DRUG WARS - © Copyright 2002 The Patriot Ledger

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IS there a BETTER WAY?

The war against drugs goes on while drug policy reformers push a rethinking of the problem

GARY HIGGINS photo illustration/The Patriot Ledger

By Mia Taylor / The Patriot Ledger

Detectives in the Quincy Police Department’s narcotics unit liken fighting the war on drugs to trying to hold back the tide while building a wall of sand.

The handful of men in the unit make about 100 arrests a year, but that’s a third the number they made in 1998, before budget cuts and shifting priorities moved manpower elsewhere.

Drug experts on all fronts agree on one thing: there’s no magic bullet, no cure-all for the problem of drugs in our society.

Drugs, meanwhile, are getting purer and cheaper, and dealers are getting more sophisticated.

The same story was told repeatedly during several months of interviews with drug detectives and investigators throughout the South Shore.

Officers said they see a benefit to society from what they do, and they literally risk their lives on occasion doing it. They do make arrests, they do seize drugs, but they will tell you they are stopping only a small percentage - perhaps as little as 5 percent - of the flow of illegal drugs.

Welcome to the war on drugs.

After more than four decades and expenditures into the hundreds of billions of dollars, there’s no end in sight. Police say they can clean up neighborhoods, drive dealers out of town and make arrests, but eradicating drugs is hardly mentioned as a goal.

Drug experts on all fronts agree on one thing: there’s no magic bullet, no cure-all for the problem of drugs in our society.

But there is wide disagreement on how to proceed.

When President Bush announced his administration’s drug control policy in February, he cited some frightening facts:

Drugs kill 20,000 Americans a year, and cost the health care system almost $15 billion a year.
Each year, 28,000 pounds of heroin and 617,000 pounds of cocaine are smuggled into the country.
Fifty percent of high school seniors nationwide, and in Massachusetts, say they have used illegal drugs at least once.

“We’ve got a problem in this country,” Bush said. “Too many people use drugs, and this is an individual tragedy, and as a result, it’s a social crisis.”

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Bush’s solution: spend $19 billion in the 12 months starting Oct. 1 to limit supply, reduce demand and provide treatment. Of that, $3.8 billion would go for treatment and research, and most of the rest to interdiction, law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

One primary goal of the federal policy, and of most law enforcement efforts, is too make illicit drugs scarce and expensive.

Another goal is reducing demand, and to that end, Bush proposed spending $180 million in the next federal

One primary goal of federal policy, and of most law enforcement efforts, is too make illicit drugs scarce and expensive.

fiscal year on the National Youth Anti-Drug Media campaign, a five-year effort that has produced 212 slick anti-drug TV commercials. They have appeared on music video networks, and during pro wrestling and sitcom shows at a cost taxpayers $929 million since 1997.

Bush’s drug czar, John P. Walters, acknowledged last month that government research has shown the ads have done nothing to reduce drug use and may have induced some teenage girls to try drugs.

“This campaign isn’t reducing drug use,” said Walters, whose official title is director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Walters nonetheless proposed spending $900 million to continue the program for another five years, but with pre-testing of the ads to make sure they are effective.

The TV ads are part of the war on drugs that have increased federal anti-drug expenditures from $1 billion in 1980 to the $19 billion a year that Bush proposed. During the same two decades, the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons exclusively on drug charges increased from 50,000 to 500,000, and drugs were a factors in the crimes of more than 60 percent of the two million inmates serving time in local, state and federal facilities.

Those are some of the numbers and facts seized upon by people who gather under the banner of drug-policy reform. They push as a basic philosophy that drug use is a public health problem, not something to be punished, and that addiction is a chronic, recurring disease like alcoholism.

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The groups advocating alternative approaches include traditional liberal organizations like the ACLU and civil rights groups, which are concerned about drug forfeiture laws and minimum mandatory sentences. The Marijuana Policy Project is focused on legalizing medical use of marijuana, while Normal wants to legalize it for everyone. The Drug Policy Foundation, funded largely by billionaire financier George Soros, lobbies across the board for changes in drug laws.

A paragraph in an article last year by Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Foundation, summarized the concerns of many who feel changes are needed in the nation’s drug laws and policies.

“The U.S. drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition decades ago, generates extraordinary harms,” Nadelmann wrote. “It, not drugs per se, is responsible for creating vast black markets, criminalizing millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens, corrupting both governments and societies at large, empowering organized criminals, increasing predatory crime, spreading disease, curtailing personal freedom, disparaging science and honest inquiry, and legitimizing public polices that are both extraordinary and insidious in their racially disproportionate consequences.”

With the stated goal of reducing harm from drug use and from current anti-drug policy, several proposals have been put forth by the drug policy reform movement. They include:

Focus drug education programs on high-risk kids and address underlying social problems. If 50 percent of teens say they have used illegal drugs in high school, a figure from a federal survey cited by both sides in the drug-policy debate, then “Just Say No” didn’t work for them.

Youth abstinence should not be the only focus of drug education, supporters of alternative approaches say. To reduce harm, they say, there should also be an effort to provide accurate, useful information to young people so that experimentation does not lead to abuse and addiction.

Make drug treatment universally available through health insurance and public health programs. Fund needle-exchange programs to reduce the spread of disease. All doctors should be able to prescribe methadone; it should be available at pharmacies and not exclusively at clinics that require special daily trips for many users.

Heroin maintenance programs have been tried on a limited basis in Amsterdam, London and Zurich, Switzerland. Literature from traditional anti-drug organizations described those efforts as failures that turned peaceful neighborhoods into crime zones and created a black market for pharmaceutical-quality heroin. Drug policy reformers described those same experiments as successful in keeping a small number of long-term addicts healthy, increasing the likelihood they would be employed and reducing crime.

Legalizing or decriminalizing all or some illegal drugs is a goal of many drug-policy reformers. Some want to let doctors be the exclusive judge of whether marijuana should be used by a patient; others would make marijuana legal with government regulation, controls and taxes. How would other drugs be sold or distributed? Perhaps government-supervised health clinics, they say.

Anything that knocks the demand out from under the vast international empire of illegal drugs would be an improvement, they say.

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While national debate continues about what to do next, the war on drugs goes on across the South Shore.

Police are still tracking dealers and making arrests. The realistic goal, drug investigators say, is “increasing the search time” for someone who wants to buy drugs by cutting off supplies and arresting suppliers.

“Anyone who uses cocaine on the South Shore is having an impact in Colombia ... it’s like they’re pulling the trigger on guns that are creating violence in Colombia, as well as here in the United States.”

– U.S. Rep. William Delahunt.

“The only thing we’re going to do is make it more difficult to find them,” says Quincy police Sgt. Patrick Glynn.

The Quincy narcotic unit’s goal is to create a community where users have to leave the city to buy drugs, but even that is proving to be an illusive goal.

As police plug the hole in one place, drugs seep in elsewhere.

Even the most casual user is contributing to the problem.

“Anyone who uses cocaine on the South Shore is having an impact in Colombia,” says U.S. Rep. William Delahunt. “In a way, they don’t understand, it’s like they’re pulling the trigger on guns that are creating violence in Colombia, as well as here in the United States. We all have a moral obligation to understand that.”

Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee and the House International Relations Committee, said education and treatment are key to solving the problems of drug abuse. He rattled off several reasons to keep trying to win the fight.

Crime, violence and the social impacts of drug use are all among his reasons.

And there’s one other.

Sept. 11.

Delahunt said it would be naive to think that some of the money that financed the terrorist attacks did not come from drug trafficking.

“I feel confident that at some point in time the connection will be revealed between 9/11 and drugs,” he said.

There were reports for several years linking the Taliban with heroin production.

What’s more, since Sept. 11, with many of this country’s resources diverted to other pressing concerns, drug arrests around the borders has increased by 25 percent, Delahunt said.

“My own opinion is that the ultimate answer here is treatment with education,” Delahunt said. “Treatment is important because it’s the hard core addict that drives the trade and makes it profitable. Until we make treatment our focus, our priority, then we are going to be running in place.”

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For offenders who do end up in jail, Delahunt would impose one additional requirement: No one jailed for drugs should be released without successfully completing a course of treatment to the satisfaction of a professional.

“We talk about educating kids, but the education also has got to be directed at the parents,” Delahunt said. “The slogans are great. I was (a district attorney). Slogans are good. They make you feel good, but if that’s what you’re relying on - and all that you are relying on - you’re perpetrating a fraud on the American people.”

In this war on drugs, there are advocates for providing police and prosecutors with more funding for overtime and equipment, and there are officials who argue there would be more benefit from using the money for treating addicts and educating kids about addiction.

There are legions of supporters for putting more drug users in jail with mandatory sentences. There are likewise people who argue that private use of any drug should not be a crime.

No matter who you talk to, there’s rarely talk of winning - if winning means eradicating illegal drugs.

Some of the officials involved in the war on drugs liken it to the war on terrorism, saying both are battles that will never truly be over no matter what policies the nation pursues.

The war on drugs is being fought on the South Shore. Families in every local community have been battered and torn apart by drugs, and one person dies each day from a drug overdose in Norfolk or Plymouth county.

Ultimately, it is taxpayers’ dollars that fund the war on drugs, and it is a battle on which citizens can weigh in. Locally, citizens can pay attention and influence police department priorities and how police resources are allocated. Nationally, they can contact congressional representatives and tell them what’s important.

“Cynics may say it can’t be won,” says Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, “but drug use is a public menace. The social and financial costs to society today are incredibly high: people, their lives, their families get destroyed. It’s a fight we need to fight.’’

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