ORANGE COUNTY VOICES / BRYAN J. VILA : Enforcement Falls Short in War on Drugs

Debate: Legalization and education campaigns are the ways to control substance abuse. The debate in Orange County about drug legalization has surged back and forth among judges, physicians and law enforcement officials during the past four months. While this debate has provoked some thoughtful and accurate commentary, it has also been the source of much confusion. As a professor of criminology and a former ghetto cop, police chief and federal law enforcement officer, I want to clarify this issue.

We have become far too committed to the least effective and most harmful response to the problem of drug abuse. Contrary to the position taken by “drug warriors” such as Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates and Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi, the evidence strongly indicates that Superior Court Judge James P. Gray is right: The war on drugs is not working.

We should stop squandering scarce criminal justice system resources and the bravery of our law enforcement officers on this ineffective strategy. The harm done to society by enforcing criminal laws against the use and possession of illegal drugs far exceeds the harm done by drug use. This is something that many people who argue against legalization fail to understand.

For example, the direct effect of heroin is to make people stuporous, not violent; the direct effect of marijuana is to make people euphoric and silly, not aggressive; even stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines that do make people more excitable and agitated seldom lead to violence except when seriously abused.

Of course illicit drugs can harm people who abuse them. So can overindulgence in alcohol, tobacco, food and even our Southern California sunshine. But our society’s response to alcoholism, lung cancer, obesity and skin cancer is supportive and compassionate. We use a public health approach based on education and regulation to control these deadly problems.

In contrast, our attempts to control illegal drug use rely almost exclusively on law enforcement. This ill-conceived reaction is what condemns addicts to a life of degradation, not the substances to which they are bound. It forces them to deal with drug dealers in an underground economy whose violence and corruption infiltrate the rest of society. Addicts sell their bodies and steal to pay exorbitant prices for adulterated drugs of unknown potency. Most of their crimes are committed to feed their addiction.

When the violence from this world spills into our daily lives we respond by committing more resources to drug enforcement. This leads to prison overcrowding and forces the early release of muggers and rapists to make room for more drug users and sellers. We already imprison a larger proportion of our population than any other industrialized nation, yet “drug warriors” demand more jails.

If enforcement isn’t the answer, what is? Beginning with the least dangerous drug of all, marijuana, we should attempt to control drug use via government-controlled distribution systems that sell only to adults and that do not advertise. This alone probably will cut the number of drug arrests in half.

Based on our experiences with marijuana legalization, we then could develop similar ways to manage heroin and cocaine use. But legalization only defuses the drug economy, it does little to discourage drug abuse. Using tax revenues from drug sales, we also should implement the types of public drug education campaigns that recently have proven effective against the most deadly drug in our country--tobacco.

Unlike the war on drugs, anti-smoking education campaigns work. They have brought about a steady decline in tobacco use even though tobacco is more addictive and deadly than marijuana, heroin or cocaine. And they work in spite of tobacco’s easy availability. We need to extend the same type of strategy to control the use of other dangerous drugs like alcohol, cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Destroy the $300-billion-a-year illicit drug economy. Eliminate the street violence, official corruption and human degradation it buys. Educate people about the dangers of using any drugs. Provide those who still choose to use drugs with pure drugs of known dosage, and punish them accordingly if they commit crimes. Help those who do abuse drugs to bring their lives under control. The war on drugs is causing more casualties than drug use.

It’s time to recognize that the behavior of citizens in a free society is best controlled by persuasion, not force. The view of “drug warriors” that people can only be controlled by force is contrary to the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded. We should reserve the criminal law for those behaviors that present the greatest threat to society. Drug use does not itself present such a threat.

Judge Gray should be congratulated for his courage and insight. We must seriously consider what he, and many other responsible people (such as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, former Secretary of State George P. Schultz, liberal columnist Anthony Lewis, conservative doyen William F. Buckley, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, retired New York Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy and U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet) are saying: The war on drugs is not working. Instead of redoubling our efforts, it is time that we re-examine where we are going and why.