-Abraham Lincoln

If
you live in Somerville, you probably know of someone who has suffered
from drug abuse. Coke, meth, crack, and particularly heroin and
oxycontin use is ruining lives, stressing families, promoting crime,
destroying young peoples' futures, and occasionally, killing them. A
significant portion of assaults and murders are drug related.

Somerville
Cares About Prevention educates citizens regarding drug use and its
consequences. Our Police Department works hard to reduce drug related
crime. They do at least as well, and probably a little better, than
their colleagues in other urban areas. Yet there are always more
addicts to treat, more dealers to arrest, more funerals to attend, more
heartache to heal.

Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon declared
war on drugs. Since then, we've spent more on that war than in Iraq and
Afghanistan. We've made 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug crimes.
Prisons are our fastest growing industry, with 2.2 million Americans
currently locked up. We're annually making 1.9 million arrests and
spending $70 billion. Yet drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far more
available. What is to be done?

If you drive northwest on Mystic
Avenue, not far past the Medford line you'll pass a modest office
building. One of its tenants is LEAP, an organization that is
influencing opinion on drug policy across North America. Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition's members-current and retired law
officers-propose a different way. They advocate "a system of regulation
and control of production and distribution [that] will be far more
effective and ethical than one of prohibition."

LEAP member,
Terry Nelson was a federal drug enforcement officer for 30 years. He
"saw on a daily basis that we were making no difference….When you put
a drug dealer in jail, you create a job opening."

Former federal
Drug Czar Lee Brown says, "When you're in that position, you see very
quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle
of people using drugs, going to prison, getting out, and getting into
drugs again."

The alternative? Brown points to a study
conducted fifteen years ago by the RAND Corporation. A team of
mathematicians calculated the most cost effective tactics in the drug
war-law enforcement, interdiction, foreign aid, treatment, and
prevention. They were surprised to find that only treatment was
effective.

But the hard evidence has no impact on drug
policies that have not just failed in their stated goals of reducing
drug addiction, crime, and juvenile drug use. Instead, the drug war
continues to worsen each of these.

LEAP member Jim Gray
describes himself as a conservative judge in a conservative
jurisdiction. Prior to joining the Orange County Superior Court, he
prosecuted what was then Los Angeles' largest ever drug case. He says
unequivocally, "We have a more radical approach [to drug law] than any
other western democracy, and we have a bigger drug problem. I'm
convinced there is a connection."

The plain truth is that drug
laws create crime. In his book Bad Trip, conservative author Joel
Miller writes, "Drug prohibition does not end drug use. It simply
forces the consumer to break the law to get what he wants."

Add
to that addicts who steal to support their habit and drug bosses who
kill to dominate their territory. Peter Christ, a LEAP member and
retired Buffalo PD captain observes, "We legalized alcohol because it
only took us 13 years to learn the lesson that alcohol did not create
Al Capone. Prohibition created Al Capone. And everyone didn't become a
drunk in 1934."

He's right. With alcohol prohibition, murder
went up 13% and robbery, 83%. Prohibition ended in 1933, and violent
crimes returned to their pre-prohibition levels by 1937. Judge Gray
estimates that 80 percent of felonies are drug related.

One of
the drug war's hypocrisies is that its purpose is to prevent harm to
users. While drug addicts do serious damage to their lives, the drug
war destroys those lives.

Jay Fleming, a thoughtful LEAP
member, served 15 years with multiple drug enforcement agencies: "As
with all wars, you have to have an enemy. That enemy turns out to be
our fellow citizens. Once you make the enemy evil, its ok to use any
means to destroy them." He relates how, working undercover, he got to
know drug culture people and their families. "And then you have to come
back and destroy that family."

The number of Americans behind
bars for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent, has increased by 1,200
percent since 1980. Legendary NYPD crusader Frank Serpico describes the
prison system as an industry. "They run it like real estate. They have
so many rooms, they have to rent them out, and the police fill them."
Former drug cop, then coroner, then mayor of Vancouver Larry Campbel
says that the drug war isn't really a war, it's a business.

Imprisonment
and a criminal record is not the only damage prohibition does to
addicts' lives. Joel Miller writes, "People who fall into a drug habit
and do not want to harm others by stealing, instead harm themselves by
whoring."

Fleming's remorse suggests another drug war impact.
Former Seattle Police Chief and LEAP member Norm Stamper says,
"Narcotic enforcement puts cops in an untenable situation. They are
enforcing laws that in many cases they don't believe in." Then there
are lucrative temptations to corruption. The few cops who yield, damage
the morale of and public respect for the many who don't.

Nor
is corruption limited to law enforcement officers. LEAP member Cellie
Castillo was a DEA agent interdicting Latin American drug traffic. He
discovered that U.S. officials were sending flights of cocaine to the
U.S., buying weapons with the proceeds, and sending the weapons on
return flights to Nicaraguan Contras who used them to commit
atrocities. His reports were ignored.

And of course the
Taliban, al-Qaida, and terrorists in Colombia, Peru, and Pakistan can
finance their operations through drug trafficking because drug use is
criminalized in the U.S.

LEAP's solution is to legalize,
regulate, and heavily tax drugs. Then as Judge Gray suggests, "Hold
people accountable for what they do instead of what they put in their
bodies."

A portion of the enormous revenues and reduced costs
thus generated could be put into drug treatment. The RAND study found
that 13 percent of addicts who went through treatment stopped using
permanently. That seems minimal until you realize that no other tactic
has produced any reduction at all. And treatment programs have become
more effective since the study.

This is not a matter of
morality. Enforcement causes more misery than it prevents. It's not a
matter of ideology. George Will, Howard Zinn, William F. Buckley, Noam
Chomsky, Milton Friedman, and George Shultz have all agreed with the
policies that LEAP advocates. It's a matter of hard evidence, honesty,
and courage.

Nixon was right to call drug abuse an epidemic,
but he was wrong to make "war" on its victims. Over my lifetime, a half
dozen people whom I have known died from overdoses or bad drugs. At
least that many got caught in prison/addiction cycle. One was shot to
death in a transaction. Judge Gray says that, "Eventually we will come
to our senses." I hope so.