BIG EASY OFFERS ONLY TOUGH CHOICES FOR AMERICA'S DRUG WAR

With unemployed middlemen and roaming dealers claiming new turf, New
Orleans is a microcosm of the failed 'war on drugs', writes Ethan Brown

Drug policy chiefs have had few concrete successes in convincing the
public or policymakers to retrench in the decades-long drug war. But
when the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) held its international Drug
Policy Reform conference in New Orleans recently there was the sense
that its time - and place - were finally right.

Just a few days before the conference kicked off at the Astor Crowne
Plaza in the French Quarter, the November 27 issue of Rolling Stone
featured a sprawling, 15,000-word investigation by Ben Wallace-Wells
into the US failed drug policy called How America Lost the War on Drugs.

Though anti-drug war broadsides are about as common in Rolling Stone
as paeans to the late Hunter S Thompson, Wells' piece was unusually
effective because it was not about the unappreciated pleasures of
psychedelia but instead a methodical assessment of the high costs and
low benefits of highly-punitive drug policies employed by the US.

Indeed, in praising the piece as the "smartest drug story of the
year," Slate's Jack Shafer compared Wells to "an auditor called in to
assess the wreck of a Fortune 500 company". And there could certainly
be no more appropriate place for the Drug Policy Alliance to bring
its anti-prohibitonist message than New Orleans - Louisiana has the
highest incarceration rate in the US, yet still has still has
extraordinarily high levels of drug use, drug dealing and drug
related homicide.

Unsurprisingly, it was a pair of panel discussions about the
flourishing of the drug trade and collapse of the criminal justice
system in New Orleans - Drug cultures in post-Katrina New Orleans and
Post-Katrina, can New Orleans afford to keep fighting the failed 'war
on drugs?' - that yielded the deepest and most unexpected insights.

A team of sociologists and criminologists with the National
Development and Research Institutes (NDRI), a New York-based
non-profit research and educational organisation which conducts
studies in public health and criminal justice policy, provided
near-novelistic accounts of the changes in the drug business in New
Orleans since the storm.

Interviews with more than 100 drug dealers and users in New Orleans
and Katrina turned up stories like: white crystal meth cookers
instructing black crack dealers on how to cook up the drug on their
kitchen stoves; an explosion in heroin use and availability that has
resulted in the drug being consumed in all manner of strange and
fascinating ways from heroin-laced gumbo sold for $10 a cup, to
tightly-rolled marijuana blunts packed with the drug; dealers from
storm-wracked neighborhoods moving into surrounding areas and
clashing with established dealers (this may go far in explaining the
current murder epidemic in New Orleans); and, perhaps most
disturbingly, thousands of "emancipated youths" (teenagers returning
to New Orleans to live on their own, with absolutely no parental
supervision) entering into the drug game in order to support
themselves financially.

The NDRI team also catalogued the criminal justice meltdown in New
Orleans in devastating detail, from the immediate aftermath of the
storm when few parts were up and running to today, when they are
operating yet highly dysfunctional.

Soon after the storm receded, a makeshift court and jail was set up
at the New Orleans Amtrak station, dubbed "Camp Amtrak" by local law
enforcement officials. Working conditions at "Camp Amtrak" were so
horrendous that the district attorney actually worked from the
station's gift shop. Since then, the DA has worked in temporary
quarters on Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans and has struggled
to keep up with the surge in robbery, murder and drug cases.

In 2006, the city infamously released 3,000 suspects under Article
701 of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure, and this year has
not been much better - there were 580 so-called 701 releases in
January alone. The sense among hustlers that there is a near-total
lack of consequences for their actions has actually eliminated
employment in at least one level of the drug business according to
the DPRI sociologists and criminologists.

Before Katrina, drug dealers would use intermediaries to get product
to customers who wouldn't enter certain neighborhoods (for example,
the French Quarter visitor looking for cocaine who didn't want to
venture into predominantly black neighborhoods like Treme or Mid-City
was served by an intermediary).

Since the storm, dealers have grown so bold that they sell directly
to just about anyone on the streets, a big break in tradition in the
drug business - particularly crack - in which selling to unfamiliar
customers is verboten as they often turn out to be informants or
undercover cops. "The dealer does not think there is any likelihood
of arrest or conviction," explained DPRI's Stanley Hoogerwerf, "so he
has eliminated the intermediary, who is now added to the ranks of
unemployed in New Orleans".

Interestingly, as described by the DPRI team, the plight of the
post-Katrina street hustler - stressed out by the loss of their place
of residence and skyrocketing living expenses ranging from higher
heating bills to rent - is remarkably similar to the average
overburdened New Orleanian. That strain, unsurprisingly, is soothed
by a boom in demand for prescription pills like Xanax and Valium
which are increasingly sold by New Orleans hustlers along with the
stable of illicit substances like cocaine, meth and marijuana.

Indeed, New Orleans-based rapper Lil Wayne had a huge hit this year
with his woozy ode to sedatives I Feel Like Dying. In the song, Wayne
rhapsodises about being a prisoner behind "Xanax bars" (high dosage
pills of Xanax are dubbed "bars" on the streets because they resemble
miniature chocolate bars).

Given the widespread abuse of illegal substances (and the illegal use
of legal substances) the options for in-patient rehab in New Orleans
are surprisingly sparse. Else Pedersen-Wasson, executive director of
substance abuse treatment centre Bridge House, explained on the
separate discussion panel that the few in-patient rehab beds in the
city are quickly filled when they (rarely) become available, indeed,
by one estimate there are just 200 such beds in all of New Orleans.

It would be comforting to think that New Orleans is uniquely
dysfunctional, unfortunately, however, the criminal neglect that
characterises the state of the criminal justice system in New Orleans
- - huge resources allocated toward arrest and incarceration while
rehabilitation is left high and dry - is mirrored across the country.

That's precisely what made the DPA's message of treating drugs as a
public health rather than criminal justice issue so powerful, even
though the conference itself could have used more purely analytical
voices like Leap (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), who offered
stories at several panels about making waves of arrests and then
realising that they'd made little or no dent in the drug trade.

Coincidentally, on the second day of the conference, the justice
department released a report stating that there were approximately
2.38 million people incarcerated in state and federal facilities as
of 2006. Of those incarcerated, 905,600 are African-American, an all-time high.

Yet, as the wave of arrests and incarceration crests, there are signs
that the tide may be turning against US drug policy. Virginia
Democratic Senator Jim Webb recently held hearings on mass
incarceration in which he proclaimed that "with the world's largest
prison population, our prisons test the limits of our democracy and
push the boundaries of our moral identity".

At a DPA conference panel called Black America: The debate within,
Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury enthusiastically
praised Webb's fearlessness on such a politically unappealing issue
to rapturous applause from the packed ballroom.

Few politicians, Loury said wryly, are "in a rush to declare the drug
war a failure". Perhaps the increasingly glaring policy failures of
the drug war in New Orleans and in the rest of the country will cause
other lawmakers to follow Webb's brave lead.