SADLY, DRUG LAWS STAY

I'm not usually big on anniversary stories, but this one is just too awful,
too expensive, too pointless to ignore.

Sadly, another year has passed without a repeal of the mindlessly harsh and
provably ineffective Rockefeller drug laws.

It's a shame ol' Nelson can't drop by and say hello at noon today, when a
big crowd of decent New Yorkers will gather on Third Avenue outside the
office of his latest successor, George Pataki.

Mothers whose daughters are serving life in prison for nonviolent drug
crimes. Fathers whose sons are doing 15-year minimums for being naive drug
mules. Brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and children and friends
and - well, the faces all fade together after a while. We now have 22,000
people in New York prisons on account of these cruel and senseless laws.

"If Rocky were still alive, I'm telling you he would be standing there with
the Mothers of the New York Disappeared," said Randy Credico of the William
Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, one of the main groups fighting to
repeal the Rockefeller drug laws. "His brother Laurance has already come
out publicly against the Rockefeller drug laws. He says Nelson was a man of
compassion. He would have realized these laws were a big mistake."

The evidence is that strong.

It was 29 years ago today, May 8, 1973, that the headstrong New York
governor, eager to burnish his crime-fighting image for the national stage,
strode into the ornate Red Room at the Capitol building in Albany. He held
an appropriately ornate pen. And he signed into law what he boasted would
be "the toughest anti-drug program in the nation!"

It wasn't just the absurdly long sentences, longer than the stretches
served by many murderers, rapists and arsonists. Equally bad, all
discretion, all common sense was purposely taken away from the judges. The
idea was that they couldn't be trusted. Rigidity was everything.

So first-time offenders would be treated just like hardened repeaters.
Couriers and lookouts would be handled the same as major kingpins
(although, in truth, very few kingpins have ever been netted under the
Rockefeller laws. The law has mostly captured the tiny minnows of the drug
trade - desperate, small-time addicts, earning their daily fix).

That day at the Capitol, 29 years ago, Rockefeller was triumphant. "We are
creating the strongest possible tools to protect our law-abiding citizens
from drug pushers," he declared.

History must have a sense of humor. Over time, the harsh New York drug laws
became known by the sponsoring governor's name.

And why not? Hardly anyone else seemed eager to claim ownership.

Rockefeller had been opposed on this not just by the usual civil
libertarians and liberal groups. Many conservatives warned his rigid plan
would only make things worse.

He'd fought "against this strange alliance of established interests,
political opportunists and misguided soft-liners who joined forces and
tried unsuccessfully to stop this program," he complained at the signing
ceremony.

Strange alliance?

"Well, the Judicial Conference opposed it, the district attorney's
association opposed it, there were police officials up here opposing it,"
he told reporters afterward.

Now there's a renowned trio of softies for you - judges, DAs and cops!

Apparently it didn't occur to the governor that maybe the whole
law-enforcement world hadn't gone suddenly weak-kneed. Maybe these judges,
DAs and cops had something over the billionaire governor. They'd actually
dealt with the issue of drugs in real life.

And what exactly has all this harshness bought on the New York drug front,
beside packing New York's prisons with nonviolent drug offenders, many
convicted of selling or possessing relatively minor amounts?

Almost nothing good. After 29 years, drugs are cheaper, more potent and
more plentiful than they've ever been.

And the prisons are far more crowded. In 2000, more than 44 percent of the
people sent to state prison in New York were locked up for drug crimes.
That's compared to 11 percent in 1980. The vast majority of these drug
prisoners were never convicted of any violent felony.

And someone's had to pay for this. Us.

Two billion dollars for new prisons, $675 million a year to feed, house and
secure the drug inmates. Since 1982, New York has opened 38 prisons, not
counting annexes, all in rural, mainly white areas, housing an increasingly
black and Latino population.

Illegal drug use cuts across racial and ethnic lines. Yet 94 percent of
those sent to prison under the Rockefeller laws are black or Latino.

Many events are planned for today's bleak anniversary. Sponsors include the
Drug Policy Alliance, the Kunstler Fund, the Legal Action Center, Justice
Works and other tireless souls.

Ads are appearing in Spanish-language papers today, since Latinos are a
major swing group on the drug-laws issue. Al Sharpton and Fernando Ferrer
have recorded phone messages, urging calls to Pataki's office.

The current governor in recent months has been saying he too wants to
reform the Rockefeller drug laws. So far, though, he's offered watered-down
proposals - and has failed to press even those.

Here's hoping the ghost of Nelson will haunt him today.