THE DRUG PROBLEM ‘Broken hearts and broken communities…’

Moderator: We recently held a roundtable on gun laws at which Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said the real problem was drugs, and that the nation’s 40-year-old war on drugs had failed. What’s your assessment?

Rowland: The Athens County prosecutor recently said 90 percent of his cases were drug-related. Our drug laws have divided our cities and fed into the worst angels of our nature.

Gmoser: Fifty percent of federal crimes involve drugs in one respect or another. The relationship of drugs to crime is overwhelming.

Diaz: And yet, for the last six years the FBI reports a steady decrease in violent crime, but more people are being incarcerated — half of them for low-level, nonviolent offenses that are usually drug-related.

Newby: I agree that’s the case now, but I was chief in Dayton when crack-cocaine hit us hard in the late 1980s and early ’90s; crime skyrocketed and it took several years to get it under control. Homicides were at nearly 100 a year; it’s gradually declined to around 40. I doubt that too many people who focus on the number of lives destroyed, the cost to society, would say the war on drugs has been a success. As somebody who fought that war, I would say, looking back, that 40 years later we are not in better shape and may be worse.

Gmoser: Nationally and internationally, it’s a failure. We’ve got troops walking through poppy fields in Afghanistan, looking for the Taliban, and we’ve got failed interdiction programs in Colombia. What are we gaining there?

Rowland: Actually, the international drug war has come home to roost on our own border, in the form of 47 headless bodies in Mexico. …

Seidel: I hate the term “war on drugs.” It’s a bumper-sticker term that already suggests it’s not working. But if you look at the whole history of it, since the 1970s, drug use has been dropping. Prevention works. We need to keep drugs out of the hands of children. We need solutions to the drug problem, rather than just focusing on what’s not working.

Gmoser: Locally, I have solutions — a program like drug court but better, a diversion program for felony offenses in Butler County that will keep from filling our county jail, gets you the treatment you need and helps you get back into society. If you’re a violent offender, we want you penned up, but if you’re just somebody with a drug problem, I want you to get help. That’s where we need to spend our resources, not sending planes to Colombia to dump chemicals on coca plants.

Newby: That’s a good policy but, if you arrest one crack dealer today, you’re always going to have another one on the same corner tomorrow.

Diaz: The ACLU always wants to make sure everyone has equal access to such programs. With some diversions, discretionary decisions are made.

Gmoser: I took that off the table in ours, so that it doesn’t happen.

Newby: I can’t speak for the whole state, but I can tell you that in Montgomery County, it’s done fairly.

Moderator: So, does anyone think the drug war has worked?

Seidel: It’s not the dismal failure everyone says. At one end, you have the war, and at the other far end, you have legalization, which I say unequivocally is not a good idea. We need to bring it back to the middle, away from the extremes. We need drug courts, we need education, we need programs that keep families together and help children.

Rowland: At what cost? You say you’re against legalization, but if they legalized heroin tomorrow, would you start using it?

Seidel: You and I wouldn’t, but young people will. They’re risk takers, and there will always be people who use drugs. We don’t think drugs should be a normal, socially acceptable thing. Kids have told us one reason they don’t use drugs is that they’re illegal, which isn’t something that keeps them from tobacco and alcohol.

Rowland: The drug war has put one in 20 black men in prison, has turned our inner cities into crime zones, has led to the militarization of our police, and done enormous harm. Prohibition simply does not work. Our first wave of it was with alcohol, and it didn’t work; this is the second wave, and it’s also not working.

Gmoser: It’s specious to compare alcohol and drugs. No one ever became a drunk from one drink, but with cocaine and heroin, once and you’re addicted. There’s no comparison. You say if we let it go wide open, somehow we’ll have fewer addicts; I don’t agree.

Moderator: Well, let’s look back to Prohibition. When it went away, a lot of the violence it brought did, too. Would that happen here?

Rowland: It would have to.

Newby: I say, go back to ground zero and start a new policy from the ground up. For instance, we’ve done a terrible job educating people about drugs. We had the D.A.R.E. program and spent a lot of time with kids in fifth grade, but we failed to follow it their whole time in school. It’s not like a vaccine; you have to keep it up.

Diaz: Look at how we did it, though. If you send a fuzzy, cartoon-ish mascot in, that won’t be effective. I still think we should be funding proper treatment.

Wilson: We talk about treatment for the abuser, but why not for the lowlevel, non-violent dealer? We try to minister to them. A lot of young African-Americans and Latinos get into dealing because they don’t think they have any other choices, and they’re arrested at significantly higher rates than Caucasians.

Moderator: Politicians decided mandatory sentences were the way to be tough on crime.

Wilson: But you can’t just lock everybody up. If they’re violent, yes. Our young black boys are being recruited in massive numbers by dealers to run drugs, be lookouts. … So we have a lot of young, non-violent offenders who made a mistake; then if they want to get out of that game, they can’t because they’ve got a felony now. It’s ravaging the black community.

Newby: There is a big difference in the community damage caused by crack vs. cocaine, though, and drug laws were passed based on how harmful the drug was to the community, not on the race of the offender. I bet a lot of people in those communities are in favor of keeping those dealers locked up.

Gmoser: And we have low-level dealers who turn violent.

Wilson: I agree, it often graduates to that.

Gmoser: Not always gradually. In the business of drugs, violence is like breathing.

Rowland: But does it have to be? Imagine: Instead of going to a corner where there’s a dealer with a weapon, a user could go safely to a pharmacy, where he is also taxed, and he also has to do treatment. You’ve taken all the violence, incentive and interdiction out of it. The black market would be significantly downgraded.

Fetter: Not necessarily. This is also a family issue. I have a couple in my church whose children are robbing them blind to get the money for drugs, and that has nothing to do with where they get them. This is tearing families apart.

Rowland: But isn’t it a better society to get the drugs at a drugstore, rather than waiting till somebody gets hurt?

Fetter: Somebody is already getting hurt. When we talk about drugs, you’re impacting an entire community. And we’re wrong when we say that by sending somebody to prison for a drug offense, they’ve paid their debt to society. In effect, we lose twice, by paying for them to be in prison. If my son breaks my neighbor’s window, he doesn’t want to hear me say, “I sent him to his room”; he wants me to send him to fix the window.

Gmoser: Speaking of which, where are the moms and dads? I don’t see parents as involved on this as they should be.

Newby: And look, getting rid of drugs won’t fix all the problems we have in society.

Rowland: But it would affect in a positive manner communities that have been hard hit by drugs.

Newby: You’re assuming it would.

Diaz: In Ohio, the average cost of educating kids is $10,000 a year, one year of treatment costs $5,000, and incarceration costs $25,000. We’re spending more on incarceration than on education or treatment. It has not worked. We are leading the world as an incarcerator, and Ohio is a leading state. If you’re a business leader trying to locate a business, there are a lot of people here you cannot even employ. That’s got to affect business.

Newby: I agree it’s far cheaper to treat people, but I don’t agree you get there by abolishing drug laws.

Diaz: Changing the laws in Portugal and some countries has been very successful.

Seidel: Smaller country, not the same. You need to keep drugs illegal in the U.S. and provide more treatment, prevention, education and environmental protection. Drug courts and diversion only work because we have the hammer of the court system to enforce them.

Gmoser: Without the hammer, I wouldn’t have a drug court. You have to have a way to make people complete the deal. Carrot and stick works.

Rowland: All I’m trying to do is get over the semantics. Let’s stop using the word “legalize.” Maybe that will help. Let’s use the term “reprioritize,” or “disincentivize.” The main thing is to shift the model to put more people in treatment than in prison. I realize I’m more of a utopian on this, but I think it could work.

Moderator: There’s a move under way to get medical marijuana on the ballot in Ohio. How do you think it would go?

Newby: I expect voters would approve it. It’s widely used, and a lot of people say marijuana is no worse than alcohol.

Rowland: In 2005, 42.6 percent of all Ohio drug arrests were for marijuana. I would dare say everybody in law enforcement would be more effective if we could get rid of those.

Seidel: But it’s the most abused drug, and while the marijuana lobby has done a very good job to make it feel like a normal, non-threatening thing, it’s still a dangerous drug.

Rowland: But you could tax marijuana. I know I’m the utopian; would you see the end of gang violence, a flourishing of additional treatment, the renaissance of the hemp industry? I don’t know, but I think things would be so much better.

Seidel: It’s naive to think legalization would make crime go away. When Prohibition was ended, the mob didn’t disappear; it shifted gears. You think the people who run these huge drug cartels are going to just fold up shop and start following the law? They’ll adapt. That’s their business.

Gmoser: Besides, ending Prohibition didn’t end alcoholism. I’m still not for legalization.

Newby: Why do you think we passed drug laws in the first place? Because drugs are dangerous, and they were harming communities.

Diaz: But times have changed, and in the history of the country, there are a lot of things that used to be legal, or illegal, that aren’t today.

Moderator: Final thoughts?

Wilson: We can’t continue to do what we’re doing. We need to figure out what to do differently and to restore these minority communities that have been devastated by the war on drugs.

Newby: I think the public is ready for changes. But rather than go from where we are to the extreme of legalization, we should move toward more treatment. We need big changes, we really do.

Diaz: The war on drugs has been fundamentally unfair, particularly to African-American people. We should turn the entire war-on-drugs system into a treatment model, and we should fund education, not incarceration.

Rowland: We’re Americans. We’ve made this work in the past, and we can do it again.

Seidel: Drugs are illegal because they’re harmful. They’re devastating. Changing drugs from illegal to legal is very dangerous, and I think we should not even consider it.

Fetter: I think the issue is that drug abuse is profoundly immoral. It devastates the individual, the family, relationships, it hurts the economy. I think most of us would agree that our laws should be a reflection of our morals, but they should do more than just keep the community safe. They should be about restoring a sense of wholeness in our communities. This isn’t just about the safety of locking up offenders and keeping our streets clean, but of dealing with broken hearts and broken communities.