Children killed through war on drugs. This is Detroit but it could have been Wanganui.
Child killings challenge the drug war
Take your pick of who to blame for the apparent drug-related execution of Alexus Eppinger, 9, and her five-year-old brother Terrance as they lay sleeping in a Detroit home last week. There are plenty of targets to choose from.
Maybe you blame their mother for not having the instincts God gives a goose to protect her children. That's cold, I know, since she was slain, too. I'm sure she loved her babies. But you have to do more than love children; you have to keep them from danger, and putting them to bed in a house known for drug activity is dangerous.
Or maybe you're angry with the city and its police department for their impotence in containing the wave of drug violence that continues to claim the lives of innocents. I'm with you. It doesn't matter how many new lofts Detroit builds or how many new clubs open downtown, if its children are fair game for shoot-em-up maniacs, Detroit isn't a fit place for decent people to live.
The drug dealers? Sure. Anyone so numbed by greed that he can pull the trigger on a gun pointed at a child doesn't qualify as human. He's a beast, and there's too damn many like him walking our streets.
But my pick is a drug war that's turned our cities into battle zones and provided irresistible incomes for the most sinister elements of our society.
You want to know why kids are being killed in Detroit? Because drug dealing is a $100 billion enterprise in the United States. All of that money moves through the criminal underground, where it is untaxed, unregulated and untraceable.
The only way to stop the drug trade from consuming our children and our communities is to take the profit out of selling dope.
For more than 30 years, we've tried to do that by kicking in doors, rounding up street corner dealers, cutting off international supply lines and filling our prisons. And it hasn't worked.
It will never work. Those determined to destroy themselves with drugs will find a way to do so, just as those who prefer to ruin their lives with alcohol or gambling, vices the government decided that, if we can't beat 'em, we might as well tax 'em.
So let's get the drugs off the street and into the pharmacies where they belong. Pick a variety of narcotics, from marijuana to heroin, and sell them in measured doses over-the-counter, like packaged liquor.
Move the drug money from the alleys to Wall Street. Let the pharmaceutical companies produce, sell and pay taxes on narcotics.
Perhaps we'll have more users when drugs are no longer illegal. But legalizing drugs will allow rehabilitation resources to be focused on those who truly have a problem, and create more funding for anti-drug education.
A drug-free America is an impossible dream. Our stubborn determination to press this lost cause is killing people.
If it were just the dope dealers who were dying, I'd say have at it. That's addition by subtraction.
But in Detroit we've seen the collateral damage of this misguided war.
When babies die in their beds, we have to start challenging the premises of the drug war, and asking whether the fight is worth the cost.
Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The Detroit News.
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10 comments:
I have an alternative proposal. Each public hospital should open a drop in centre where nurses would administer any requested narcotic on-site free of charge (obviously there would have to be security guards on the door). This would have some consequences:-
- Free on-going supply would eliminate any incentive for anyone to market narcotics.
- Gangs, no longer replete with drugs profits or the support of drug users, would become weaker and more isolated.
- Police resources could be reallocated to focus more clearly and effectively on crimes against persons and their property.
- Guaranteed narcotic quality would eliminate some existing healthcare demand.
- More rapid (on-site) response to bad side effects would lower the healthcare burden overall.
- The lack of marketing, undesirability of associating with the kind of persons who would attend the centres, and possibly unwillingness to organise ones life around regular visits to a hospital, would deter persons from trying narcotics for the first time.
- The 'drugs as youthful rebellion' motive would be blunted by the lack of availability on the streets coupled with the tacit state acceptance of narcotic use.
- The current generation would undoubtedly patronise the centres for a good many years, but in time narcotic usage in society would wane.
- Overall, the cost of running the centres would be covered by saving within the healthcare system alone. The wider benefits to society are frankly incalculable, but without doubt substantial.
Dave Christian
Nolan Finlay misses a crucial point - drug addicts will be violent regardless of whether they are able to buy drugs legally from pharmacies or not.
Drugs destroy families and ruin lives. The stress brought on by living with an addiction makes many people violent or aggressive in one way or another.
As shown by Nolan's account, drugs destroy communities and we under the direction of Anderton are waiting for similiar effects here. The government supposedly can't control the sale of drugs in NZ.
I don't believe it. If the penalty for dealing hard drugs was either life imprisonment (meaning life) or the death penalty, the government would at least be treating the threat with the seriousness it deserves.
Gloria
Anonymous makes some good points. I have first hand experience of dishing out "legal" opiates. We don't have security gaurds on the door of my pharmacy but there have been many occaisions when they were required. Making something legal and readily available in my experience does not necessarily eliminate the criminality associated. In fact take-home doses of methadone probably enhance it. In Nelson in the past two months we have had two deaths where methadone is implicated.
Gloria,
There is drug-related harm and then there is gang/crime-related harm.
Stopping the flow of income to gangs/criminals and removing the organised crime element from drug dealing will eliminate the gang/crime-related harm.
But yes, drug related harm will still exist (but will be easier to identify and combat).
We don't have the resources to increase drug crime sentences, nor should we. That's just more of the same and won't work. There are plenty of countries that have draconian drug laws - they still have the drug problem AND the overbearing government problem!
The other point is the type of drugs. P is popular here because it is dirt cheap for gangs to produce. In a competitive market, regulated by corporate liability and negligence law, drug companies would benefit from creating drugs which deliver a high without the side effects.
Cheaper drugs (less crime), less "cool factor", more quality control, safer drugs, less income to gangs.
It seems that prohibition is really based on emotional grounds rather than any real benefit.
I wrote a whole post on this on my blog: http://beercroggles.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/drug-related-harm/
mdm, The problem is we have one drug (methadone) being supplied on a restricted basis into an otherwise blackmarket. Often the people you serve have irreversibly- developed criminal behaviour. Someone was telling me yesterday about a friend who regurgitates her methadone, adds water to it and sells it for dope. She needs the effects of the dope more than the effects of the methadone apparently. If she could get the cannabis legally she wouldn't be ripping off the pharmacy or continuing to deal with the blackmarket crims.
I disagree with Gloria that all drug addicts are violent.
And if you want genuine life sentences for dealers then prepare for an imprisonment rate like that of the US (3 or 4 times ours) where locking them up still hasn't delivered a drug free utopia.
Lindsay, I agree re cannabis. NZ should have a law similair to South Australia where it is legal to grow a limited number of plants for personal use. The friend of the friend is quite typical of methadone clients, they have conned the A&D clinic. They pretend to be sick and the A&D clinic staff pretend to treat them.
If their behaviour is irreversibly criminal as you suggest, then it would be better off for society if they were incarcerated regardless of the cost.
just a thought: people have taken the tobacco industry to court for the damage it has done, claiming they didn't know how bad smoking was for them. Just think about what would happen if dope, coke, crack or even H were supplied legally...tons of lawsuits from people who "didn't know how harmful it was".
Hand in hand with legalisation would be the upping of the education process. There would be zero room for doubt about the harm drugs might cause. That is part of the point of bringing them into the open. Nobody taking up smoking today could rightly claim they don't know about the harm.
Hosptials as drug dealers?? Well, you would just then have to convice drug users that they can trust the police to leave them alone. Hard to do. And since people who use drugs recreationally often do so to "heighten" the pleasure of other experiences that they may not be able to get in a hospital room the chances are that a minority will use it and this will be just another state program.
Anonymous two is historically illiterate. Prior to drugs being criminalized in the US in the early 1900s cocaine, heroine, etc., were legally available and there were hundreds of thousands of addicts without the violence. Just as alcohol was peacefully distrubted until prohibition so it was with narcotics. And when alcohol was legalized the violence dropped.
As for the lawsuits on smoking -- I'm old enough to remember half a century back and cigarettes were widely called "coffin nails" and and other terms that clearly indicated that everyone thought they were unhealthy. I suspect the lawsuits are based more on the damages big tobacco can pay out than on the actually fact that these people had no idea they unhealthy. I don't think there were that many people who were totally brain dead.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed the nation's [USA] war on drugs a total failure and insisted the crime rate would go down if the government spent money on treatment as opposed to jailing people with drug problems. 'If you want to get serious, if you want to reduce crime by 70% in this country overnight, end this war on drugs,' he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. 'You want to get serious, seriously serious about crime and violence end this war on drugs.'
"It's laughable that anyone could look at themselves with a straight face and say 'oh,we're really succeeding.' I mean it's comedy."
(Notably, the late July Conference of US Mayors called for a new bottom line on Drug Policy... one that acknowledges what is being done is without merit.)
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