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Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) March 14, 2005 Copyright 2005 The Columbus Dispatch

By Evan Goodenow, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Maybe if he hadn't knocked down so many doors to drug dens.

Maybe if he could look past the blood and the tears, the thousands of lives lost and the billions of dollars spent, and say that the nation's 38-year crusade against drugs has made a difference.

Maybe then it would be easy for Columbus police Cmdr. Michael J. Manley to dismiss the idea of legalizing drugs.

Like most police, Manley is opposed to legalization. But he acknowledges he has wavered on the idea.

"The so-called 'war on drugs' is basically a joke," said Manley, who joined the Columbus Police Division in 1978 and has been working drug busts for 20 years. "Our budget is down, but the drug dealers have an unlimited budget."

On the streets, "demand is up, supply is up and prices are down. It's kind of a shame housing isn't like that."

Manley emphasized that he was speaking for himself and not the Police Division. But a national group of mostly retired law enforcers known as LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, sends members across the country to denounce the drug war.

Speakers include Eleanor Schockett, a retired judge from Miami who served on the bench from 1991 to 2002. Schockett told about 30 Ohio State University students last month that the time has come to legalize drugs because the laws aren't working.

Schockett occasionally went out on drug sweeps with police. She remembers remarking that new dealers would hit the streets by the next day and having the officers reply, "Oh, no. They'll be out there in an hour."

Many current and former judges agree that laws against drugs have failed but know it's political suicide to say so, she said. "There is not one judge I know that, in private, will not tell you that they believe (prohibition) to be a failure."

For two Franklin County judges who frequently deal with drug offenders, their private opinion is the same as their public one: Legalization is ludicrous.

"My problem is not the usage -- my problem is, what is the result of the usage?" said Dale A. Crawford, a Common Pleas judge since 1983.

If drugs were legalized, drug use would be encouraged, he said. "We're going to have another 150,000 people who can't work and they're going to be unemployable and who are sick and are going to have to be treated. . . . Somebody's going to have to pay for that."

Crawford said money should be channeled into treatment programs. Supply will increase to meet demand, he said, "but if we concentrate on treatment, supply will be irrelevant."

Jennifer L. Brunner, a Common Pleas judge since 2001, often takes a carrot-and-stick approach to drug addicts: treatment vs. prison time. Legalization would make drug use too easy, she said. "For some people, the impediment of its being illegal probably helps."

Local, state and federal governments spent $30 billion to control drugs in 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In her speech at OSU, Schockett said the money could be better spent on treatment.

The drug trade "needs to be regulated and controlled, and only a governmental agency can do it," Schockett said. She thinks that would put drug dealers out of business.

Drugs weren't banned until the 20th century. George Washington grew hemp. Cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola. Heroin was prescribed as pain medication until opium was banned in 1925.

In 1967, New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller declared the "start of an unending war" on drugs after the state legislature approved a three-year addiction-control program that allowed judges to commit drug addicts for up to five years of compulsory treatment.

In 1973, New York passed a series of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders that became a model for other states and greatly increased the prison population.

By the end of 2003, the most-recent year for which statistics are available, state prisons were estimated to be at capacity or as much as 16 percent above, while federal prisons were operating at 39 percent above capacity, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. On Dec. 31, 2003, nearly 2.1 million people were being held in local jails and federal and state prisons.

Critics say drug laws are draconian, but Schockett said the debate goes beyond morality to economics and race. Minorities and poor people are more likely to be prosecuted. At the end of 2003, there were 3,405 black male prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States and 1,231 Latino male inmates per 100,000 Latino males, according to the federal government, compared with 465 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.

The number of people serving time on drug charges is difficult to determine because prisons typically classify inmates by their most-serious offense. Someone doing time for robbery and drug possession, for example, wouldn't show up as a drug offender. Thirty-one percent of inmates entered Ohio prisons with a drug crime as their primary offense in the fiscal year that ended July 31.

Many drug cases are prosecuted in federal courts, and drug criminals accounted for 55 percent of federal prisoners in 2002, the most-recent available statistics.

Schockett doesn't like the idea of cocaine and heroin use, but she said people have the right to make bad decisions "as long as they're doing it in their own homes."

Manley thinks it's unrealistic to believe that junkies wouldn't steal or even kill to feed their habits, even if drugs were legal.

Legal or not, drugs will always be used, he said. "It's just part of our nature. It's sad."

The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the United States has increased 800% since 1980, helping the US achieve the highest imprisonment rate in the industrialized world: 550 per 100,000. Under the banner of the war on drugs, a kind of creeping totalitarianism tramples more human rights and civil liberties each year: tens of millions of "clean" citizens are subjected to supervised urine tests at work; hundreds of thousands are searched in their homes or, on the basis of racist "trafficker profiles", at airports or on highways; possessions are seized by the state on suspicion alone. The protection of the innocent is forfeited as part of the collateral damage of homeland security. Americans are protected at the expense of their liberty. Such tradeoffs are the standard rationalization of dictatorial governments and failed states. [more]