From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 15:06 PDT Subject: 5 articles from Police News Message-ID: <1484000592@cdp> Now on this newsgroup find five articles OCRed from the Spring '94 issue of Police of Police News. I was quite surprised at the anti-WOD content. Hopefully these articles will be widely distributed. The articles by Judge James Gray and Judge Rose are jsut as expected, but you may be delighted to see similar sentiments from Milton Friedman, George Schultz, WilliamBuckley and the editor-in-chief of this "cop" mag. Jim ============================================================================= From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 14:58 PDT Subject: Judge Rose in Police News Message-ID: <1484000587@cdp> A World Gone Mad By Ronald W. Rose United States Magistrate Judge In Police News Spring 94 Twenty years ago as a young prosecutor, my job was to put people in jail for dealing in drugs. As a result, many were convicted. I was absolutely certain that vigorous enforcement and long jail terms was the way to go. I had every confidence that throwing resources, manpower, additional judges, mandatory minimum sentences, life without parole, etc., etc., etc., would soon solve the problem. Within a few months, I tried another drug case involving the largest (at that time~ cocaine seizure in the history of Florida - 23 pounds. It was front page news for days. These defendants were likewise convicted and are probably still in prison. Has this solved anything? In my opinion, absolutely nothing was accomplished, except I got to chalk up another victory at a cost to the taxpayers of thousands of dollars each year, for clothing and feeding these dregs of society. Instead of seizing pounds of cocaine, we now seize buildings full of the stuff. The drug lords in South America are laughing at us all the way to the bank. They know that for every mule or mid-level dealer we take out, there are fifty more waiting to take their place. There is just so much money to be made that the slim chance of being caught is always worth the risk. Believe me, after twenty years as a prosecutor and judge, I can assure you that we only catch the stupid ones. In disadvantaged neighborhoods, drug dealers are the local heroes. Every kid in the ghetto wants to be one. These children see it as a way out of their despair and poverty. They can make more selling "crack" cocaine, in one afternoon, than a hard working person with a job can make in a week. I customarily speak with DEA agents who visit my office for search warrants. Their attitude is universally one of despair. They spend entire careers believing each day they come to work that their presence makes a difference, but the problem gets worse no matter what they do. It is getting worse in logarithmic proportions. We already have more people in jail, per capita, than any other country on earth (About five times as many per capita). We used to ignore the battlefield carnage of the street gangs, as they were only killing each other in their own neighborhoods. Now theses same gangs are coming out of their ghettos. They are increasingly taking their act on the road. One new tactic is to cruise the freeways at night looking for wealthy individuals who they can follow home, brutalize, rape and pillage, all for the sake of supporting a drug habit. Year after year we are treated to the same tired political solutions. We now have a "drug czar." Whoop-de-do! The first one got his picture taken a few hundred times, gave a few speeches, declared victory and resigned. We have spent decades throwing more judges into the system, adding prosecutors, investigators, building prisons (but not in my backyard), using the military, and in short spending an incredible bundle of money. We have nothing to show for it but a bunch of photo opportunities where a few pounds of the stuff and some seized cash are exhibited in grand style to demonstrate how well law enforcement does its job. The carrot is always held out that we are turning the corner; there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Sure. By and large law enforcement is composed of men and women truly dedicated to their profession - individuals who would lay their lives on the line and often do. They have an unenviable job. Yet their function has been reduced to stamping out cockroaches without any ability to get to the nest. A total waste of time and energy. The drug lords love it. My solution is not politically correct and is certainly not acceptable to those upstanding politicians (oxymoron, sorry) we have entrusted to make our decisions for us. It is, simply, to decriminalize the use and possession of drugs. Not only decriminalize them, hut actually give them away to anyone insane enough to want them. Before anyone goes ballistic here, I do not advocate giving drugs to children This should always be a capital offense. We have to take the profit motive out of this Dante's Inferno that is killing us like the Chinese "death from a thousand cuts." Prohibition did not work with alcohol and it is not working with drugs. I harbor no illusions that this solution is perfect, but it is essentially the only one remaining. The Colombian cartels, the Jamaican gangs, the Ins Angeles street gangs, and our local drug lords make the Mafia look like a troop of girl scouts. The terror is coming to our shores, a little bit at a time, and we just sit back and take it. Why can't we realize what is happening to us before it is too late? If we used the money presently being squandered to lose the drug war, funnel it into drug treatment and education, the problem would largely disappear in a few years. There would be no profit left. Drugs would be free, drug lords would lose their millions and millions in profits, corruption would all but disappear (except maybe in the Savings and Loan industry), our elderly would not feel trapped in their homes, and most importantly, our children would have a future free from the specter of slaughter in their schools or having to endure the nightmare of addiction. The present generation of drug user is probably beyond hope. Perhaps treatment will help, but we have to cut our loses and protect what is left. ============================================================================= From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 14:59 PDT Subject: Judge Gray in Police News Message-ID: <1484000588@cdp> Our Drug Laws Have Failed By James P. gray, U.S. Superior Court Judge In Police News, Spring 94 What we are doing is not working We have focused our attention, effort and resources upon intercepting heroin, cocaine and marijuana, and incarcerating those who sell and use them. We have been increasingly successful in seizing even larger quantities of these drugs, con`vichog greater numbers of defendants who are involved with them and sentencing those defendants to even longer terms in our jails and prisons. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the problem created by making these drugs illegal continues to grow. The only practical resolution available to us is to revise our laws so that the use by adults of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, and the purchase by adults of these drugs generically at licensed commercial pharmacies is legal. Although under this proposal the purchase and use by adults of heroin, cocaine and marijuana from the pharmacies would be legal, the sale, transfer or furnishing hy anyone of any quantity of these drugs to minors would he severely punished. Also, present laws concerning public drunkenness, driving a motor vehicle while under the influence, etc., would not he changed, and the unlicensed sale of these drugs would remain a violation of the law. The price of the drugs at the pharmacies would be set at an amount that would be continually adjusted so as to undercut the sales price of any illegal sale "on the street." This would do away with the financial incentive to sell them illegally. Without a doubt, some people will continue to buy and abuse these drugs under this proposal. However, since there would be no incentive to "push" these drugs, they would never be advertised or "on sale", and free samples would never be given to anyone, including non-users in order to get them "hooked", etc., the usage should not be above the present rate, and probably, after a possible initial surge, would be materially reduced. All of the other results under this plan would be positive. Crime would he materially reduced. For example, there is no violence now in the manufacture, distribution and purchase of alcohol. Also, for those who would continue to burglarize in support of their drug habit, they would do so less often because of the reduced price. Since part of the sales price at the pharmacies would be a tax, resources for the education about and treatment of drug abuse would he substantially increased. Police and society's other pressing needs. No new taxes would be needed for jail or courthouse construction. Lower income areas would be reclaimed from the drug sellers. Monies obtained by juvenile gangs and other organized crime would be decreased. Violence and corruption in our country and abroad would be significantly decreased. Overdoses and other medical problems from the usage of these drttgs would be reduced because the Food and Drug Administration would ensure that the strengths of these drugs would be accurately set forth on the labels. Drug treatment would be encouraged because of warning labels outside, and literature inside the packages, including toll-free numbers to call for more information. Clean needles would reduce the spread of AIDS. Many good, honest and intelligent people may disagree with this proposal on moral and/or other reasonable grounds. In addition, other people who have vested interests in the present system may also oppose this plan. However, in my opinion, the choice we have now is further to escalate our efforts and the spending of our limited resources in a losing or lost "war on drugs," or to face the reality that is upon us and legalize these drugs under a plan of regulated distribution such as this one. The sooner we make the change, the sooner we can stop the bleeding. Views from the Front George Schultz, the former Secretary of State for Reagan, says legalization would destroy dealers profits and remove their incentive to get young people addicted. He concedes, however, that such a proposal is unpopular. "Sometimes at a reception or cocktail party I advance these views and people head for somebody else," says Schultz. "Everybody is scared to talk about it. No politician wants to say what I just said, not for a minute." Patrick Murphy: We over rely on law enforcement and interdiction. Only about 30% of our spending is on treatment, prevention and education. In Canada the balance is about the exact opposite. Politicians get in a bidding war over who can talk the toughest. It started when I was police commissioner of New York when Rockefeller was governor. A lot of people have gone to prison since then and drug abuse has gotten worse. I think NAVPO's effort to show police officers another way to look at this issue is a commendable and an enlightened approach. Jerry V. Willimas, Former Chief of Police, Washington D.C.: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders' suggestion that we study the idea of decriminalizing illicit drugs took me back to the early 1970s, when people were talking seriously about decriminalizing marijuana. One private conversation from that time stuck in my mind. "Personally, I don't think that marijuana is any more dangerous than my favorite psychoactive drug, the martini," the statement went. " But I'm afraid that decriminalization would send a signal to young people that it is all right to use it." The words are not exact, for I did not make notes, but that is the crux of what President Nixon said to me some two decades ago. Here we are 20 years later, and I wonder if anyone received the signal Mr. Nixon was talking about. In 1992, local and state law enforcement agencies reported nearly a million arrests for drugs violations. Drug offenders make up one-third of the felony convictions in the state courts. In a nation where three-quarters of all robberies go unsolved and where violent offenders go free on bail awaiting trial dates on overburdened court dockets, we choose to clog the system with drug offenders. ============================================================================= From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 14:59 PDT Subject: Wm Buckley in Police News Message-ID: <1484000589@cdp> RAT POISON By William F. buckley We are with reason angry at the Mexican officials who ho-hummed their way through an investigation of the torture and killing of a U.S. drug agent. It is true that a few years ago the government of Mexico cooperated in a program designed to spray the marijuana crop, but it proved temporary. Somewhat like wage and price controls. If for a season the marijuana crop from Mexico declines, then marijuana from elsewhere - Hawaii, for instance will increase. If there is less marijuana being smoked today than 10 years ago, it is a reflection not of law enforcement but of creeping social perception. It has gradually transpired that the stuff is more harmful that originally thought, and a culture that spends billions of dollars on health foods and barbells is taking a longer, critical look at marijuana. We read about cocaine. In a vivid image, someone recently said that the big radars along the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States begin, night after night, to track what looks like a swarm of locusts headed our way. Private planes, carrying coke to the American market. So we bag a large number of them today, and they show up on the television news. That plane over there was carrying $10 million (or was it $100 million?) worth of coke, hurray for the Drug Enforcement Agency. But then the sober evaluation comes through. Last year - a splendid year for drug apprehension - resulted in interdicting, oh, maybe to percent, 20 percent of the stuff coming in. And of course the measure of success in the drug business, like that in the business of robbing banks, is, what are your chances of getting through? Answer: terrific. The odds will always be high, when you consider that the amount of coke you can stuff into a single pocket of a man's jacket can fetch $200,000, and that the cost of the stuff where picked up can be as low as $1,000. A profit of 2,000 percent (modest in the business) is a powerful engine to try to stop in a free society. So what are we going to do about it? My resourceful brother William Safire has a hot bundle of ideas aimed at catching the people who launder the profits from drugs. These ideas include changing the color of our currency, so that the boys with big sackfuls of green under their mattresses will be forced to bring them out, revealing their scarlet letters. Maybe we should breed 5O million drug-trained dogs to sniff at everyone getting off a boat or an airplane; what a great idea! No, we are face to face with the rawest datum of them all which is that the problem would not exist, except that in the United States there is a market for the stuff, and that the stuff is priced very high. If we cannot effectively prevent its insinuating its way into the country, what is it that we can prevent? The answer, of course, is its price. The one thing that could be done, overnight, is to legalize the stuff. Exit crime, and the profits from vice. It is hardly a novel suggestion to legalize dope. Shrewd observers of the scene have recommended it for years. I am on record as having opposed it in the matter of heroin. The accumulated evidence draws me away from my own opposition, on the purely empirical ground that what we have now is a drug problem plus a crime problem plus a problem of huge export of capital to dope-producing countries. Congress should study the dramatic alternative, which is legalization followed by a dramatic educational effort in which the services of all civic-minded, and some less than civic-minded, resources are mobilized Ours is a free society in which oodles of people kill themselves with tobacco and booze. Some will do so with coke and heroin. But we should count in the lives saved by having the deadly stuff available at the same price as rat poison. ============================================================================= From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 15:01 PDT Subject: Milton Friedman in Police News Message-ID: <1484000590@cdp> The Same Mistake By Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics "We seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in handling drugs" Most crimes are not committed by people hungry for bread. By far more are committed by people hungry for dope. Should we have learned a lesson from Prohibition? When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted it as follows: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." We know now how tragically wrong he was. New prisons and jails had to he built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, and created a decadent moral climate -- and in the end did not stop the consumption of alcohol. Despite this tragic lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in handling drugs. There is no disagreement about some of the facts. Excessive drinking of alcohol harms the drinker; excessive smoking of cigarettes harms the smoker; excessive use of drugs harms the user. As among the three; awful as it is to make such comparisons, there is little doubt that smoking and drinking kill far more people than the use of drugs. Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, though it is not certain that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many persons are deliberately made into drug addicts by pushers, who now give likely prospects their first doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would largely disappear, since the addict could buy from a cheaper source. Whatever happens to the total number of addicts and the possible increase of that number the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are both extremely expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, and they become criminals themselves to finance the habit. They risk constant danger of death and disease. Consider, next, the rest of us. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises primary from the fact that drugs are illegal. It has been estimated that from one third to one half of all violent and property crime in the United States is committed either by drug addicts engaged in crime to finance their habit, or by conflicts among competing groups of drug pushers, or in the course of the importation and distribution of illegal drugs. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically and immediately. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials -- and some high-paid ones as well - succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money. Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and improve law enforcement. It is hard to conceive of any other single measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order. But, you may ask, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience both with Prohibition and, in recent years, with drugs is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may he able to cut off opium from Turkey - but the opium poppy grows in innumerable other places. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin, but the simple manufacturing operations can be carried out in innumerable other places. We may be able to persuade Mexico to spray or allow us to spray marijuana fields with parachute - but marijuana can be grown almost everywhere. We may be able to cooperate with Columbia to reduce the entry of cocaine - but success is not easy to attain in a country where the export is a large factor in the economy. So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to he if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope. Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, hut also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention. -- "excerpted from "Tyranny of the Status Quo" ============================================================================= From: Jim Rosenfield Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs Date: 04 Jul 94 15:03 PDT Subject: Police News on the WOD Message-ID: <1484000591@cdp> A Drug Economy By Robert LeConte Police News Spring '94 We've been down this road before. In the 1920s, Americans amended the U.S. Constitution to prohibit alcohol, launching, in the process, the greatest crime wave in history. Citizens soon figured out that crime was worse than Demon Rum (which flowed just as strong), and prohibition was repealed. Currently there is talk of repealing our drugs laws, for many of the same reasons. But the problems law enforcers face with drug enforcement are more analogous to Vietnam than to bootleggers. Like that armed conflict, our tough-talking politicians have us fighting drugs like we fought communism in Southeast Asia, one patrol at a time, with body counts and gong-ho rhetoric. But drug busts and seizure press conferences are not winning a war in which - as Kennedy described Vietnam - "the enemy is at any given time, everywhere and no where." It is possible to build enough prisons, create enough courts, and hire enough law enforcement officers to effectively wage an all-out war on drugs. But - and this is the important part - IT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Since 1981, well over 150 billion of our tax dollars have gone to interdict roughly 10 percent of the drugs coming into America. If tough new laws and more money double our success rate, we're still fighting a losing battle. Our failure has bred frustration, which is the only way to explain some of the battlefield tactics that have grabbed headlines. My friend Chief Gates suggested we take drug users out "and shoot `em." It was a comment made out of total frustration, that he did not mean for a minute, for it would have sentenced his own son to death (As discussed in his book "Chief"). Patrick Buchanan suggests that we execute all drug dealers the enforcement of which would get one thousand police officers killed in the first year. Jack Kilpatrick modified that view somewhat. In his nationally syndicated column he suggested that we get "serious" about drug enforcement by publicly hanging drug dealers. I wish we could indulge Mr. Kilpatrick and hang a few, televise it live on FOX, put it on the front page of every newspaper. The next day Kilpatrick himself could interview the street dealers about the impact it had. Let me save you some time - you won't be able to find two dealers who even heard of it. Of course, you may want to provide dealers with press clippings and the grisly photos, but good luck scaring straight someone who attends about ten funerals a year. "Say what? They killed who?" As frustrating as it is to admit, arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating non-violent drug offenders has become an ineffective and expensive means of providing for the general welfare. Prohibition puts coke on the gold standard and overloads the criminal justice system with small-time dope dealers - who, if you really wanted to punish them, would be denied a criminal economy and forced to find real work. There is, of course, the moral question, best addressed by our new "Drug Czar", former New York Commissioner Lee Brown. Last year, Lee told POLICE NEWS that decriminalization of drugs would mean genocide for the black community. But Director Brown, what if I told you about a segment of America in which one out of four men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in our criminal justice system (the percentage jumps to 50% in Washington, D.C.); in which the majority live below the poverty line; or in which four out of five children are born without a father in the household? The black community is in a genocide countdown, right now. The problem is not so much the physical effects of drugs. The problem is a criminal economy (and a welfare system) that makes a mockery out of an honest day's work. Non-violent drug abusers, who sincerely want help, do not need to dance the arrest/hold/release cha-cha. They need intervention, not slogans and the slammer. Those drug-abusers who are violent need the dark end of a prison cell and they need to stay there. I do not agree that America should simply "decriminalize" all drugs. But, there is no question a new approach is long overdue. I'm convinced that if the DEA and the FDA had regulated controlled substances 20 years ago, we would not be in the epidemic we're in now. Crack almost certainly would not have thrived - it was invented because the high cost of drugs made a cheaper version more profitable. And gangs, deprived of a criminal economy, would not have flourished, saving thousands of innocent victims of drug warfare. I would join other conservative voices like William F. Buckley and former D.C. Police Chief Jerry Wilson in regulating drug use provided the feds implement the following: 1.Police were given the resources and authority to create drug-free zones (as they have on many streets and housing projects), including random sobriety check points. 2.As George Will suggested in a recent column, we need to further research ways of chemically blocking the cocaine high. (We successfully treat heroin users with methadone a drug in which the users have the good manners to simply lay down and fall asleep.) 3. We should start linking aid to dependent children with mothers who test drug-free. (The household in Chicago in which 19 children were found laying two deep on mattresses in the middle of February received $4,000 a month in public assistance. The seven adults who also lived in the house were arrested. One admitted to being a drug addict. Another was out at the time of the raid - giving birth. The child was born with a coke addiction. 4.We should enact William F. Buckley's proposal that would put drugs in a regulatory scheme that would take all but the most serious cases out of the judicial system, with the stipulation that anyone caught selling the stuff to minors will he executed. 5.The DEA needs to limit its mission to helping local law enforcement rid our schools and streets of drugs and drug dealers. Drugs should he kept out of public sight and absolutely out of the hands of young people. Our pursuit of the Drug Kings has little impact hack home. (Pablo Escobar is dead. Now all we have to do is invade Columbia and apprehend the thousands of other South Americans in the drug trade. Of course, we did invade Panama, partly because of the government's drug running. Earlier this year, our own government told us that more coke blows through the country now than when Noriega was in power.) Convincing any federal agency to reevaluate and refocus its mission is not easy, but if the DEA put all its resources into our schools and streets it could have real impact. 6.Finally, America's civil courts need to insist that those who take drugs take full responsibility for their actions. The law should provide little recourse for a person whose abuse results in the lose of their drivers license, job, children and access to unlimited health coverage. Ultimately, whether a drug or alcohol abuser sinks or swims will largely depend on the support they receive from family, friends or church. Federal, state and local officials have little impact. All the king's horses and all the King's men are not a damn bit of good when protecting someone from self-destruction. If, however, that drug or alcohol abuser steps over the line and his addiction threatens the safety of others, then federal, state and local officials need to come crashing down like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately, as every criminal knows, what's looming overhead is more like a lone, ornery blue bird. Let me put that in perspective: roughly one-fifth of all crimes result in an arrest, only about half of those lead to convictions in serious cases, and less than 5% of those bring a jail term. Even that number leaves prisons so overcrowded that the average prisoner serves just one third of his sentence. (Is that the police force that you joined? It's not the one I joined) The criminal justice system has become ineffective, because like so much of our government, we think we can do it all. We can't. Our tough talking politicians pass laws like "Lawyers in Wonderland," where Uncle Sam will give you a handout if you're good or a quick tour of a correctional facility if you're bad. The government that thinks it can raise illegitimate children with a subsidy, is the same government that thinks it can save drug abusers from self-destruction with guns and battering rams. Police officers need to insist that our law makers take a hard look at our resources and set priorities. Our laws need to make a distinction between abusers who require medical intervention and abusers who require law enforcement intervention. And when those laws are passed, police officers should have the resources and authority to effectively enforce them or take them off the books. To those civilians who will undoubtedly write to remind me that any changes in our current strategy would make drugs more accessible to the dopers who want them - all I can suggest is that you walk to any number of street corners in our cities. If you are not sure where the drug dealers are, throw a brick - believe me, you'll hit one. Just do me one favor - throw it hard.