The drug war is a crime
RIGA, PETER J.
noted and their authenticity disputed by experts of a more secular bent. Especially critical were those who had worked for years on systematic archaeological excavations which had turned up...
...It is a risk, but given the alternatives, the risk is worth taking...
...They come out of prison only to involve themselves again, and this in turn accounts for the system's high recidivism rates...
...While the number of deaths and murders connected to illegal drugs has soared to some 21,000 a year (they account for the highest number of deaths among minorities under the age of thirty-five), the figure nonetheless remains smaller that the number of deaths each year which result from drunk driving (22,000...
...It is legal, available, and there are many programs to deal with its negative effects...
...REPORT FROM THE FRONT LINES THE DRUG WAR IS A CRIME LET'S TRY DECRIMINALIZATION practice law in the criminal courts of Harris County, Texas...
...Up to 1980, social programs in the cities were beginning to show some progress, but with the Reagan administration's singular emphasis on law and order, these were radically curtailed...
...If the war on drugs proves anything, it is that its emphasis on law enforcement---on the supply-side rather than the demandside-has been a colossal failure...
...The same thing must be done for other drugs...
...Pragmatically, the legal and controlled sale of drugs would not only reduce crime but channel valuable resources into treatment...
...The same arguments about cause and effect ought to be made here as well...
...Others have gone so far as to claim that the Taj Mahal itself was not built by a Mughal emperor to commemorate his wife but was, in fact, a pre-Islamic Hindu monument appropriated later by Muslim aggrandizers...
...The battle for India's history is also being fought in elementary and high schools...
...are mostly crimes of poor people, and whites have the money to buy drugs (legal and illegal), to pay for good lawyers, or to afford rehab centers...
...Drug legalization in England and Holland has had mixed results...
...Clearly, there will be some increase in drug use if drugs are made legal and accessible at a reasonable price...
...Thanks to such groups as MADD, laws related to drunken driving have become tighter and more strictly enforced...
...They spend about $50 billion on marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, and hallucinogens...
...The problem is not one of race, but of class and the sense of possibility...
...The real solution for challenging and changing the grip of the drug culture lies in people having some sense of hope for their future...
...The United States has cut back drastically on its alcohol and tobacco consumption because people have become aware that even in moderation these legal products are dangerous...
...Let me hasten to say that neither the legalization of drugs nor the mere availability of treatment/rehabilitation would cure the root causes of their widespread use...
...Instead of seeking to build more jails at enormous costs, we should apply a fraction of that money to drug rehab centers, a proven method of helping people get off drugs...
...Especially critical were those who had worked for years on systematic archaeological excavations which had turned up nothing that remotely suggested that the site held such antiquarian wonders and indisputable proof for religious beliefs...
...A study in the 1950s traced adolescent heroin addiction in New York City...
...It is a shock, nevertheless, to learn that the French medical relief organization, Doctors of the World, which sends volunteers to underdeveloped nations like Somalia and Ethiopia, also has an affiliate in New York City...
...Yet we are now spending about $159 a day to house a prisoner in one of our overcrowded jails...
...While over $t00 billion was spent on the effort--an eightfold monetary increase--a 1990 report of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Drug Enforcement Administration of the Department of Justice tells us that there are today 6 million hard-core, illegaldrug users, double the estimate in 1980...
...India's self-identity pivots on how it understands its past, and that past is currently disputed...
...It found that the majority of users were from poor neighborhoods...
...Furthermore, taxes from these legalized drugs will fund treatment centers and educational outreach...
...Your Honor, we find the defendant guilty, the court room jammed, the docket overloaded, the calendar crowded, the jails full, the system appalling, but, what can you do...
...Moreover, the real drug of choice in the / white community is alcohol...
...Those who drive while under the influence of drugs would be severely dealt with--much as we do with those who drink and drive...
...There are few whites in this group because drug crimes (possession, use, distribution, theft-robbery to get money for a habit, etc...
...Take, for example, the repeated statistics demonstrating that where the sale of guns is controlled, as in England, the number of homicides is minimal compared to ours...
...PETER J. RIGA Peter J. Riga, a free-lance writer and a theologian, is an attorney in private practice in Houston, Texas...
...More than half of them are in prison because of drug-related crimes...
...BRIAN K. SMITH Brian K. Smith is professor of religious studies and history at the University of California at Riverside...
...Some of these could well become the Ayodhyas of the future...
...According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (1992), there has been no increase in its use in those states...
...To me it is shameful and irrational that users of cocaine and heroin are labeled criminals and go to jail--with almost no hope of therapy or rehab--while the users of the powerful drug alcohol are considered sick (alcoholics) and given therapy...
...Yet we bump into the evidence every day in the pages of our newspapers...
...Nadia Marsh, the people there are worse off than the poor of the third world Commonweal 16 July 1993:7...
...There are deep social causes for illegal drug use which our present law-enforcement strategy does almost nothing to alleviate...
...Yet the benefits of legalization will outweigh the negatives: less crime, illegal profits, more resources available for greater rehabilitation efforts, fewer jail cells and prisoners, better utilization of law enforcement personnel, greater respect for law, fewer corrupted policemen, and fewer deaths from impure substances...
...If we can distribute condoms and clean needles to control the spread of disease, why can't we bring ourselves to distribute drugs cheaply and legally...
...In the U.S...
...While there has been a slight increase in drug use in those countries, the number of crimes associated with drugs has decreased...
...Part of the money from the legal sale of these drugs could be allocated for education and rehabilitation, much as we do with tax money from alcohol sales and from gambling...
...At present, treatment is available for only about 15 percent of the nation's drug addicts...
...We have heard, in an abstract way, that many of our citizens live in third-world conditions...
...If we were to legalize and control the use of illegal drugs, we could make some significant progress...
...I am constantly amazed that over half of the prisoners in the justice system are black and another third are Mexican or other minorities...
...Fed up with mandatory sentencing guidelines, two prominent federal judges in New York recently refused to hear drug-related cases (New York Times, April 17...
...Or the repetition in the current health-care debates that our Canadian neighbors across the border do not share our fears of financially crippling illness because the universal, singlepayer, health-care system there protects them in a way which most Canadian citizens find very satisfactory...
...We keep on going back to law enforcement and punishment, a costly and consistent failure...
...6:16 July 1993 CommonwealThese facts are well known and yet we refuse to face them...
...As another federal judge, Robert W. Swett, told the Times, "The present policy of trying to prohibit the use of drugs through the use of criminal law is a mistake...
...All are poor...
...there are now eleven states which have decriminalized the personal use of marijuana...
...How this young nation-state conceives of, or reconceives, its own history will determine whether India will survive as the world' s largest secular democracy, or enter the new millennium as the newest, and by far the most populous, of the world' s theocracies...
...Since then, numerous other studies have established the link between deprivation and drug use...
...Yet the appointment of Lee P. Brown to a cabinet-level position as the Clinton administration's first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy does not indicate a shift in emphasis...
...Textbooks in the states controlled by the BJP have been rewritten so as to glorify the "Hindu past," excoriate the policies of the "Muslim invaders," rename Indian cities and other geographical locales, and reenvision the relationship between the Hindu religion and Indian national identity and citizenship...
...Hindu extremists, for their part, have broadened their efforts and distributed a list of 3,000 sites across the country where, they say, Muslim emperors usurped sacred Hindu ground...
...Professor B. B. Lal, the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, had conducted one such excavation in the '70s and found absolutely no evidence of any preexisting Hindu temple at the site...
...All told, each year 14 million Americans use illegal drugs for one reason or another...
...Historians at the prestigious, left-leaning Jawaharlal Nehru University have also joined the fray, publishing pamphlets and newspaper articles in an attempt to discredit the BJP account of Ayodhya' s past...
...Its volunteers work in parts of the city where people do not have even the most basic medical care...
...According to one of the volunteers, Dr...
...The legalization I envision would not be without regulation...
...We must do the same with other drugs...
...The money involved is so ready, so substantial, that dealers can always find another recruit to take the place of someone who has just been caught...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy FROM BED-STY TO ISRAEL BLACK TEENS ON A KIBBUTZ t is still hard for Americans to admit that things are better, or are done better, in other countries, other cultures...
...For those imprisoned, for use or for dealing, incarceration does little more than harden them...
...The funding is just not there...
...For starters, we could cut the prison population by more than half, thereby raising vast sums of money for proper law enforcement and therapy for those addicted...
...One of the reasons rampant crime is associated with drugs is the drug trade's great profitability...
...It certainly doesn't rehabilitate them...
...However, statistics from the past twelve years on what came to be known as "the war on drugs" tell a grim tale...
...In themselves, these are only palliatives...
...Brown' s background is in law enforcement (he has headed police departments in New York, Atlanta, and Houston), and the initial Clinton budget ($13 billion) seems to be a carryover of previous spending patterns: the bulk of the money is earmarked for law enforcement, surveillance, prison construction, and border patrols, rather than education and rehabilitation...
...Nevertheless, I think the time has come to legalize drugs...
...The real solution to drug addiction lies in individuals' heightened awareness of the destructiveness of drugs, and in self-pride programs for society' s "have-nots...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
