Pubdate: Sun, 1 Nov 2009
Source: Appeal-Democrat (Marysville, CA)
Copyright: 2009 Appeal-Democrat
Contact: 
http://www.appeal-democrat.com/sections/services/forms/editorletter.php
Website: http://www.appeal-democrat.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1343
Author: Cynthia Tucker

IT'S TIME TO END THIS MODERN PROHIBITION

Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon used the unfortunate phrase 
"War on Drugs," launching a misguided crusade that has encouraged 
street violence, eaten away at state budgets and packed our prisons 
with nonviolent offenders. The nation's punitive approach to drugs 
has turned us into a penal colony. We lock up more of our citizens 
per capita than brutal dictators like Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro.

There's an old saying about seeing the opportunity in a crisis. 
Perhaps the multiple crises caused by the Great Recession - which has 
bled state and local treasuries and swelled the federal deficit - 
will prompt lawmakers to end this futile era of prohibition, which 
has been costly far beyond the money spent.

Much of the social cost has been borne by black men, who use illegal 
drugs at rates about equal to whites but are nearly 12 times as 
likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, 
according to a Human Rights Watch report released last year. That's 
because lazy tactics encourage local police officers to focus on 
penny-ante street dealers to plump up their arrest records.

That practice can have tragic consequences, as it did in 2006, when 
Atlanta police fraudulently targeted the home of an innocent elderly 
woman, Kathryn Johnston, and shot her dead. More often, those tactics 
yield less dramatic but equally tragic results: Prison has disrupted 
the lives of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent black men, ripping 
them from their families and neighborhoods, rendering them 
unemployable and, therefore, unmarriageable.

(Any offender, black, white or brown, who murders, rapes or maims 
deserves to stay under lock-and-key. But the streets are not made 
safer when we put nonviolent offenders in prison for selling or 
possessing small quantities of illegal drugs.)

If you prefer a cool-headed focus on finances, though, that, too, 
shows wasted resources. Counting local, state and federal spending, 
the nation fights this losing war at an annual cost of more than $40 
billion.  Attorney General Eric Holder implicitly acknowledged those 
costs when he announced recently that the feds, with "limited 
resources," would no longer punish users of medical marijuana, as 
long as they follow state laws.

That was a perfectly sensible move, though a modest one. Holder 
followed up with highly publicized raids in several U.S. cities, 
including greater Atlanta, on a Mexican drug cartel. The message? The 
Obama administration may not call it a war, but they will employ the 
same tactics to halt the savagery of drug thugs.

Yet, the violence associated with the drug trade is fueled by the 
illegality of the product, just as it was during Prohibition. Al 
Capone wreaked havoc in Chicago, all the while making millions (even 
way back then) from the sale of illegal alcohol. When the 18th 
Amendment was repealed, the violence dropped off precipitously.  If 
customers can buy their intoxicant legally, gangsters have little 
reason to get in the business.

Most lawmakers are too cautious to advocate de-criminalizing all 
narcotics, and that's probably just as well. Methamphetamine, heroin 
and cocaine are highly addictive substances that should be regarded 
with due caution. But there is every reason for local and federal law 
enforcement authorities to target only big-time dealers, measured not 
by ounces or bags but monetary value. Anybody caught with less than a 
thousand dollars worth of coke is not even a court jester, much less 
a drug kingpin.

California, meanwhile - so often the cutting edge - is considering 
legalizing marijuana outright and taxing its sale. If the state 
succeeds - if it can find a new revenue stream from legal marijuana 
sales without obvious collateral damage - other states will certainly 
want to do the same. This era of prohibition could end one state at a time. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake