Pubdate: Sun, 17 Jun 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Steve Lopez
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?233 (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition)

FORMER L.A. POLICE OFFICER CALLS FOR DRUG LEGALIZATION

'Prohibition Is Not the Answer and It Will Never Be the Answer, 
Because It Does Not and Will Not Work,' Stephen Downing Says

Stephen Downing speaks fondly of his 20 years with the Los Angeles 
Police Department, saying he misses the camaraderie and the integrity 
of the people he worked with in a career that took him from street 
cop to deputy chief. Along the way, as commander of the Bureau of 
Investigations, he oversaw the Administrative Narcotics Division.

And so when we had lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Long Beach the other 
day, it was more than a little strange to hear this lifelong 
Republican insist that for the sake of cops, and in the interest of 
logic and public safety, the United States ought to legalize drugs.

You might be tempted to ask yourself, OK, what's this guy smoking?

But he's never touched any illegal drugs, Downing insisted. Not one 
puff, and nary a snort.

The way he sees it, the war on drugs hasn't reduced drug use and the 
violence that accompanies it; it's made matters worse. Law 
enforcement and the drug lords have been in an arms race for more 
than 40 years, perpetuating their own existence in a never-ending 
escalation that has bloated prison budgets and robbed us of funding 
for education and basic human services. The killing fields hold the 
bodies of cops, dealers and innocent victims. And still, after 
incalculable costs in blood and money, neither the supply nor the 
demand has abated.

Downing sent me a note after reading my column two weeks ago, in 
which I questioned drug policy priorities and drew a connection 
between U.S. consumption and the 50,000 bodies piled up in Mexico's drug wars.

"When I started, the show-and-tells for the media were a kilo or two, 
a couple of handguns and a few thousand dollars in cash," Downing 
wrote, referring to the news conferences called by the LAPD to 
celebrate its busts. "Today it's warehouses full of dope, pallets of 
cash and tens of thousands of war level weapons. That alone should 
tell us something about failed policy."

When Downing talks about legalizing drugs, he means we should 
"legalize, regulate and control" illicit substances. But he isn't 
referring only to marijuana, even though he finds it illogical that 
marijuana is illegal while alcohol and tobacco - proven killers - are 
perfectly legal. He's talking about legalizing cocaine, heroin, 
methamphetamine, Ecstasy, the whole underground kaleidoscope.

With all those drugs, Downing said, "prohibition is not the answer 
and it will never be the answer, because it does not and will not 
work." About five years ago he was recruited by Law Enforcement 
Against Prohibition, which advocates for drug policy reform that 
would treat addiction as more of a health issue and divert savings to 
better uses.

"We have bravely fought the war on drugs for more than 40 years - 
arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning at ever-increasing levels," 
reads a statement on the group's website."We have spent well over a 
trillion dollars and made more than 39 million arrests of nonviolent 
drug users. Ask yourself this simple question: Has it worked? As most 
of us can answer from experience: No."

Downing joined the LAPD in 1960 and moved quickly through the ranks, 
serving as commander of the juvenile division and then commander of 
special investigations, overseeing narcotics. He saw the beginnings 
of the Bloods and Crips, heard President Nixon's declaration of war 
on drugs, and watched rivers of federal money flow to create 
increasingly militarized police departments.

"Even small departments have gotten all this equipment," said 
Downing, who wrote and produced TV shows after leaving the LAPD and 
now lives in Long Beach.

"I went to the Christmas parade last year, and they've got a big 
armored vehicle running down the street. At Christmas!"

Downing said that as a cop going after drug dealers, it gradually 
became clear to him that he might as well have been fighting the 
mythical Hydra - cut off one of the snake's heads, and two more sprout.

"We had a police officer shot in crossfire on a drug raid, and he 
went into a wheelchair for life, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, this guy's 
like this because he was trying to keep an addict from getting his 
heroinUKP' We had another cop killed in a buy-bust.... He shot him in 
the face. And this weighs on you, and you ask, 'What is the value of 
what we're doingUKP' "

Since then, California's prison population has exploded, gangs still 
control drug trade from inside and outside of prison, Mexican cartel 
violence has become all the more savage and law enforcement policy 
remains largely unchanged. Part of the reason, Downing suspects, is 
that law enforcers have gotten dependent on the asset seizures that 
are divvied up among various agencies and used to keep the whole 
thing humming along.

"There is not one metric that says this policy approach is working," 
said Downing, who believes decriminalization would lower drug prices 
and profits and defang criminal enterprises. He noted that the 
leaders of several Latin American countries have begun calling for an 
exploration of legalization.

I asked UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, who teaches courses on drug 
policy, what he thought about all of this, and he sounded a more cautious note.

"If we legalized all drugs," he said, "there'd be smaller illegal 
profits, less violence among dealers, safer drugs and fewer people 
behind bars."

"We'd also have vastly more drug addiction and more crimes and 
accidents due to intoxication," Kleiman added. "There's no magic 
formula to end the drug problem. Details matter, and not all drugs 
are alike. I'd like to see cannabis made legally available for use by 
adults. I don't want to extend that to cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine."

OK, said Downing. Let's start with pot, regulate and control it as we 
do the wine industry (which would be a vast improvement over the 
current hodgepodge of medical marijuana laws), study the results, and 
learn what we can from countries that are decriminalizing other drugs.

"The harm to society is too great," he said, "to keep going as we are."
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