Pubdate: Sun, 09 Sep 2012
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2012 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Neill Franklin
Note: Neill Franklin is the executive director of Law Enforcement 
Against Prohibition, a retired Maryland State Police major and former 
Baltimore police lieutenant colonel.

A CARAVAN FOR PEACE

Activists Protesting the Drug War's Terrible Toll Arrive in Baltimore

One hundred and ninety six people were murdered in Baltimore last 
year. Recent figures show our violent crime rate is more than two and 
a half times the national average. Many of these crimes spawned from 
the illegal nature of the drug trade, and the vast majority of them 
will go unsolved because so much police time is spent arresting drug 
users and low-level dealers.

But this weekend, a cross-country caravan of victims of the drugwar 
brings a message of change to Baltimore. Dozens of Mexican and 
U.S.-based drug war survivors, law enforcement officers and others 
with firsthand experience with failed drug laws have been traveling 
for weeks now, educating people about the destruction our policies 
havewrought and the futility of continuing them.

Forty years after President Nixon declared the war on drugs, and 
after a trillion dollars spent, drug use continues unabated, yet the 
power of the gangs supplying the drugs has greatly increased. Those 
gangs were responsible for more than 60,000 deaths and 10,000 
disappearances in Mexico over the past six years, and untold deaths 
in the United States over the past four decades. Family members of 
some of those killed are on the caravan today, and polls show voters 
agree with them that it's time to enact drug law reform. Politicians 
and policymakers need to abide public opinion and common sense by 
providing treatment, not jail time, to people with substance abuse issues.

I was a police officer. Over the course of my 34-year career, I 
arrested hundreds of people for drugs, and I saw how this not only 
failed to prevent violent crime but caused more violence as others 
battled to take over newly available markets. I saw that when those I 
arrested went to jail, they lost their jobs, homes, friends and 
families because of it. It's unlikely that anything in their lives 
changed for the better because of their interaction with the criminal 
justice system. Most of them didn't receive treatment for their 
addictions. They weren't educated. And they weren't given job skills 
that would help them reintegrate into society.

I know the harm drugs can do and how important professional help is 
to treating drug addiction. And I know that for every dollar spent on 
treatment, four to seven dollars are saved on crime and criminal 
justice costs. But I also know how few addicts receive this treatment 
because our drug control funding priorities are upside down.

In the end, the only things that improved were the profits of the 
violent drug cartels running the trade and the arrest numbers of the 
police department. Numbers that tried so desperately to prove that 
which is unprovable: that we are winning this costly, destructive, 
unwinnable war on drugs. All the while the drug treatment centers, 
the employment agencies, the schools of the city - and across the 
nation- remain underfunded.

Although this is a problem in Baltimore, it's not merely a Baltimore 
problem. President Barack Obama has repeatedly said we should treat 
drug abuse as a health problem rather than as a criminal matter, but 
he has yet to back up his rhetoric with shifts in drug control 
funding. He, like President George W. Bush before him, spends the 
majority of federal drug money on law enforcement, punishment and 
interdiction, rather than on prevention and treatment.

This in turn, puts pressure on countries south of the border, many of 
whose foreign aid, essential to their very survival, is tied to their 
participation in the American war on drugs. That is what brought the 
Caravan For Peace here this weekend. Imagine losing your own child - 
to drug war violence, to the criminal justice system or to drugs 
themselves - and being able to do little about it because it's not 
even your own country's war. That is the plight for Javier Sacilia, 
the renowned Mexican poet leading the caravan, who lost his son at 
the murderous hands of the cartel.

For the sake of the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters and 
daughters and sons of those who have been lost but who have no voice 
to protest, make your voice heard. Tell your elected leaders it's 
time to change our priorities in the war on drugs. Tell them it's 
time to fund treatment centers and schools, not another juvenile justice center.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom