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Sunday, March 09, 2008
Former prosecutor says Drug-War is a horrendous failure, supports legalization
Posted by Justin Jeffre
A former soldier in the War on Drugs turned conscientious objector was in town Thursday to discuss the 38 year old policy. After 35 years of legal experience, James Gierach, an attorney and former Chicago prosecutor, has concluded, “Not only does prohibition not work but it is prohibition (not drugs) that is at the hub of most U.S. crises worth talking about: gangs, guns, crime, prisons, AIDS, health care, corruption, and eroding of our civil liberties.” He says legalization allows the government to control drugs instead of drug dealers.
Gierach was a Chicago prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in the early 1970s, where he scrutinized and perfected search-warrant complaints for narcotics officers to “make the charges stick” in court. He also worked “homicide court” and says he witnessed the violence that exists as a direct result of drug prohibition.
He spoke to the Rotary Club last week and debated city councilmember Cecil Thomas (who introduced an anti-marijuana ordinance that criminalized possession of small amounts) on the Mike McConnel show in the morning. The ordinance has produced a great disparity of arrests between blacks and whites. “You can get over an addiction, but you can never get over a conviction,” said Gierach. (A few months ago, Thomas told the Beacon he even favors making Hamilton County a dry county).
Gierach told the Rotary Club that while working for a “zero-tolerance” municipality, he wrote a rejection letter to a young man that had applied to be a street-sweeper because he failed his drug test for marijuana and was therefore ineligible for the job. He said he wrote a PS. “The test results do not disqualify you from being President of the United States,” referring to Bill Clinton’s use. He jokingly said we could talk about Newt Gingrich if we want to be bipartisan.
He argues we should legalize all drugs so that government can control it as with alcohol and tobacco. “We can’t fund schools because were filling our prisons,” he says. According to Gierach, “every dollar spent on prisons is a dollar that’s taken away from schools.” He says government simply can’t afford this policy. “Prisons are the most expensive and useless thing you can do with your dollar.” He said Hamilton County voters were right to reject the jail proposed by County Commissioners Pepper, Portune and Sheriff Si Leis.
The US spends over 60 billion dollars a year on the so called War on Drugs (some critics refer to it as a war on the poor). It costs around $30,000 a year to house an individual in jail. The US has more people in jail than any other nation on the planet with 2.3 million people in prison. According to a recent Pew study 1 out of every 100 adults is behind bars and 1 out of 9 if you’re an African-American between the ages of 20-34. Gierach asks, “How many millions are we willing to put in jail?”
Gierach told the Rotary Club that simply making drugs legal for those already addicted would take about half of the money out of the trade and go a long way to reduce all the problems that go along with it. He points to “shooting galleries” in the Netherlands, Holland, Germany, Australia and Switzerland-where the introduction of heroin-injecting centers have reportedly led to an 82 percent decrease in its use since 1990. According to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet it has “changed the image of heroin use as a rebellious act to an illness that needs therapy ... Heroin seems to have become a ‘loser drug,’ with its attractiveness fading for young people.”
In fact, this liberal experiment is sweeping the world. According to the UK’s The Independent, Frankfurt is one of about 40 cities in Europe and Australia where safe injection sites have been embraced by police and health officials as an essential tool of urban drug policy. And only America demands a fundamentalist line in the so-called “war on drugs” and balks at prescribing heroin to addicts.
Proponents say that “shooting galleries” reduce drug use in parks and cause less sharing of needles and fewer discarded syringes left on the streets. A review by the EU’s Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction concludes: “[The] longer the exposure to consumption rooms, the greater the reduction in high-risk behaviour.”
According to Gierach, when he started as a prosecutor in Cook County the best heroin you could get was only 2%, today in Cook County you can get 90% pure heroin, so kids aren’t even using needles, their simply snorting the drugs. “We’ve got more drugs, worse drugs, unregulated drugs, uncontrolled illegal drugs and it doesn’t matter where you are in the country the problems are the same everywhere”, he says.
Gierach travels the country arguing, “Crime is flourishing; state and local governments can’t pay their bills; more and more funds are diverted to prisons and jails instead of schools and higher education; and illicit drugs are stronger, cheaper, more dangerous, uncontrolled and illegal”. He says, “People have been using drugs from the beginning of time and they’ll be using drugs till the end of time.
Adding, “The question is whether we need the government to regulate and control these drugs, and I think we do and LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) thinks we do, because they are so dangerous we shouldn’t delegate the control to the gangs”. He continued, “If you prohibit drugs you give up the right to be able say who sells, how old the seller has to be, where they can sell from, what the dosage is, what warnings need to go on the package.”
He says that right now we have drugs that are completely regulated by the gang bangers and because there’s so much money in this business, you get guns involved. Once people have guns, they become their solutions to other problems. So now if a guy who got a gun because of all the money involved in the drug trade gets into a fight over a girl, instead of just a fist fight like in the old days, he goes to his car and gets his gun.
Gierach argues that bad guys like Al Capone and Pablo Escobar like prohibition because it creates a huge black market for them and it’s the foundation for their business. “When you make them illicit there’s a 7000% mark up”, says Gierach. Now that alcohol is legal, it is controlled and taxed and you don’t have a huge market for criminal organizations the argument goes.
He asks “why are the good guys on the same side as the bad guys?” His answer in Clintonese terms, “it’s the money stupid”. He suggests that everyone from the criminal justice system (and beyond), feed from what he calls “the drug-war gravy train”.
Gierach points to the 100,000 more policemen under Clinton that now have jobs, the drug testers, drug labs, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, clerks, sheriffs, probation and parole officers, prison guards, the D.A.R.E. pay rollers, the drug court personnel, the manufacturers of Plan Colombia helicopters and herbicides, the mass media advertisers (radio, TV, magazine and billboard) spouting anti-drug ads designed by the Ad Council for the ONDCP and Partnership For A Drug-Free America, and the advertising raking in huge revenues. “Money and profits have forged a formidable Prohibition Cooperative between the good guys and bad guys” he said. And, “there has never been a drug free America and there never will be.”
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09 Mar 2008 at 07:57 pm | #
I am glad the beacon is actually covering something important; it is a refreshing change.
09 Mar 2008 at 08:28 pm | #
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I wonder what made us think that our prohibition against intoxicants would end differently than the one our ancestors attempted?
10 Mar 2008 at 11:00 am | #
Its a simple fact that in order to control something it must be legal. Look at prostitution in Vegas!
10 Mar 2008 at 03:15 pm | #
The Drug War is Option A
Legalization is an Option B
(Thank You again, Scott Ryan, “What Happened to Dr. Paul?”, The Beacon, last Saturday.)
12 Mar 2008 at 06:56 am | #
I see that you mention that city council member Cecil Thomas was in the debate and you give a link to an audio. It indicates that it is quite long. I don’t want to listen to city council member Cecil Thomas. So maybe you can save me some time. Did Thomas say anything meaningful or worth listening to?
12 Mar 2008 at 11:32 am | #
dieterschmied, I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but I didn’t find Thomas’ argument compelling. He does say some things that I found amusing.
12 Mar 2008 at 11:49 am | #
The problem with controlling marijane, both option A and B, is that it is a naturally occurring plant. It can be grown indoors or outdoors, with little attention or a lot of attention. We can’t keep dandelions from growing in our chemically treated (poisoned) lawns, how can we control this. If the government legalizes it and tries to regulate it that way, or any way, people will still grow it for themselves, it doesn’t matter what you do. This very fact alone means that it should just be decriminalized and left to nature to figure out what happens. The control freaks need to get a life. Anybody that ever went to the playground as a kid KNOWS that slippery slopes are mostly just good fun.
BTW awesome article, and I just want to that this site and its newspaper (still exist?) is what journalism should be. Thank you!
12 Mar 2008 at 01:38 pm | #
williamsburg, people can grow tabacco too, but they don’t. It’s easier just to buy a pack at the store. I don’t think most smokers in Amersterdam grow it when they can go to the coffee shops and just buy it.
People can brew their own beer also and some do. Either way they can’t sell it to others. In the case of alcohol it is much safer now that it is regulated and we tax it.
I was shocked when Cecil Thomas told us if he had his way “it would be a dry county”. History has shown us this authoritarian approach has only worked for the Al Capone’s and other drug dealers. As Gierach points out there is a drug war gravy train and Thomas supports it.
12 Mar 2008 at 09:09 pm | #
Justin , you sucked me in and I listened to the recording. My first reaction is wonder whether Cecil Thomas is typical of the thinking of city council. Is he representative of the citizens of Cincinnati? I was embarrassed over how he struggled to explain “the moral justification of putting people in jail for using marijuana”. It would have helped to understand the term “moral justification”.
The fact that he got elected twice confirms my position that democracy is not worth fighting over.
And given the number of blacks in prison makes me wonder why they have formed a gorilla militia secretly to get ready for the inevitable or are they that docile?
12 Mar 2008 at 10:07 pm | #
dieterschmied, I think that the show is worth listening to because Gierach and Ryan make some interesting arguments.
Thomas’ comments are also interesting. I think his thinking is typical of city council. They all voted for this policy with the exception of David Crowley and Roxanne Qualls. (I don’t think they want Hamilton County to be a dry county like Thomas does.)
I agree that he completely failed to explain “the moral justification for putting people in jail for using marijuana”. I personally don’t think there is one and I have yet to hear one. I’ve asked David Pepper and I think he completely fails to make a good case also.
Who told you we live in a democracy? This has never been a democracy and the truth is it was never intended to be.
Again, we don’t live in a democracy and these policies are bipartisan so we can’t get the kind of reforms we need in the ballot box. We don’t even get a real debate about it during the campaign seasons. Even Obama is silent on the Drug War gravy train.
Blacks aren’t docile on the issue; just look at the NAACP led effort to get the regressive jail tax on the ballot and to defeat it. That took a lot of hard work to defeat the million dollar corporate sponsored jail tax because it was bipartisan.
I don’t think a secret militia could really work. First of all, we are all being illegally spied on. The government tracks graffiti spraying activists and prosecutes them more harshly than the terrorists living in Miami and CEO’s that pay terrorist death squads in Latin America.
The Black Panther Party for self-defense was infiltrated under COINTELPRO, people were arrested on trumped up charges, jailed and some were even assassinated in their sleep.