Pubdate: Sat, 29 Nov 2008
Source: SouthtownStar (Tinley Park, IL)
Copyright: 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.southtownstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4719
Author: Jim Gierach
Note: James E. Gierach, a retired prosecutor, is a member of LEAP 
(Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). He lives in Palos Park.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Obama

OBAMA SHOULD END WAR ON DRUGS

President-elect Barack Obama's new drug czar needs to be someone 
other than another friend of Big Al Capone. So, speak up.

In a single week in 2004, 50 tons of illicit narcotic drugs were 
seized in Iran. Four years later, opium production in U.S. 
troop-cluttered Afghanistan is at a record level.

The drug war does not work.

Tell Obama. Not only does it not work, but the drug war funds 
terrorists abroad and gangbangers at home. Prohibition on drugs 
enables the bad guys (just as it did in Capone's day with alcohol), 
keeps people addicted, permits amateurish drug manufacturing and 
packaging, and forfeits the right of government to regulate and 
control illicit drug dosage, purity and labeling.--

Perhaps worst of all - drug prohibition makes crime happen. Chicago's 
spiraling homicide rate threatens, again, to earn the Windy City the 
unwanted Capone-like mantel, "Murder Capital of America."

Substance prohibition is the public policy that made Capone rich. It 
is a policy that promises equal opportunity in the land of 
opportunity. And it's a policy that redistributes the wealth from 
predominantly rich white drug users to minority poor black and brown sellers.

Obama knows the prohibition of drugs results in one heroin overdose 
death a day on average in the Chicago region. He knows prohibition 
corrupts the kids, encourages them to drop out of school for "easy 
money," busies the Illinois Department of Children and Family 
Services, and grows the prisons. He knows a prison-laden society 
undermines families and dulls the collective sensitivity to solitary 
confinement, human suffering and the super-max Towers of Tamms prison.--

He knows a burgeoning U.S.-prison environment teaches Abu Ghraib 
values, makes slippery the straight and narrow, and transforms a 
Golden Rule-based society into an informant-based one, rewarding the 
culpable informant who saves himself from draconian drug-sentencing 
by sacrificing his co-worker.--

But tell Obama so he knows that you know. The war on drugs is the 
heart of so many American crises.--Some of those crises include 
street gangs, guns, addict crime, turf-war crime, elevated school 
dropout rates, the transmission of the HIV-virus and the spread of 
AIDS by addicts sharing dirty needles (since allowing access to clean 
ones would "send the wrong message"), unnecessary burdening of health 
care, the endemic corruption of specialized Chicago police units such 
as the old Gangs Crime Unit and Special Operations Section (SOS). 
This is not to the exclusion of ordinary beat cops and the keepers of 
drug evidence, the funding of al-Qaeda and bin Laden workers, the 
annual export of billions of U.S. dollars in exchange for Colombian, 
Mexican, Afghan and Golden Triangle drugs and the exacerbation of 
trade imbalance. Tell him.

Aside from profuse collateral damage caused by the drug war, those 
who battle the direct harm caused by drug abuse know the basic 
tenants underlying the drug field. It is easier to make a new addict 
than to cure and old one.--An addict is better off in the hands of a 
responsible government-regulated and trained drug mentor than in the 
hands of a drug dealer. A controlled substance is less dangerous than 
an uncontrolled and unregulated substance. Tell Obama.

The American voter isn't stupid. Neither is Obama.

President-elect Obama - we need an end to drug prohibition and a drug 
czar committed to treating drugs like a health problem, not a 
law-enforcement problem. We need harm-reduction. We need drug policy reform.

Sock it to us, Barack - appoint a Gierach-like drug czar.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake