Building America’s ‘Criminal Infrastructure’
Waged more intensely and over many more decades, the drug war has produced many more violent criminals than alcohol prohibition.
- Millions of non-violent drug offenders have been “enrolled” into America’s prisons, our “Universities of Crime.”
- In prison, they gain real criminal skills in murder, armed robbery and fraud from the professionals in the fields. (Note: This education is not limited to the intellectual realm. It transforms their personalities as well, in an environment that features violent homosexual rape.)
- Every day, 1,600 “graduates” merge back into American society as more brutal and skilled thugs. (Economist magazine)
- The number of drug prohibition’s “Criminal Scholarships” has exploded with America’s convict population: 200,000 in 1970 to 2.2 million, today.
Drug Prohibition Promotes Racism
Black and brown Americans have replaced Italian, Irish and Jewish Americans in our prisons. One young black American male in three has the unwelcome attention of the law; he is in prison, on probation or on parole. While alcohol prohibition promoted bigoted stereotypes against Italian-Americans, drug prohibition promotes the racist stereotype of young black and brown man as criminal gangsters.
Drug Prohibition’s New Toady: The Press
Prohibition-era journalists understood and reported the connection between Prohibition and its effects: crime, gangs and brutality — e.g., the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Modern reporters routinely help drug warriors, principally by writing only about the harms of drugs, but not the harms of the drug war.
Re-criminalize Rape and Murder by Re-legalizing Drugs
The Los Angeles Times reported that the County Sheriff’s Dept. routinely releases criminals guilty of burglary, robbery and fraud early in order to make room for nonviolent drug offenders. The Times also reported that some prisoners have committed murder, after serving 10 percent or less of their sentence. The Sheriff has effectively decriminalized burglary, robbery and fraud. Worse, drug prohibition is also assisting violent criminals. In November 2004, Californians resoundingly passed Prop. 69, which requires all convicted felons, certain misdemeanor offenders and those arrested for rape or murder to give up DNA samples. The samples are subjected to genetic testing, and the results are uploaded into the FBI laboratory’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. DNA evidence from crime scenes can be run against the database for matches that will help identify suspects of unsolved murders, rapes and other felonies. Unfortunately, more than a quarter of a million DNA samples have not been tested. While even trace amounts of suspected illicit drugs are routinely tested in police labs, police claim that they “lack the resources” to test these DNA samples. The result is that thousands of rapists and murders are free to rape and kill again. By effectively placing a higher priority on “protecting adult boneheads from themselves” over protecting rape and murder victims, drug prohibition has effectively decriminalized rape and murder.
Prohibition: Dumb and Dumber
America’s Founders declared that the “pursuit of happiness” is a “God-given, inalienable right.” Note: They did not declare that the wise pursuit of happiness and certainly not the government-approved pursuit of happiness. (A right ceases by definition to be a right if it requires government approval.) Carrie Nation and the other alcohol warriors foolishly thought they knew better than America’s Founders. But today’s drug warriors are even more foolish. They have not only ignored the moral and political instruction of America’s Founders, they have ignored the bitter lessons of alcohol prohibition.
Drug Prohibition: a Trojan Horse for a Police State
Drug prohibition has had many effects, but one of them has not been a reduction in drug use. So, throughout its history, drug warriors have responded to their ongoing failure with the demand to give the government added police power. Some particulars:
- In 19 of the last 20 Congressional sessions, the federal government has passed laws that criminalize more peaceful, consensual activity. Conservative columnist George Will has observed: ”The criminal class is unimpressed.”
- The ever-escalating drug war has also been marked by the growing “militarization” of a domestic police force. Increasingly, drug raids are no-knock forced entries carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last 25 years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams. Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, a widely cited expert on the “militarization” of domestic police departments, estimates that the number of SWAT team deployments has jumped from 3,000 a year in the early 1980s to more than 40,000 a year by the early 2000s.
The War on Drugs and the War on Terror
Drug prohibition has become the main source of money for terrorists, at home and abroad. Illicit drug profits, which are possible only because of drug prohibition, fund terrorist efforts against democracies in Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan. Transnational gangs, like the infamous MS-13, rely on illicit drug profits to bankroll their mayhem.
Supply and Demand
There is a demand for drugs whether we like it or not. Since there is a demand, there will be a supply. This supply is being sold on the streets by gangs, with no taxes being collected.With drugs legal, they will be sold in stores, not on the street. Put a small tax on them, which can go toward rehab programs. Don’t put a big tax on them; otherwise they will be sold on the street again, as cigarettes are now. Turf wars among rival gangs will be greatly decreased because there will be no more territory to fight over, decreasing drive by shootings. There will be no more unsafe home meth labs. They will be made in controlled labs where no innocent people will be hurt or killed.
Decrease in Crime
There should be a decrease in crime due to the lower cost of drugs. Drugs are expensive now because they are illegal. With drugs costing less, there will be a decrease in burglaries and robberies to steal for them. Hopefully this will decrease insurance premiums.
One Man’s Conclusion
Most ominously, drug prohibition is not only creating social chaos inside America. Since 9/11, it is empowering terrorists, providing them with money to buy the things they want the most: nuclear weapons. Will America’s bipartisan political establishment attempt to counter this with another feckless, expensive TV campaign designed to shame heroin addicts? There’s a better way. End drug prohibition and stop the flow of tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban, immediately. Failure to do so may end, as our Secretary of State once observed in another context, in a “mushroom cloud.”
We don’t have to like drugs. We do need make life safer for those who wisely don’t take drugs.
Mr. Fine is the Treasurer of the Culver City Democratic Club.
