Before I begin, I’d just like to thank you for the patience you’ve shown while waiting for me to finally put something up on this blog. – RAB ;->
A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE WAR ON DRUGS
If the purpose of our War on Drugs is to ensure the long-term viability of what leftist minds like to call "the prison-industrial complex," then by every conceivable yardstick it’s a resounding success. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to get the drugs off our streets, just open your eyes and see the abject failure radiating from sea to shining sea.
Before we go any further, let’s take legalisation off the table right now. Legalisation may be fine for marijuana, because almost all of the social costs that would entail are already with us, courtesy of alcohol and tobacco being legal. Indeed, the prime benefit of legalising marijuana for both medicinal AND recreational use is that doing so would stymie those in the legalisation movement who don’t plan on stopping with pot, by cutting off the flow of money and manpower that they currently divert from the marijuana-reform movement.
But the social costs of legalising hard drugs (cocaine, opium and its derivatives, etc.) would be far too great to ever consider it a viable option: skyrocketing prostitution and property-crime rates, health-care costs going through the roof, lost workplace productivity – the list goes on and on. Legalising hard drugs would spell the End of America, period.
Therefore, what do we DO about the drug problem in this country, if legalisation of hard drugs is not an option (and it isn’t!) and our current plan of action is sufficiently ineffective to make even gun control seem a little less ridiculous by comparison? Common sense will tell you that developing a better plan requires that we first examine the flaws in our current strategy.
As things stand now, the procedure for a drug bust goes like this: when a lead is confirmed, the police go in. People are arrested; contraband is seized as evidence. Those arrested are tried and, when convicted, imprisoned.
Even setting aside for now the cost to the taxpayers of keeping these guys behind bars for X number of years, this approach is more problem-ridden than you can shake a stick at. When police officers are required to testify at drug dealers’ trials, do you think they get a call while walking the beat, telling them to come in and testify? Or do you think they have to spend entire days at the courthouse, waiting to find out whether that will be the day they have to sit in the witness stand – or whether they’ll have to come in the next day and play the waiting game all over again? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the arrested dealer’s bosses have already filled his vacant job with a fresh new recruit. Business as usual, uninterrupted by the minor inconvenience of an employee’s removal from duty.
So, where do we stand now? Drugs are still being sold, people are still buying and using drugs, some of our Finest are taken off the beat for a couple of days to sit in a courthouse waiting to testify, and we face two alternatives regarding the fate of the arrested dealer: either he’ll spend some time in the hoosegow at the taxpayers’ expense, or he’ll get off scot-free on some arcane legal technicality (or the whim of a pro-defendant or otherwise lenient-minded judge) and be back on the streets pushing drugs faster than you can say "revolving-door justice."
Now that we know what’s wrong with the current approach, we can start developing a better way. Bear in mind that my alternative approach is not perfect: there will still be a drug problem in this country – just a much smaller one. There really IS no perfect solution to a problem this messy; even the "perfect" solution isn’t perfect. Its implementation would be so draconian and outright ghoulish that most Americans would reject it, and if we dared actually implement it the rest of the World would condemn us for doing so until the Sun supernovas and swallows up the Earth. Are you ready for a solution to America’s drug crisis that consists of dispatching every person involved in the problem – including the buyers!! – with a bullet to the head, while using weapons of mass destruction to completely obliterate countries known to be major sources of the drugs on our streets? No? Then why not relax for a few minutes and give my solution a hearing-out instead?
First, we take a new approach to the drug-bust procedure. When a lead is confirmed, the police go in just as they already do. When they go in, the new procedure would go down as follows: the people in the drug den are stripped down to their skivvies and cuffed to anything that will prevent them from moving about. Then all the drugs, weapons, money and other valuables are confiscated. The drugs are taken back to the precinct for destruction in a vat of battery acid, the weapons and other valuables sold at auction (the weapons, specifically, sold to law-abiding people) and the money deposited into a special government account. And what of the dealers? Let their superiors deal with them.
This new approach has the following advantages: it saves the taxpayers the costs associated with trials, imprisonment and other hassles associated with the current method. It frees the police to conduct raids on more drug dens at a much faster pace. It focuses on what is supposed to be the Alpha and Omega of this War: getting drugs off the streets. And since dealers who get raided too often will likely be killed by their superiors for losing too much money and "merchandise," the sharp increase in the number of dealers killed that will naturally occur as the result of a sharp increase in police raids will discourage most (though not all) people who might consider dealing a viable career choice under the current scheme.
The primary drawback is that the new approach represents a radical departure from the traditions that are hallmarks of our justice system. No trials. No defence. No appeal. To many, this would seem to be Un-American. But since those traditions were promulgated in simpler times, when problems of this sort were non-existent, the sad fact is that these traditions are not effective in dealing with a problem like the narcotics trade. We already are using a few new approaches in another war – the War On Terrorism. We can ill afford to continue spinning our wheels trying to make the square peg of our legal traditions fit into the round holes of modern problems like terrorism and illicit drugs, when it is already crystal-clear that a new approach is necessary.
At this point, the only parameters we ought to observe when formulating new approaches to problems that cannot be dealt with using current methods are: (1) innocent people shall not be harmed by the new approach, (2) authorities must not create extraordinary scenarios that don’t already occur anyway under the current method, and (3) the ultimate goal of the effort – the effective removal of illicit narcotics from our streets – must be accomplished to the satisfaction of all parties whose satisfaction we must consider.
I think you’ll agree that in the absence of a better way to solve this problem, my proposal will at least bring a significant improvement in the efficiency of the War On Drugs. Let the debate begin!!
