LEGALIZE DRUGS -- ALL OF THEM

Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a
former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and
they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me
set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief
of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and
not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth,
psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug-reform movement
hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues
to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.

I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to
use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a
scotch and water.

Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of
other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we
choose to frame responsible drug use -- not an oxymoron in my
dictionary -- as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the
abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a
criminal, matter.

As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on
drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts,
the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and
Democratic administrations, with one president after another --
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush -- delivering
sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and
cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug
use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut
back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of
new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go.
The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the
1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per
100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900
Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had
ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses
than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault
combined. Feel safer?

I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in
residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and
lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights
between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their
markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line
of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and
drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability,
wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher
for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America
and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs -- and can't have them
without breaking the law.

As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of
(laundered, untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for
character-challenged police officers.

Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police
force -- the Los Angeles Police Department included -- that has
escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and
converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing
and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or
murdering witnesses.

In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow
citizens. War requires "hostiles" -- enemies we can demonize, fear
and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our
citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, less than human.
That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of
clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated
to kick the addiction.

President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he
want to "coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or
cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not
therapeutic, powers.

As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly
analytical look at both the "drug scene" and the drug war. Such
candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing
the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement
investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder
and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).

How would "regulated legalization" work? It would:

. Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate,
harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.

. Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to
libertarians or paleo-conservatives).

. Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.

. Ban advertising.

. Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be
used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs
of administering the new regulatory agency.

. Police the industry much as alcoholic-beverage-control agencies
keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such
reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving
while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod,
assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The message is simple.
Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.

These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory
street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by
users who resort to stealing in order to support their addiction.

Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently
illicit drugs -- substances of uneven, often questionable quality
(including "bunk," i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder
or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract
from today's drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy
and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of
those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once
and for all.

Combined with treatment, education and other public-health programs
for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town
an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.

It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead
to greater police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.

But wouldn't regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to
the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure --
our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite
circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. My own
prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible increases in abuse.

The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for
bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not
dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sex, relieve pain, drown one's
sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have
turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.

They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or
does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans,
treat drug abuse as a public-health problem and end the madness of an
unwinnable war.