MORE ON DRUG JUSTICE

I have received e-mail asking if I meant that drugs should be legalized.
The intent in last week's column was not to push for legalizing drugs just
that there is no alternative given our present justice system.

Attempting to legislate changes in human behavior is a losing proposition,
as it ignores one important fact. Some humans are destined, whether by
genetics or diseases or downright orneriness to be socio-paths, criminals,
druggies, alcoholics, or perverts. Ignoring that fact is what makes our
present justice system a charade. It becomes a facade that makes people
feel good instead of correcting the problem.

Legalizing drugs, as abhorrent as it sounds, has to be considered because
the way the justice system is founded. That is why alcohol became legal.
The disgusting thing is that if laws cannot change a human, then it is all
right to make a profit off of his sickness. There are plenty of examples,
even a phrase for it called sin tax.

The drug war system needs careful scrutiny, perhaps even to be abolished
and replaced by one more humane and feasible, one that would not
discriminate against free people seeking their own destiny.

Societies are enclaves that try to eliminate all those that do not adhere
to their standards. Yet the outcasts have to go somewhere to survive
somehow. It is the needs of the outcasts that must be addressed, from a
simple extermination to an elaborate commune of their own.

Prisons are a poor substitute. Treatment of criminals by punishment assumes
that they are reclaimable, in spite of the recidivism experienced in the U.
S. It is an expensive cover-up of the inadequacy of those that are trained
to solve social problems and the penologists who greedily support them.

The quandary extant is that there is no solution to this problem once the
dictates of politics and religion are involved. The same conditions that
define the unacceptables make it impossible to take steps that will correct
the conditions. That is to say, laws enacted to protect the victim more
often protect the criminal. Our very basic beliefs are at stake. Men are
created equal before the law. Expanded that means all are innocent until
proven guilty. Even with a jury of our peers, mistakes are made and in our
courts the extension of primitive ideas become sophisticated machinations
in an upward spiral feeding on itself.

One example of handling outcasts occurred during the late 18th and early
19th centuries when England discharged most of its criminals to Australia,
then an open continent occupied by few human beings. The most important
factor was Britain's need to relieve its overcrowded prisons

Sadly, there are no empty continents to relieve our prisons of the
"unruly." The problem is formidable but the solution seems to lie in
accepting that humans will misbehave. One should realize that those nearest
the unruly suffer the greatest. There should be a method where the
sufferers would have due course without the legal interference and the
psychobabble now interposed.

There is no Utopia, just dreams of one. Trying to reach that ideal must be
negotiated, and one element is to correct the way we handle the drug problem.

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Arnie Adams is a freelance columnist who writes about current affairs. He
is retired from the US Coast Guard.
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