Just a thought...
Watching Cops tonight it was all about the DEA taking down some dealers. In four hours, ten cops arrested three different black guys selling $280 of drugs. The police spent most of the time congratulating each other on their “success”. The dealers were all driving pieces of crap; one even had a baby seat in the back. It just wasn’t right. First, what a waste of tax payer money. I’m sure it cost a lot more to put the operation together than $300, on top of that society now has to shelter and feed these guys in jail. If it’s too hard to go after the drug lords and police need to justify their existence with small time arrests then it seems the system is a little broken.
Legalize drugs and make them a public health issue? Build social policy so that a guy doesn’t have to sell crack to buy his baby formula? All way too hard, especially when we could be doing some real good -- like banning gay marriage and making sure women can’t get abortions.
Legalize drugs and make them a public health issue? Build social policy so that a guy doesn’t have to sell crack to buy his baby formula? All way too hard, especially when we could be doing some real good -- like banning gay marriage and making sure women can’t get abortions.
posted by mochi at 7:49 PM
2 Comments:
The drug problem is one that's been broken for a long, long time.
People like drugs because, frankly, they feel good. I like drugs. Thankfully, I grew up in a stable environment, had good role models, and have a strong enough constitution that I've never been addicted. Not everyone is as fortunate.
Our war on drugs is a shining example of trying to fix the effect rather than the cause. There will ALWAYS be drug dealers and drug kingpins, as long as there are drug users, period. The ONLY way to get rid of drugs is to get people to stop using them. Why government still doesn't understand this, I'll never know.
Programs to get users unhooked and prevent potential users from getting addicted are expensive. That's too bad, but what are the alternatives? There aren't any. That is simply the way it is. We have to pay lots and lots of taxpayer money to help poor and/or unlucky people stay off drugs. We just do. It's a national health issue. It's no different than funding cancer research.
A good start would be spending the $300 (plus court costs and cost of incarceration) on helping addicts, rather than arresting nickel and dime dealers.
Part of the problem with the "war on drugs" is that incentives are built in for number of arrests not quantities of drugs taken off the streets. The police departments will get extra money from the government if they can show a large number of arrests, and the street level dealers who are not making much money and don't have high quantities are easy prey for the police since much of their work is open air dealerships.
The book Freakomics discusses a study by a University of Chicago Ph.D. student which went into the gangs and looked at their structure. What was learned was that the people at the bottom make no money and the people at the top make a lot: very much like the corporate structure. Unfortunately, the people at the bottom have the greatest risk of arrest since the police will not devote the time and energy to infiltrate the top echelon of the drug system.
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