
drug crisis in this country.

You've probably read or heard about Operation Double Play. Begun in
late August, it is an intense initiative by Chicago police to rid
high-crime neighborhoods of two epidemics: open-air drug markets and
the homicides they spawn. It is intended to be a one-two punch, one
prong targeting buyers, the other targeting sellers. The goal is to
drive each out of the neighborhood and the violence with it.

Roll call began at 2 p.m. Thirty minutes later four marked, Police
Department squadrols left Area 4 headquarters on Harrison Street and
Kedzie Avenue and headed down Van Buren Street, parallel with the
Eisenhower Expressway. Their destination was a low-rise building at
300 S. Maplewood Ave. It is what's left of the Chicago Housing
Authority's Rockwell Gardens.

When the doors of those oversized police wagons flew open, close to 70
plainclothes tactical officers jumped out in plain sight.

You couldn't miss them if you tried.

People in that neighborhood cheered. Mothers and their children came
outside to sit on a battered playground and watch.

Gangbanger drug dealers working the area fled like the wind.

The white officers disappeared into "The Hole," that is the lobby of
the building, securing the area and setting up what would be a
processing operation.

The black officers stayed outside to man "The Spot." Dressed in
do-rags, jeans and gold chains, they became the "drug dealers,"
calling out "Rocks and blows!" (in other words, cocaine and heroin).
"Two for the price of one! Whatcha want? Whatcha need?"

In less than four hours, 102 buyers were in plastic handcuffs and on
their way to lockup. Black. White. Hispanic. Male. Female. Old. Young.
Local. Out of state.

Many were hard-core addicts. One of the hardest of the hard core was
only 19. Michelle is from Western Springs, an affluent white suburb
where the median income is $98,000 and the median price of a house is
$323,000.

More than geography separates Western Springs from the West
Side.

And yet Michelle, without blinking an eye, said she'd been "scoring
heroin on the West Side since I was 15."

Amazingly, this was the third time in five days that Chicago police
had targeted this one building. Regardless, buyers kept coming back.

Those arrested were charged with a misdemeanor, attempting to purchase
narcotics.

In less than 24 hours they were booked and released.

The police did their work efficiently and well. But it raises the
question: What long-term good did it do?

One answer is that the homicide rate on the West Side is down 75
percent from what it was a year ago. That's the good news.

The bad news is about the war on drugs. If the buyers are an ant army
of addiction, the street sellers are an endless stream of people
willing to risk prison to make big money.

They are people like Kenny, age 39, who was busted by undercover
officers the next day for selling rock cocaine. He told me he had
gotten out of prison just five days earlier. Think about that.

The drug problem is all about the money.

Somebody replaced Kenny and was out there to sell to someone like
Michelle before police got back to the station.

It's about the money.

That's why some very respected voices for a long time have argued for
legalization.

One of them is Richard Dennis, a multimillionaire futures trader and
Chicago philanthropist who has argued for years that if drugs are
criminal then mostly criminals will profit from the drug laws. He
argues it's time to attack the profitability, not the morality.

Even those who oppose legalization forcefully believe we have done
nothing to really attack the money end of the dope business.

Tom Donahue runs High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, a federal
initiative with a mission to coordinate federal and local law
enforcement to coherently attack drugs on the street.

What still is missing, Donahue says, is a federal mandate--with tools
to match--to go after the top of the drug food chain, with an emphasis
on currency exchanges and banks that launder the money that
street-corner hustlers and their suppliers collect every day.

Whether you agree with Dennis or Donahue, they each are saying
something that we should listen to.

It's time to go after the money.