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.
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