CLUB IN SALISBURY LIGHTS UP, SORT OF

SALISBURY-After Peter Christ's talk Tuesday at the Salisbury Rotary
Club's weekly meeting, an elderly man stood up and challenged Mr.
Christ's unconventional argument that the national drug policy is
failing. "Are they all wrong and you're right?" the man asked. "Are
the states and the federal government wrong and you're right?"

"The fact that one person or a group of people is for or against
something doesn't make it right," Mr. Christ rejoined from a podium,
dressed in a maroon shirt and dark slacks, his waist-length ponytail
hanging behind him.

Mr. Christ, a police captain in a large Buffalo suburb for 20 years
before retiring in 1989, favors decriminalizing all drugs, regulating
them and bringing them to the market with age restrictions similar to
those placed on alcohol and cigarettes.

Such an approach, he said, would eliminate crime associated with drug
trafficking, would free the legal and prison systems from a staggering
volume of drug-related cases and would put drug addiction in its
proper place, making it a medical problem rather than a criminal one.
At the same time, he claimed, the change would not drastically
increase drug use.

It's a policy issue, he said, and the war on drugs is a policy that
Americans are hesitant to discuss. Though Salisbury is largely
affluent and conservative, Rotary members organized Mr. Christ's
appearance to hear his message and bring to the floor a topic that is
anything but boring.

"Policy is something we fall back on when things don't work. ..." Mr.
Christ said. "If I want something in a store, for example, and the
employee says, 'Sorry, I can't give you that. It's company policy,'
there's nothing you can say. Policy is fixed and forgotten. We have a
drug policy in America that we don't talk about. We just talk about
how to make it work.

"We call this policy 'the war on drugs,' which is a wonderful term,
because by using 'war,' there is the implication that it will be over,
that it can be won," he said. "Secondly, we don't like people who
speak against our wars. They're suspect. They're less loyal ... as
everyone else because they're not on the bandwagon."

Mr. Christ came to the Rotary meeting as a representative of the
Syracuse, N.Y.-based group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which
he helped to create last March.

The organization is run by a five-member board of directors and a 10-
member advisory board composed of current and former judges, police
officers, prosecutors and others involved in the nation's war on
drugs. Mr. Christ said he hoped it would gain the same credibility and
respect obtained by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1960s,
and show that dissatisfaction with the drug war has spread to many
aspects of society.

Drug prohibition doesn't work, Mr. Christ said, just as it didn't work
in the 1920s and 30s, when the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
outlawed alcohol. But he qualified the point, saying that removing
prohibitions couldn't be extended to all crimes-it would only be
successful, he said, in "consensual crimes."

"The difference between crimes with victims, like rape, murder,
robbery, and so on, and consensual crime is profound," he said.
"Consensual crimes are committed between two or more consenting
adults, and they're all happy about it. For example, I make a bet with
you, you win, and we're happy. The laws against consensual crime
create more crime. ... "

In addition to preventing drug-related violence, corruption, and other
negative consequences of the illegal narcotics trade, legalization and
regulation would yield cleaner drugs, removing laced and adulterated
drugs from the market, Mr. Christ argued.

"We're good at controlling and regulating things," he said. "And we're
good at preventing people from harming one another. But we're not good
at preventing people from harming themselves."

Mr. Christ tried to assuage the fear that wide availability of drugs
through legalization would boost drug use. He said that drugs are
already easily available, and that drug use is a choice dictated not
by laws but by desires.

"If I offered $1,000 to anybody to return to this room in 24 hours
with some crack, and guaranteed immunity from prosecution, how many
people would come back with the drugs?" Mr. Christ asked the
somewhat-stunned Rotary audience