Breaking Rank (8 page)

In August 2003, Governor Rick Perry pardoned thirty-five of the people Coleman sent to prison, thirty-one of them black.

Thousands of drug cases have been dismissed throughout the country in just the past few years because of similar police malfeasance. Spurred on by federal financial incentives, departments exert tremendous pressure on narcotics units and individual narcs to make a lot of busts, impound a lot of dope, and seize as much of a drug trafficker's assets as possible.

On June 17, 1971, President Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one in the United States.” Just how prevalent is drug use in America? In 1975, according to the Monitoring the Future survey, 87 percent of high school seniors reported that it was “easy” or “fairly easy” to buy marijuana. At the dawn of the new century, and millions of arrests later, the figure is at 90.4 percent. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reported in 1998 that high school students found it a lot easier to score pot than to purchase beer. In 1988 Congress set a goal of a “drug-free America by 1995.” Yet, according to research of the Drug Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C. (which in 2000 merged with the George Soros–funded Lindesmith/Drug Policy Research Institute to form the widely respected Drug Policy Institute), the number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million and counting. That's a lot of enemies.

Not that the war on drugs hasn't taken prisoners. The Department of Justice reports that of the huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the eighties and nineties (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002), the vast majority are for drug convictions. The FBI reports that 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1980. By 1999 that annual figure had ballooned to 1,532,200. Today there are more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, and aggravated assault combined.

Nowhere is this misguided campaign waged more mindlessly than in New York. The “Rockefeller Drug Laws” call for life in prison for first-time offenders convicted of possessing four ounces, or selling two ounces, of a controlled substance. The result? The state's prison system is filled to the gills, with drug offenders, most of them convicted of minor offenses, most of them nonviolent, taking up 18,300 of its beds.

By any standard, the United States has lost its war on drugs. Criminalizing drug use—for which there is, was, and always will be an insatiable appetite—has been a colossal mistake, wasting vast sums of money, and adding to the misery of millions of Americans.

The solution?
Regulated legalization.
“Decriminalization,” the controlled legalization of drugs, means you take the crime out of the use of drugs but preserve government's right—and responsibility—to regulate the field.

How would it work? If I were the new (and literal) Drug Czar I would have private companies compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package, and peddle drugs. I'd create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians and neo-cons) to: (1) set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency, and purity; (2) ban advertising; (3) impose taxes, fees, and fines to be used for drug abuse prevention and treatment, and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency; and (4) police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies operate in the states.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would put all those truly frightening, explosion-prone, toxic meth labs out of business—today; make sure that no one was deprived of methadone or other medical treatment for addiction or abuse; establish free needle exchange programs and permit pharmacy sales of sterile, nonprescription needles in every city; and require random, mandatory drug testing (of the type that would have nailed me) for those workers whose judgment and mental alertness are essential to public safety—cops, firefighters, soldiers, airline pilots, bus drivers, ferry boat operators, train engineers, et al. (Not part of the et al. are brain surgeons,
mental health counselors, and countless others whose sensitive work, if botched, would generally not jeopardize
public
safety.)

And, in my spare time, I'd mandate effective drug prevention education in all elementary, middle, and secondary schools. But what about DARE, you say? All those black and red bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, dump trucks—surely it's the best “drug abuse resistance and education” going? Not according to the Triangle Research Institute out of North Carolina. Their comprehensive mid-1990s study, commissioned by the Department of Justice (which then refused to publish the damning results, showing that DARE grads were just as likely as non-grads to use drugs), convinced me to get rid of the popular program in Seattle. I replaced it with—nothing. We were fortunate in that city to have a public school system teaching a comprehensive “healthy living” curriculum in the elementary grades, which included a superb drug prevention/education component. Based on the work of J. David Hawkins and Richard F. Catalano at the University of Washington, it remains a model for the nation.

I would insist on the enforcement of existing criminal laws and policies against street dealing, furnishing to minors, driving under the influence, or invoking drug influence as a criminal defense. Consequently, if someone chose to take a drug, anything they did under its effects would be 100 percent their responsibility, which would make them 100 percent accountable for any and all results. If they rob a bank, drive high (or low), furnish drugs (including alcohol) to a minor, smack their neighbor upside the head, slip Ecstasy into their date's drink, they should be arrested, charged, and prosecuted. If convicted, they should be forced to pay a fair but painful price for their
criminal
irresponsibility. Moreover, if they've injured or killed someone in the process, they should be slapped with civil damages. I've never understood defense attorneys who argue, “Gee, your honor, my client was so loaded she didn't know what she was doing.”

But what of the undeniable harm caused by drugs? Wouldn't legalization make things worse? Who knows? We're too scared to approach the subject in a calm, open, levelheaded manner. But, I'll tell you what I
think
would happen: there would be a slight increase in drug use, and no measurable increase in drug abuse. Experiences in Portugal and the Netherlands suggest that decriminalization does not unleash a mad rush for drugs among the currently abstemious.

In the 1970s, at the time New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was crafting his eponymous drug laws, Amsterdam, not unlike New York City, was witnessing huge increases in heroin use. And in socially upsetting, often violent incidents as hypes fought to obtain and keep their dope. Unlike New York's officials, however, the Dutch set about a rational, compassionate civic dialogue on what to do about the country's drug problem.

Recently, I met in Seattle with about a dozen police and prosecutorial officials from The Hague. They told me that while Dutch law enforcement continues to zealously pursue drug-related organized crime, it treats
all
drug-dependency as an illness, not a criminal offense. Today, marijuana may be cultivated, sold in cafes (in small quantities), and used (responsibly). Methadone is available on demand, heroin by prescription. Bottom line, according to both my foreign colleagues and the research of this nation's Drug Policy Alliance? Drug use, in every single category, is lower in the Netherlands than in the U.S.

Handled properly, legalization would improve the overall health—physical, emotional, and financial—of our society and our neighborhoods.

How? For starters, it would put illicit traffickers out of business, and their obscene, untaxed profits would evaporate overnight. Dealers and runners and mules and nine-year-old lookouts would be off street corners, and out of the line of fire. It would take much of the fun out of being a gang member (gang-banging being synonymous these days with drug dealing, “markets” synonymous with “turf”). Firearms, big, rapid-fire firearms, employed in the expansion and protection of drug markets would go quiet—a welcome change for peace-loving citizens, and the nation's cops. Drug raids on the wrong house would be a thing of the past.
*

And since most junkies finance their addiction by breaking into your home, stealing or prowling your car, or mugging you on the street, crimes like burglary, robbery, auto theft, and car prowl would drop. A
lot.
Justice Department studies linking patterns of property crime and drug use suggest a reduction of
35 to 50 percent
in those crimes alone.

Legalization would arguably wipe out at least one variety of structural racism, as well as class discrimination. A sad but safe generalization: poor blacks smoke cheap crack, upscale whites snort the spendy powdered version of cocaine. And who goes to jail? For longer periods of time? Blacks, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas where, according to the Justice Policy Institute, blacks are incarcerated at a rate 63 percent higher than the national rate . . . for blacks! (Nationally, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, 12 percent of all African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison versus 1.6 percent of white men). More than half of these African-Americans are in prison for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. Needless to say, this same group is grossly underrepresented in drug treatment programs.

Before I became a cop I didn't think about any of this. I'd seen
Reefer Madness
, and a detective once brought marijuana to school to show us what it looked like—so we wouldn't accidentally smoke it and rot the membranes of our noses. (
Pot
, he'd said, would do that.) But, except for underage alcohol bingeing, I wasn't interested in illegal drugs so the scare tactics were wasted on me.