delawareonline The News Journal The war on drugs has created more problems than it has solved

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The war on drugs has created more problems than it has solved
By GEORGE JURGENSEN
04/27/2006

I applaud former prosecutor Peter Letang's call for a re-examination of the drug war and welcome him to the cause. He is not the first. Many other prosecutors, judges, and, most significantly, members of law enforcement who conduct the war out on the streets have also come forward, risking their careers and reputations. They have come together to form an organization to end drug prohibition. The organization is known as LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with a decorated member of the U.S. Marshal Service, Matthew Fogg. Mr. Fogg began as a marshall in 1978 and he has worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration and other areas of the Department of Justice on numerous drug interdiction efforts, including SWAT teams, and participated in the arrests of hundreds of drug dealers and drug users.

Mr. Fogg echoes Mr. Letang, observing that despite the massive number of arrests, the drug trade, drug availability and drug usage have not declined, and far too many lives have been lost or damaged and more are drawn into peril each day.
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He also points out selective enforcement tactics that tend to target lower income neighborhoods and dealers (why do they target East Wilmington but not Greenville, Centreville, don't those people do drugs?) and the disparate effect the drug war has had in the black community, but he gives better voice than I on those issues.

It's now nearly 35 years since President Nixon escalated drug prohibition in first declaring the war on drugs and later forming the DEA. The drug war has produced the thriving and violent illegal market that exists today while drug addiction remains about 1.3 percent, as it has since 1914, when this prohibition began.

Vast profits in the illegal market draw drug dealers to the trade.

Because they operate illegally, they bear no responsibility for the "products" they offer, offer no product labeling, and they enhance purity or chemically alter to make transportation easier and weight-based penalties easier to avoid. Vast profit leads them to aggressively market their wares at street corners, in drug-free zones, at workplaces, and in the shadows of even our newest suburban plazas, as I recently observed outside Newark.

The dealers, ruthless and fearless, move their wares and defend their turf. Should they be removed by police, others spring up to capture the profit. Should they be too successful, a dispute with would-be competition is sure to result. Denied legal avenues to settle disputes, drug dealers, as participants in illegal markets, settle disputes violently on the streets.

Today, well over a million more Americans are in prison or jail than in 1972 and incarceration rates per capita have increased more than fivefold. Hundreds of thousands more have died in the "drug war," and either way the cost to lives is ruinous.

Direct financial costs to taxpayers have soared, with increased prison population the reflection of increased interdiction efforts. Here in Delaware, prison facilities such as the former Gander Hill in Wilmington, now renamed the Young Correctional Facility, and the high-security prison in Smyrna are overflowing with prisoners and hazardous to both prisoners and employees, despite a four-year, $180 million expansion completed in 2000 and further expansions since. These prisons overflow despite the fact that prison capacity has been increased at a rate that far exceeds population growth and despite the fact that both violent and property- crime-related prisoners are given early release so that drug users and dealers can fulfill their minimum mandatory sentences.

There are many other arguments to end the drug war. There is the corrupting influence on the police, whose departments and governments seek financial gain through property seizures even when no one is charged with a crime (so the cycle is not broken) and sporadic reports of the planting of evidence. There is the fact that the government, in declaring that it will control what over 280 million people may ingest at any time of any day, has disenfranchised people from making choices in their own lives while it has also debased the emphasis of the choice each of us faces from being based on the natural consequences of drug use on one's life and ambition to simply whether one will be caught.

Meanwhile, cancer patients, those with degenerative nerve disorders like ALS, and AIDS patients are denied cost effective and natural treatment that can improve appetite or relieve pain.

And there are the effects on foreign nations and foreign policy, where Colombia is largely controlled by violent drug kingpins because of the massive profits involved while at the same time we intervene with and condemn peaceful practices in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, where locals have for centuries chewed unprocessed coca leaves and drunk coca tea to stave off hunger or boost energy with little harmful effect. Prohibition can leave even the most casual user or one-time experimenter scarred for life with a criminal record that will destroy opportunity for a lifetime or unable to seek help or treatment for fear of facing the risk of arrest.

The drug war reflects a political arrogance that the government can solve bad habits by passing a law and sending police out on the streets to arrest the way to an improved society.

The collateral damage of this arrogance is clear. It is time to end the drug war, to seek education, treatment, product labeling and testing, and a more orderly yet much less profitable market for the measure of drug usage, which society cannot stem or prevent, with or without force.

The transition will be difficult as people adjust to taking more personal responsibility, just as the transition from a centrally planned economy did not go smoothly in Russia or Eastern Europe, but the end result is a more just, more peaceful and more prosperous society. Of course there will be those that use drugs to their demise, there always was and there is today. At least there will not be vast profits for dealers and the associated violence and property crime or the other side effects of the drug war.

Logic compels that we end the drug war and with all my heart and soul I believe we must.

George Jurgensen is state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Delaware.