Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Police Officer’s View on Drugs
by Tony Smith, Senior Writer
November 29, 2008
For 28 years, I served as a member of the Vancouver Police Department, and spent most of that time at the street level, in and around Vancouver’s poorest area commonly known as “Skid Road.” This area is Canada’s poorest postal code zone. It is an area of cheap fleabag hotels, bars, and drugs. The only people who reside here are those whom society has cast aside because of disability, personality disorders, or sheer bad luck. It has been like this for at least 50 years. Only the faces and preferences of the addicts have changed.
Quite early in my career as a law enforcement officer, it became very obvious to me that the most dangerous drug was a legal drug. That drug is alcohol. Every riot, every disturbance, every assault, every serious late night motor vehicle accident, every homicide, and every sexual assault almost always involved alcohol.
Where were the horrific crimes caused by drug addicts? They were there, but generally speaking they were non-violent property crimes and prostitution. It has been estimated that somewhere between 75-80% of all property crimes are committed by addicts. This begets the question that most policemen in our major cities have asked themselves countless times: why not treat addicts for their addictions, not as criminals, and supply their drugs temporarily until they get help. Apparently, a significant reduction in property crime, reduced jail costs, and lower medical costs is not a sufficient answer.
The biggest question, which really changed my thinking toward the criminalization of drugs was, is why do we persist with laws that guarantee that serious criminals will become immensely rich, powerful, and violent toward any other criminals who stand in their way. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profits for the gangsters. U.S. history teaches us of a parallel situation that occurred during alcohol prohibition in the early twenty century, when gangsters became rich and powerful supplying bootleg alcohol. Al Capone’s South Side Gang and similar gangs murdered whoever stood in their way. The crime rate shot up 200%. Finally, when alcohol prohibition was canceled, most of the gangs disappeared as the profits were gone, the murder rate returned to what it was before prohibition, AND everyone didn’t become an alcoholic overnight!
Let’s ask ourselves a question. If heroin and cocaine were legal, would you use them? Virtually everyone says no, which is really no surprise if you think about it. We also know that up until the 1920s these substances were legal. Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol was the drug of choice to the Victorians. Today the percentage of drug addicts, by which I mean those unable to function in society due to their addictions, remains the same as before there were any drug laws. Hardly a round of applause for the billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 80 years. Indeed if drug prohibition were a business that received payment for its results, it would not have lasted a year.
Everyone fears change, and one of the big fears of the general public is the fear of drugs becoming more readily available to our children. Today most of our children can in fact more easily obtain drugs than they can obtain liquor. The gangsters make sure this is the case by ensuring that dealers are present outside most of our schools. These dealers pay no heed to our children’s health, and they often have little knowledge of the substances cut with the drugs or even strength of their products. Drug prohibition causes this situation to persist.
If we look at the history of tobacco, we know education works. Tobacco eventually kills 50% of all regular smokers. Tobacco is legal. Yet through common sense and education, tobacco smoking is down by two thirds from thirty years ago. Education works, but only if honestly given. This spring I was approached by a grandmother whose granddaughter had phoned her in real distress. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been running the D.A.R.E. program in her school, and she was convinced that her parents’ occasional use of Marijuana would cause their deaths. If any of the information given is flawed, kids will reject all information given to them about drugs from parents and other authority figures.
I am a member of LEAP, which is an organization of retired policemen, judges, prison guards, others involved in law enforcement ,and many others. It was founded by a former highly commended U.S. drug enforcement officer, Jack Cole. Today it is worldwide. We all believe that drugs are not good, but it is “the War on Drugs” that is causing most of our problems. This war costs 2.5 billion dollars a year in Canada and 10 times that amount in the United States. WHY?
it’s a bit of a contradiction to say that alcohol is a root cause of most serious crime and then argue that we should legalize other drugs. if we legalized alcohol and this is what we’ve got, why shouldn’t we think that the same will happen with the other drugs, if not made worse by the fact that alcohol will likely continue to be involved in the cocktail of stimulants/depressants reacting with a person’s system? isn’t the logical answer to this gentleman’s view to criminalize alcohol again? (i get that prohibition didn’t work, but the point is that there are no good answers here, only attempts to control the symptoms of a systemic problem for which there is no solution)
When alcohol was prohibited the murder rate went up 4 times. When it was finally legalized again, 75 years ago, the murder rate went back to what it was before prohibition, most of the gangsters went out of business, and everyone didn’t become an alcoholic overnight. Opium was first used around 4000BCE in Mesopotania, Marijuana about a 1000years earlier, and coca plants raised, and the leaves chewed around the same period. They don’t go away, and will probably be around until we go extinct. Some humans unfortunately have addictive personalities and will do dope, drink all the time,sniff gasoline, or do whatever it takes. Fortunately the vast majority of us have an aim in life and know this behaviour will destroy them.The war on drugs over the past 90 years, has simply made things much worse, we have handed all control of drugs over to the gangsters, who are at the schoolgates to ensure all our kids have a steady supply of these drugs.The drugs they sell may be lethal as gangsters maintain no quality control over the drugs they sell, The war on drugs in the US, costs 75 billion dollars a year. Einstein defined insanity as to know something doesn’t work and keep repeating it.
Our actions have not and will not work. The ONLY method that will work is education. All we are allowed to arrest are low level dealers and a few scapegoats. The real criminals are far too well protected and far too rich to spend time in jail.
It is very true that to keep doing the same thing and expect different results is insanity.
Matt, i agree there seems to be an error in logic they way you say it, but what he is saying is that if alcohol is worse then illegal drugs now that it is legal, and it was so much worse when it was illegal, doing the math backwards for the illegal drugs now, they would cause barely any crime at all if legalized.
Good article Tony, I’ve actually been looking forward to the next DARE talk at my high school since I’ve memorized most of the statistics to show how bogus all their “facts” about illegal drugs, especially marijuana, really are.
You people are missing the point entirely. The effects of alcohol make someone belligerent, aggressive, and hostile. Alcohol is the only drug which does that to the user. The effects of other drugs, all the drugs that grow right out of the ground without any help from mankind, are not nearly as detrimental. Drunk people swear they’re ok enough to drive a car. Then they commit vehicular homicide. Alcohol consumption lowers ones coordination.
The effects of other drugs are not nearly as dangerous as the effect of alcohol.
Read tinyurl.com/1mn and tinyurl.com/potconviction and see how the ‘war on (some) drugs’ is just the government’s way of replacing lost slave labot with prison labor.
Stupid keyboard.
‘replacing lost slave labor with prison labor.’
Dunno how that happened… maybe it’s cuz I’m drinking alcohol, the only legal recreational drug, aside from tobacco/nicotine, which kills thousands every year, while cannabis (”marijuana”) kills none.
To Matt K (1st commenter):
Recommended reading – http://www.marijuana-uses.com/essays/025.html
Alcohol is quite different from most illegal drugs. To a drug user (like me, just weed though), the fact that the substance is illegal has absolutely no bearing on the availability, rate of consumption or effects, positive or negative. That essay makes some very lucid observations on this point.
Basically, people will take drugs no matter what, and the same proportion of the population will be predisposed (through various contributing factors) to addiction. This does not mean the drug of addiction is itself dangerous. Would you consider hammers so dangerous that they need to be banned, given that many murders have been committed by hammers, but despite the fact that hammers have been used perfectly safely by millions more people before?
[I was going to use alcohol instead of hammers, but that would have been far too easy!]
This is worth reading, too. It’s an analysis of the U.S. government’s wrong-headed drug policy for the last twenty years. For some reason, the people being employed as “drug czar” think marijuana is the most horrible drug to ever befall humankind. Sure, it’s more prevalent than worse drugs, but then again, the worse drugs are worse! Take methamphetamine, for example. Marijuana use throughout your life will not kill you (unless you smoke it, in which case you’re susceptible to the same diseases that go along with inhaling any kind of smoke). Heroin use might kill you (although, with Nalaxone, an overdose can be reversed). With meth, you’re guaranteed to be dead in twenty years. Guaranteed! It’s vile stuff, made from psuedoephedrine and gasoline. It’s a cocktail full of poison which, among other things, causes your gums to rot and your teeth to fall out.
[...] my perspective as a Police Officer who is against the War on Drugs. In the months that followed, this article became a very popular piece on this Web site and across the social networks. As such, I’ve had [...]
I think the number one obstacle is not legalization; but rather who is going to control the MONEY. It is clear to those with minimal common sense that it is insane not to legalize marijuana. However, no one has gone to the next level to determine who will control it. Of course the government (who established prohibition) would have to determine the who, what, when, where and how marijuana will be legalized – talk about putting gansters out of business – you are talking billions of dollars who is going to do that???? That is why it is not legalized.
I love the people who pick and choose which drug to believe the propaganda about.
Gasoline is a common reagent in many chemical reactions because it’s one of the cheapest solvents – impossible to control, and effective. Large-scale manufacturers could easily filter out the really toxic stuff – it’s the amateur-chemist addicts who get screwed. Large-scale manufacturers operating in a legal environment wouldn’t need it, because they could use proper reagents without the need to obfuscate the supplychain.
Methamphetamine’s effect on teeth is not an indication of “poison” – it’s an effect of the prolonged drymouth, extended waking periods without brushing, tooth grinding, and caffeinated sugar-based beverages which usually accompany recreational doses.
Toxicity varies, but the vast majority of the commonly used drugs do infact have mind-altering effects far in excess of the effects of their short-term damage to the human organs – whether addictive, pain-relieving, stimulant, hallucinogenic, etc. Only *certain* inhalants disobey this rule – even if the press is ready to label any asphyxiant a drug.
Don’t trust anything you read about drugs – ever – from a law enforcement professional. <-An article from award-winning journalist Michael Pollan.
@Matt K: I believe the point was that education and rehabilitation is what works, not criminalization and jail time.
The fact is, there will always be people who abuse the system, do it wrong, act out of ignorance (blatant or accidental), and break things. But just because a few people overdo it and commit crimes does not mean that the alcohol was the cause, because literally BILLIONS of people partake without taking a golf club to their neighbors’ mailboxes. The minority who DO abuse alcohol or other drugs need help, and education, not jail time.
Good article.
The war on drugs is just a excuse to rob non-violent people of their Freedoms and constitutional rights
To enslave them in their labor camps.
It Nazism all over again.