HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/case.for.decrim

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 9KB | 135 lines

Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
From: Helen Nusbaum <[e-mail]>
Subject: The War On Drugs and the Case For Decriminalization
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 1993 08:15:10 GMT

              The War On Drugs and the Case For Decriminalization
                       Copyright 1992 by Steven Meinrath

     During the recent presidential debates the candidates were asked a
surprising question.  Given the utter failure of the War On Drugs and, given
the endorsement of the notion by such noted liberal thinkers as William F.
Buckley, Jr. and George Schultz, would any of the candidates ever consider
taking any steps in the direction of decriminalizing drugs?  Not surprisingly,
the answer was no.  The fact that the question was even asked in such a forum
is a measure of the degree of respectability the issue has gained in recent
years.  This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

     The first time I wrote to urge the decriminalizing of drugs was in 1978
while a probation officer in San Francisco.  Although I fully expected to
become a pariah at the Probation Department, I found a surprising degree of
support for my position among my colleagues.  Since that time the ranks of
those urging the repeal of all criminal penalties for personal drug use has
grown each year.  For those of us in particular who work in the criminal
justice system and are confronted daily with the horrendous results of the War
On Drugs, the notion that we need to take an entirely new approach to drug
abuse resonates well.  Of course, this is not a universally held belief.  A
large number of people, an entire industry in fact, profits immensely from the
huge amount of money taxpayers spend each year on efforts to suppress the drug
trade.  Others support the current prohibition on these substances for a
variety of other reasons.  But for an increasing number of criminal justice
professionals, drug use is looking more and more like a health care issue and
less like an issue that can be resolved by the criminal justice system.

     By far the greatest costs to society come not from the use of the outlawed
substances themselves but from the fact that we have chosen to outlaw them.  In
a recent article in Criminal Justice magazine, the publication of the American
Bar Association's section on criminal justice, Rufus King, former Chair of that
section, writes that, according to National Institute on Drug Abuse statistics,
deaths related to cocaine/crack in 1990 numbered 2,483 and from heroin/morphine
1,976.  (King, The Unwinnable War On Drugs, Why The ABA Should Pull Out (Fall
1992) Criminal Justice at p. 10.) Taking these figures into account as well as
those for all hospital emergency-room admissions which contained any reference
to an illegal drug (80,355 for cocaine/crack and 33,884 for heroin/morphine),
King concludes,In short, the damage done by these two most feared substances
(by the substances themselves, of course, not by the warring and disruptions of
the ubiquitous black market they sustain) is in the same range as spills from
bicycles and household accidents.  And in the entire history of drug use, no
one has ever recorded an indisputable instance of death attributable solely to
marijuana/hashish.  (Id.)

     By comparison, King points out, deaths from smoking tobacco in 1990
numbered over 400,000 and from drinking alcohol over 100,000.  These figures do
not include drunk-driving fatalities and other under-the-influence related
deaths and injuries.  Critics of decriminalization respond that the fact that
the damage done by legal drugs far outdistances that done by illegal drugs
demonstrates that prohibition works.  Remove the criminal sanctions for drug
use and youUll have just as many crackheads as we now have alcoholics.  There
are two problems with this argument: it presupposes that the only reason the
vast majority of people have never smoked crack or shot heroin is due to the
fear of arrest and incarceration if they got caught; and it completely ignores
the enormous "collateral damage" from the War On Drugs.

     If you think the drug prohibition works you should go out and campaign for
the recriminalization of alcohol and for the first-ever criminalization of
tobacco.  But before you do, consider this:  Former Surgeon-General C.  Everett
Koop once testified before a startled congressional committee that tobacco is
just as addictive as heroin.  One particularly incredulous committee-member (an
equally distinguished physician, no doubt) dismissed this as poppycock and
exclaimed, 'you don't see anyone out there breaking into people's houses to get
money to buy cigarettes, do you?' To which the Surgeon-General replied, 'if you
make it illegal, they will.' The point is, no matter how harmful the substance,
attempts by government to coerce people through the application of criminal
sanctions into not ingesting it carries a much greater cost to society at large
than allowing individuals to choose their own poison.

     The whole issue of drug use is a complex one and should not be
oversimplified.  However, the costs of continuing the current policy, the
"collateral damage" from the War On Drugs, is more than we can afford.  These
costs include, to name just a few, the drive-by shootings and other street
level violence that results from the competition in the black market for drugs;
the burglaries, robberies and thefts of all kinds by addicts forced to pay
grossly inflated black market prices for the drugs to which they have become
addicted; the inability of addicts, including pregnant women, to seek medical
care due to the fear of being incarcerated if their addiction is discovered and
the attendant costs, human and financial, of treating their drug-addicted
babies; the spread of AIDS; the astronomical cost of police, prosecutors
defense attorneys, probation officers, court personnel, correctional personnel
(not to mention courtrooms and prisons) all of whom are employed in the futile
effort to chase down, arrest, try, convict and incarcerate drug users.

     This utilization of judicial resources in turn imposes what is becoming an
unbearable burden on the entire justice system.  And, of course, volumes could
be written on the price we have all paid in terms of the rights we have lost as
courts and legislatures across the country, caught up in Drug War hysteria,
have condoned ever greater invasions of privacy by government agents, and
trampled over a myriad of well-established Constitutional protections.  For
those who believe in a more authoritarian society, the War On Drugs has been a
convenient vehicle to achieve that end.

     Perhaps the most ironic argument raised against any deviation from the
current path is that removing criminal penalties for drug use amounts to
genocide against minority communities.  This argument is made persistently by
such bona fide spokespersons for the interests of minorities and the
dispossessed as A.M.  Rosenthal of the New York Times.  Tragically, this
position is also taken by certain, although by no means all, politicians from
the African- American community such as Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep.  Charles
Rangle (Dem.-New York).  The tragedy is that the "collateral damage" from the
Drug War inevitably hits hardest in the minority communities.

     Arnold S. Trebach, President of the Washington D.C.-based Drug Policy
Foundation, responded recently to Rosenthal's cry of genocide by pointing out
the virtual state of siege imposed on many inner-city communities as a result
of the Drug War.  "The constant intimidation by drug dealers and the constant
suspicion by police of innocent, law abiding community residents has been an
unavoidable outgrowth of the drug war."  Because these communities bear the
brunt of the misguided War On Drugs, they also stand to benefit the most from a
more rational, health-care oriented approach to the problem of addiction.

     Recent studies have demonstrated that, while drug use is spread among all
socio-economic groups, law enforcement efforts are aimed primarily at drug use
among minorities and the poor.  Marc Mauer, assistant director of the
Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research group, summed it up: "We treat
middle-class drug use as a public health problem, we generally treat
lower-class drug use as a criminal justice problem."  It is time we stop
pretending the criminal justice system can solve the nation's drug problem.  It
is time we treat all drug use as a public health problem.

(Steven Meinrath is an attorney in Sacramento, California)