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Drug laws have only succeeded in creating a black market
By Hempology | July 13, 2007
The Morning News, AR
12 Jul 2007
John Lyon
WAR ON DRUGS A FAILURE, RETIRED POLICE OFFICER SAYS
NORTH LITTLE ROCK — America’s war on drugs has done more to spur the drug trade than throttle it, said a former big-city cop who now advocates legalizing narcotics.
“The war on drugs has been one of the biggest public policy failures this country has ever seen,” former Denver police Lt. Tony Ryan, who was in Arkansas on Thursday as part of a speaking tour organized by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an nonprofit organization founded in 2002 that claims existing drug policies have failed.
State Drug Director Fran Flener said today’s drug policies are broader than those of the past, focusing not just on enforcement but treatment as well.
Daily news reports announce the arrests of drug dealers and the seizure of large amounts of illegal drugs, said Ryan, 62, a decorated 36-year veteran of the Denver Police Department who now lives in Sioux Falls, S.D.
“All that’s true, except for the fact that there are more people in the wings waiting to take over, and that’s always been the case,” he said in a speech to the North Little Rock Lions Club.
Ryan said in the decades since the Nixon administration launched the drug war, drugs have become stronger, cheaper and easier to obtain. About $69 billion is spent every year on drug enforcement, yet the percentage of Americans with drug addictions has remained constant at about 1.3 percent, he said.
“There is a certain level of people where you’ll never find a solution. They’re going to abuse a substance,” he said.
What drug laws have succeeded in doing, Ryan said, is creating a black market for drugs, an explosion of crime related to the drug trade and overcrowded prisons.
“In this country, which has 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s prison population,” he said. “About 28 percent of our prison population are people who were sentenced for drug possession — drug possession, not even for sale or distribution.”
Ryan said 1.9 million Americans are arrested every year on drug charges, 760,000 of them on marijuana charges. Of the marijuana arrests, 88 percent are for simple possession, he said.
A better approach, Ryan said, would be to legalize narcotics and allow the government to control and regulate them as it does other drugs. He said the government would do well to follow the examples of European countries such as Switzerland and The Netherlands, where drug addiction is regarded more as a health and social issue than a crime.
In an interview, Ryan said he had been a police officer for about 12 years when he came to the conclusion that drug laws did not work. Though he was never a narcotics officer, Ryan made numerous drug arrests over the years.
“We had problems we weren’t solving by putting people in jail ( for drugs ),” he said.
Flener said the drug policies of today are not the same as the policies of 20 or 30 years ago.
“There’s a lot of things that are going on that are changing. We’re finding out that addiction is a brain disorder, a chronic brain disease, so it’s not just a matter of saying no, and it’s not a moral issue,” she said.
One way policies have changed is through the creation of drug courts, which give some offenders the option of treatment rather than jail time, Flener said. Since the first drug court was established in Florida in 1989, more than 1,900 drug courts have been formed nationwide, including 37 in Arkansas, he said.
The recidivism rate for drug court graduates is between 4 percent and 29 percent, compared to 48 percent for offenders with no involvement in drug courts, according to Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
In 2005, Arkansas placed restrictions on the availability of products containing pseudoephedrine, a cold medicine ingredient that can be used to manufacture methamphetamine. Last October, Arkansas Children’s Hospital announced the number of children admitted to the hospital with burns caused by meth labs had decreased 63 percent since the law went into effect.
Asked about that statistic, Ryan said it is true that homemade meth labs in the U.S. have decreased, probably in part because of laws like the one Arkansas passed two years ago. But police also are seeing an influx of meth made in Mexico and brought into the country by drug rings, he said.
“The Mexicans have come up with what is known as ‘ice,’ a different from of methamphetamine that’s nearly twice as addictive, and they’re particularly brutal about taking over territories to sell drugs,” he said.
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