The 40-year-old "war on drugs" and the criminalization of addiction have placed communities at odds with law enforcement, prosecutors and courts -- to the detriment of justice and respect for the rule of law. The violence driven by the astronomical profits of the illicit drug market and the life-long collateral consequences for those snared by drug laws will continue to exile generations from the mainstream.
It might be surprising to hear this from a cop like me, but the solution to our current human rights crisis will ultimately require the legalization and regulation of current illicit drugs.
I retired from a rewarding career with the Maryland State Police in 2007, and since then have had the honor of working as a lawyer and educator in Baltimore, largely in communities composed of people of color. One of the most heartbreaking things to witness - as both a law enforcement officer and a legal educator -- is a "contempt of cop" culture held by many people living in poor and blighted communities. As a police officer I understood that some people dislike the police. As a lawyer I have witnessed a generational feedback loop within communities of color that perpetuates fear, distrust and hatred for the police officers charged with protecting their communities and maintaining order.
This contempt is grounded in the failure of criminal justice system leaders to effectively screen and manage cases to ensure the fair enforcement of laws and distribution of police services in all neighborhoods -- regardless of the socioeconomic and racial demographics. It is also informed by our nation's long history of racial tension and violence between police and minority communities.
But nowhere is the racial disparity more glaring than in the enforcement of drug laws. The rates of illicit drug usage in America by race and zip code do not reflect the criminal engagement and prosecution rates. In fact, black and brown people in this country are being disproportionately impacted by our criminal drug laws and what has evolved into an incarceration and penal model of social control. Meanwhile, affluent whites are afforded the privilege of handling substance abuse as a family and health issue, often covered by insurance.
On the other end of this disconnect between the police and the community is an equally troubling "contempt of community" culture emanating from law enforcement. Police, as a group, have become increasingly jaded about the prospects of effective policing in impoverished communities riddled with the violence and disorder associated with the business of the illicit drug trade.
The violence surrounding the enforcement of drug laws leaves community members and law enforcement fearful for their personal safety. It is natural for officers working on the front lines of the drug war to be impacted by the fact that the colleagues they work with oftentimes become arbitrary casualties. The trauma and fear associated with that reality reverberates through every relationship, every conversation and every decision the police make.
The laws, policies and procedures driving the unjust and uneven enforcement of our drug laws must be challenged and reformed. The drug laws the police and prosecutors are sworn to uphold are immoral and have eroded fairness in the justice system and undermined the rule of law.
The "contempt of community" and "contempt of cop" speak volumes about the abject failure of our contemporary justice system to deal with drugs and the illicit drug economy. If you have not observed court dockets in action and you care about access to justice issues, go and watch. The court system, particularly in the metro areas, is completely overwhelmed, and no one is getting real justice. Not the victims. Not the government. Not the community. Not the accused.
The question our society now faces is how to end prohibition and the criminal enforcement scheme without causing more harm. A logical frame is to pilot a legal drug enclave within a bounded jurisdiction where business and religious leaders, police, prosecutors, defenders, courts, community, youth and private and public health officials work collaboratively with addicts to create both time, place and manner restrictions and effective education and prevention campaigns. Simultaneously, social pacts will have to be formed with drug cartels, local gangs and the federal government to support the overarching goal of drug legalization, which is violence reduction.
The legalization of drugs, reinvestment in pillaged communities and implementation of a thoughtful regulatory scheme for the manufacture, delivery and distribution of all currently illicit drugs will remove the profit, the violence and the systemic racism inherently linked to our criminal drug laws. The time to act is now. Justice and respect for human rights demand transformative change.
The author is a retired captain with the Maryland State Police, a professor with the University of Maryland, School of Law and executive board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com).
On the other hand, I disagree that it's heartbreaking to see people hate cops. Cops choose their job. They know that they will have to choose between obeying orders and harming innocents, yet they still decide to train and apply and work at that job. They say they are merely doing their job when many many laws go unenforced. All sexual positions except missionary are banned in most states and they don't enforce those because they are ridiculous and anyone they barged in on to arrest over that would have every natural right to blow the cop's head off, regardless of whether the state did not recognize that right. The same over a flower in your pocket. If someone is going to point a gun at you over a flower in your pocket, they deserve to die then and there no matter who they are or what color they wear. The fact is cops make a living doing things to innocents that nobody has a right to do, and if they aren't prepared to be hated and hunted and even killed for it, then they aren't prepared for the job they chose.
I sincerely believe you were an evil soul while you were a cop, even if you didn't feel one, you remained in that situation by choice. Now you have been converted to good: welcome!
http://www.johnknock.com/
Please stop saying that the police don't make the laws, they just enforce them. That is a bunch of hooey. Police organizations are huge lobbyists in Washington for maintaining the horrible status quo. Every time an initiative or bill comes up that will ease or overturn prohibition, we always see police chiefs, and sheriffs come out against it, convincing a naive public that it will make us unsafe.
We need to see *active duty* cops joining LEAP in droves. We need to see our police making truthful statements and treating the public as their bosses, not their slaves. End the DARE program and replace it with truthful, useful substance education.
Stop the failed drug war.
Let us assume, just for a minute, that all criminals re-offend, period. Which "criminals" would you prefer to have on the streets? The guy who uses Crack or Heroin, or the guy who snatched a girls purse at the mall?
Thank you for this articulate addressing of the reality of this issue, and please give some thought to considering that we have in fact legalized addiction. For if this was not the case, we would have more incarceration and less rehab, and the legal system would have been completely incapable of dealing with such levels of crime with no easy way out. Addiction has provided that escape all the way around. Peace to all
However, I could not agree more that all drugs should be legalized, and drug abuse treated as a social, not a legal issue.
Not only does the US have the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, but the racial disparity of arrests, convictions and imprisonment have become grossly pronounced. Nationwide Afro-Americans are arrested, convicted and imprisoned disproportionately. Thirty-seven percent of drug-offense arrests are Afro-Americans, 53 percent of convictions are of Afro-Americans, and 67 percent -- two-thirds of all people imprisoned for drug offenses -- are Afro-Americans. This is depute the fact that Afro-Americans do not use drugs at a perceivable higher rate than white Americans. - 8.2% of whites and 10.1% of blacks use illicit drugs.
Much of the voting rights & victories won by the civil rights movement during the 1960s have effectively been eroded. Nearly 5 million people are now barred from voting because of felony disenfranchisement laws. The United States is the only industrial democracy that does this.
Drug prohibition has become a successor system to Jim Crow laws in targeting black citizens, removing them from civil society and then barring them from the right to vote. If harsh sentences deterred illicit drug use, America would be "drug-free" by now. But that is not the case, and never will be. The drug war has given the "former land of the free" the highest incarceration rate in the world and disenfranchised millions of citizens. It is a cure worse than the disease.
The fact is that in the urban areas I have worked in, a black man has more to fear from other black men than any racist cop looking to arrest him or a racist system looking to incarcerate him or deprive him of his rights. Spin it any way you wish, but the simple truth is that there are more blacks incarcerated for drug offenses because more blacks commit the street level crimes which get one arrested for drug offenses.
Let's look at the statistics again: (2008 - illicit drug use by race) "Current illicit drug use among persons aged 12 or older varied by race/ethnicity in 2008, with the lowest rate among Asians (3.6 percent) (Figure 2.9). Rates were 14.7 percent for persons reporting two or more races, 10.1 percent for blacks, 9.5 percent for American Indians or Alaska Natives, 8.2 percent for whites, 7.3 percent of Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, and 6.2 percent for Hispanics."
That's 8.2% of whites and 10.1% of blacks using illicit drugs. Now look at the incarceration statistics:
(2007 - incarceration rate by race) "The custody incarceration rate for black males was 4,618 per 100,000.
while the incarceration rate of white males was 773 per 100,000.
This means that there are at least 5 times more blacks incarcerated for drug offenses than should be expected. This is clearly a gross injustice!
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/64
The harms of prohibition multiplied the harms of abusive use by many times. But ignorance, culture war, political expediency and deep seated racism along with business and bureaucratic interests keep it going. It's astonishing how hard it is to reverse terrible policy once it's in place. Addiction is a bad thing when it happens but the reality is most use is just that, use. We need to get over the idea that any use is abuse. At least for some substances anyway.