My Kind Of Cop

[Gary Sisco]

October 16, 2005 latimes.com : Print Edition : Editorials, Op-Ed Print E-mail story Most e-mailed Change text size

BEHIND BARS
Let those dopers be
A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other drugs

By Norm Stamper, Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. He is the author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005).


SOMETIMES PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

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But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.

I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.

Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter.

As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?

I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs — and can't have them without breaking the law.

As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered, untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.

Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police force — the Los Angeles Police Department included — that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or murdering witnesses.

In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires "hostiles" — enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, evil-doers, less than human. That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.

President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to "coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.

As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the "drug scene" and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).

How would "regulated legalization" work? It would: 1) Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.

2) Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).

3) Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.

4) Ban advertising.

5) Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.

6) Police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.

These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing in order to support their habit or addiction.

Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs — substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including "bunk," i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once and for all.

Combined with treatment, education and other public health programs for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.

It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.

But wouldn't regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure — our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. My own prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible increases in abuse.

The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one's sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.

They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.

[Noj]

Finally, someone with an iota of sense. The very same problems that made the prohibition of alcohol worthless are the same stupid problems we face with other prohibited substances.

[patricia]

But, what are all those DEA employees going to do for a living if they don't have the WAR ON DRUGS to administer and enforce?
Nobody thinks that addiction to hard drugs is a good thing. But I don't think that making them illegal has reduced their use. Rather, it has become a hugely lucrative business and the source of much more serious crime. There will always be people who use drugs, for whatever reason and to make them criminals is ludicrous, always has been. They should be helped kick their habit, if that's what they want, or left alone if that's what they want.
Throwing government money, vast numbers of drug law enforcers and violence at the problem isn't working.

[Lazz]

Personally, I'm not too happy with the legalisation concept.
I think they should be compulsory.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

I wonder what part of the law enforcement hierarchy considers Stamper a snitch? The cop on the street or the higher ups? The higher ups tend to be politicized.

[Gary Sisco]

The whole war on drugs business is just another welfare scam -- this time, for cops, prison goons, and bureaucrats of all description.

Fuck 'em. Smoke it if you got it.

They managed, for five or six weeks, to bust up the herb distribution system here not long ago. It became available again, of course, using alternative routes, but it was the first time, here, that the herbs weren't available for that long since Nixon's paraquat summer, long ago.

But where demand exists, so will supply, and, as the cop rightly says in his little essay, demand for mind-altering substances has been constant for all of human history, transculturally.

Which means they're trying to "war" on an inherent human characteristic.

Good luck. Nothing more than a waste of life and the people's hard-earned money.

[Phil_Meloy]

Originally Posted by patricia

But, what are all those DEA employees going to do for a living if they don't have the WAR ON DRUGS to administer and enforce?

They could all go and help out in the WAR ON TERROR or the WAR IN IRAQ - they could definitely use the extra help.

[Gary Sisco]

Not from those clowns, they can't.

[Phil_Meloy]

That useless huh?

[Brian Olewnick]

It's been a while since I've seen articles on the subject, but way back when, say the 70s, there was a pretty decent percentage of police, including higher-ups, who, often after they'd left the force, opined that decriminalization was the only thing to do, that they were wasting enormous amounts of time, money and lives on this nonsense.

[Enforcer]

Don't give up on the war on drugs, folks. Sooner or later, all the drugs will go away. We just have to be patient.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Larry Nagel

Don't give up on the war on drugs, folks. Sooner or later, all the drugs will go away. We just have to be patient.

And all evil-doers will be eliminated by the righteous from our society and there really is an Easter Bunny.

[Enforcer]

Originally Posted by patricia

And all evil-doers will be eliminated by the righteous from our society and there really is an Easter Bunny.

Now you're getting the hang of it, patricia!

Affixing a stamp to the envelope containing the Christmas list he's about to mail to the North Pole,
Larry

[Doc Martin]

Interesting side note: Stamper was head of the Seattle police during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots and is being boycotted by various members of the left for his role in cracking skulls there.

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Fuck 'em. Smoke it if you got it.

According to FBI figures released on Monday, a record number of people were arrested for marijuana offenses in the U.S. last year: 771,605, compared to the previous record of 755,186, set in 2003 (which surpassed the earlier peak of 735,500, reached in 2000). Marijuana accounted for more than two-fifths of the 1.7 million drug arrests. As usual, the vast majority of marijuana cases (89 percent) involved possession, as opposed to cultivation or trafficking.

[Gary Sisco]

And there are more than 100,000 Americans doing time for simple possession.

Another corrupt factor about the "war on drugs" is that the feds reward local cop departments for hootie weed busts, with gear and so forth, so there's a financial incentive for them to fuck with potheads. Plus, fucking with potheads won't normally place them in harm's way, unlike, say, cocaine, where there's so much money involved there is always also firepower.

[Nathaniel Catchpole]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

It's been a while since I've seen articles on the subject, but way back when, say the 70s, there was a pretty decent percentage of police, including higher-ups, who, often after they'd left the force, opined that decriminalization was the only thing to do, that they were wasting enormous amounts of time, money and lives on this nonsense.

A few brit cops have been pushing for decriminalisation, at least of cannabis, for years - including one of the top four highest ranking officers in the country.

[Enforcer]

My kind of cop: