cannabisnews.com: Drug War Bankruptcy





Drug War Bankruptcy
Posted by FoM on October 26, 1999 at 11:53:16 PT
Editorial
Source: Orange County Register
If violent crime is down significantly, as last week's reports suggest, why are our prisons filling up? Why are there demands for new prisons? Who are the inmates?
The broad answer is the drug war, and less-heralded statistics also released last week paint an alarming picture of who is being arrested, imprisoned, how often, and why.Let's start with marijuana. A closer study of the FBI report by Chuck Thomas at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. shows that the total number of arrests for marijuana offenses in 1998 was 682,885, 88 percent of them for possession, not sale or manufacture. That is down slightly from the record number of marijuana arrests of 1997, which was 692,200.Since Bill Clinton became president there have been nearly 3.5 million marijuana arrests. In 1998 more people were arrested for marijuana offenses than for murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault combined.What a waste of law enforcement resources. Concentrating on arresting marijuana users has almost no impact on the number of people who use it, studies have long shown. But insofar as enforcement activities raise the cost to users and push them into a criminal subculture, they increase other categories of crime such as theft, burglary and mugging, a high percentage of which are committed to raise money to buy drugs.If anything, the situation was worse in California. According to statistics from the state Department of Corrections and compiled by the Drug Policy Forum of California, as of June 1999 the state prison system held 45,874 drug offenders of all kinds, a record 28.3 percent of the prison population. A record 12.2 percent of all prisoners — 19,743 in all — were being held for simple possession, not sales, of a variety of illicit drugs. The number of drug prisoners in California has increased more than fivefold since 1986; their proportion as a percentage of the total prison population has doubled. Keep in mind, too, that there are few prison treatment programs for those who are addicted — and that drugs tyipically are easily attainable in prison. Ex-cons are likely to re-enter society with the same drug-related troubles with which they left.Interestingly, the number of prisoners held on marijuana charges in California (all for sales or cultivation, since simple possession is a misdemeanor in California) has increased by 12 percent since the passage of California's medical marijuana law in 1996. Nearly 20 times as many people are in state prison on marijuana charges as 20 years ago.What these figures demonstrate, as Drug Policy Forum spokesman Dale Gieringer explained to us, is that "the war on drugs is bankrupt. California taxpayers are spending over $1 billion a year to incarcerate people for inherently non-violent drug crimes, with no evident public benefits."Yes, it is good news that violent crime seems to be declining, acknowledging that such statistics warrant a certain degree of skepticism. (A new book from George Washington University criminologist William J. Chambliss, "Power Politics, and Crime" delineates systematically just how shaky the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports can be, especially for year-to-year comparisons). But the trend has been strong enough in recent years to establish credibility.Such a decline in violent crimes makes the growing share of drug-related arrests in this year's crime statistics all the more tragic. As Gary Johnson, the Republican governor of New Mexico, is only the most recent public official to remind us, it is time to rethink the war on drugs.Pubdate: October 25, 1999Copyright 1999 The Orange County RegisterRelated Articles & Web Sites: Marijuana Policy Project's Web Sitehttp://www.mpp.org/California NORMLhttp://www.norml.org/canorml/US Marijuana Busts Remained High In 1998 - Group - 10/17/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3318.shtmlJohnson Won't Let Drug Issue Go - 10/16/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3308.shtml
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Comment #1 posted by Alexandre Oeming on October 26, 1999 at 13:45:27 PT:
WYSIWYG
As Arnie told us in T2, it's in our nature to destroy ourselves. For the majority of the sheep out there, i'm almost ready to concede the "point".
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