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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