DON'T FRAME DRUG POLICY AS A MORAL WAR

In 1998, the Drug Enforcement Administration sent its Mobile
Enforcement Team into Benton Harbor, Mich., while state troopers
patrolled the crime-ridden streets. With 42 arrests, the DEA struck a
major blow at the drug ring responsible for some 90 percent of violent
crime in the city.

In congressional testimony the following year, the DEA boasted: "After
the intervention of law enforcement officers Benton Harbor was
being brought back to life. They brought a sense of stability to
the area."

This was wishful thinking. Not only has there been no lasting effect
on the drug trade, resentment of outside law enforcement in Benton
Harbor recently has exploded into riots. Residents of the crime-ridden
and depressed city see police as an occupying force.

Outsiders find it hard to believe that residents of dangerous
communities -- those most in need of police services -- can be anti-
police. Our drug laws create this paradox.

I policed ground zero in our "war" on drugs on the streets of
Baltimore. Police in such circumstances do the best they can. But
faced with constant levels of drug-related violence and hostility, one
should not expect the model for Officer Friendly.

The pattern is always the same: a poor community ravaged by drugs, a
history of real and perceived police misconduct, a racially charged
spark, then riots.

Liberals are correct to note that rioting does not happen in the
absence of poverty, poor education and poor policing. Conservatives
are right to blame the individual rioters. But both sides miss the
central point: Eighty years of failed drug prohibition have destroyed
swaths of urban America. While the damage from heroin and cocaine use
is real and severe, prohibition creates an illegal market based on
cash, guns and violence. While drug use can destroy an individual, the
illegal and violent drug trade destroys whole neighborhoods.

Drug prohibition criminalizes large segments of the population, even
the majority in some areas. Police can't hire from some areas they
police because not enough men reach hiring age without a drug conviction.

We need to accept the fact that drug addiction is a personal and
medical problem. We need to push violent dealers off the street, even
if it means tolerating inconspicuous and peaceful indoor drug dealing.

Drug dealers see themselves as businessmen. Arrest one and another
will quickly move to take the market.

We should learn from our already legal recreational drugs, tobacco and
alcohol. In 40 years, cigarette smoking has decreased by half. Public
education hammered home the harm and changed attitudes toward tobacco.
And, for the most part, people are happy with their localities
regulating alcohol sales. For both tobacco and alcohol, high taxation
discourages new users and raises money for education.

We should implement similar policies for drug use. Treat drug abuse as
a medical problem. Separate the problems of drug use from the violence
of the drug trade. Acknowledge that drugs are bad, but don't frame
drug policy as a moral war against evil.

Until we do these things, people in communities such as Benton Harbor
will be under siege and sparks will set off riots.

~~~~~~~~~~~
The writer, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Harvard, worked two
years as a Baltimore city police officer. He wrote this for The
Washington Post