Pubdate: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 Source: Columbia Daily Tribune (MO) Copyright: 2000 Columbia Daily Tribune Contact: http://www.showmenews.com/ Author: Charley Reese, columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. U.S. NEEDS NEW APPROACH TO REVIVE WAR ON DRUGS Suppose your son or daughter became addicted to crack cocaine. Suppose he or she committed some nonviolent crime to support the habit. Suppose he or she was arrested. At this point, you might suppose the police would notify you. It doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes cops, using prison sentences as a threat, will force a nonviolent first offender to become a confidential informant. In one case, a 19-year-old girl was wired, given $85 to buy crack and instructed to go to a crack house and smoke dope with a man the cops suspected of murder and try to get him to talk about it. She failed, and the cops charged her with the original offense. Her father, one of those World War II veterans not so easily intimidated by bureaucrats and politicians, was outraged. "Just what was Plan B?" he inquired of the cops. "What would you have done if this guy had discovered the wire and killed my daughter? I'll tell you what you would have done. You would have called her mother and me, and you would have said you found our daughter's body, and it appears to be drug-related. And you would never have admitted her murder was your fault." Outrage has led to a crusade to persuade the Florida Legislature to pass a law that would prohibit officers from using addicts who are first-time, nonviolent offenders as confidential informants. The father also wants a law that would send first-time, nonviolent offenders who are addicts or mentally ill into treatment rather than a prison. Harold Koenig's logic is irrefutable. But logic and common sense don92t always work in politics. Law-enforcement types are opposed to his sensible ideas, but they are wrong, and he is right. This so-called war on drugs, now more than 40 years and uncounted billions of dollars old, is a flat failure. There are more drugs available now than there were before. And, as everyone knows, the only answer is to cut the demand. You do that by treating addicts, not stacking them up in prisons. Addiction to a chemical substance is an illness. Mental illness is a medical problem, not a law-enforcement problem. Koenig, though well past retirement age, went unarmed to several drug dealers in his county and asked them, "Who are your customers?" He got virtually the same reply from all of them. Seventy-five percent are addicts released from prison or jail; 15 percent are addicts who haven't yet been caught. "So there is 90 percent of their market, and if, by mandatory treatment, you could cure 75 percent, you'd put these guys out of business," Koenig said. Koenig is going to need a lot of help if he is going to overcome the resistance of the law-enforcement bureaucracy, which gets millions of dollars to "fight the war on drugs." But his approach makes sense. He has formed an organization he calls HEART -- Help Early Addicts Receive Treatment. You can contact him at 341 Lanternback Island Drive, Satellite Beach, Fla., 32937. The phone number is (321) 773-0298. As for forbidding cops from using nonviolent first offenders as undercover informants, common decency demands that. It's one thing to force a career criminal to be an informant. It's quite another to put a sick, and often naive, youth into a position of danger. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea