Posted by
Sean Engmann on Sunday, April 12, 2009 8:39:48 PM
The Drug War has been going on since well before I was born, and is likely to continue in its present state well after I die. Given the current tactics, the Drug War is absolutely unwinnable and it is our current drug policy that is responsible for the violence on the Mexican border. The moniker Drug War, like the War on Terror seems to be a euphemistic term, but it is only euphemistic in that in both wars, the United States is not doing what's necessary to win, we are not going all in.
A war is as black and white as it comes, you're either on one side or the other. Trying to paint the War on Drugs in shades of grey dooms us to failure. As a society, we need to make a decision about what we will tolerate and what we will not. What we do tolerate needs to be made fully legal, what we do not needs to be criminalized and penalized harshly. The extremes are the Dutch model of legalization, and Singapore's model of zero tolerance, we need to pick one for each drug, and if we do so, we will win the Drug War.
As an example, marijuana is widely used and widely available as an illicit drug. Society might decide that it is tolerable and legalize it. Heroine on the other hand, is dangerous and intolerable, we need to criminalize its sale with a mandatory life sentence for selling it. We need to attack supply and not demand. With such a harsh penalty, the cost of selling the drug would go through the roof and as a result the quantity demanded would fall dramatically.
Opponents of mine would say that my policy constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and assume that the prison population would skyrocket. They would be wrong on both counts. Because of the cost of selling, transactions would likely move off of street corners and be very secure. We would have fewer arrests, not more. Additionally, we would eradicate the street drug dealers and dry up the revenue stream of local gangs that terrorize urban neighborhoods as the cost of using a middleman would be too high. In terms of cruel and unusual punishment, there's nothing cruel and unusual about jail time for a crime, particularly one as insideous as selling drugs.
Our issue now is that we are still criminilizing drugs, but the punishment is not requisite to act as a deterrent, particularly given the fact of overcrowding of prisons. Sentences are often extremely short and prisons in California serve as a breeding ground for further gang activity. Unfortunately, overcrowded prisons benefit prison guards, as other economic factors complicate the simple task of winning the Drug War.
Finally, the Mexican drug cartels and all gangs should be treated as domestic terrorists. We need to give the police the tools to effectively defeat the gangs, and those tools include the increased use of force and property seisures. All individuals who are in the United States illegally and engaging in gang activity, particularly the selling of drugs, need to be reclassified as enemy combatants and detained at a facility like Guantanamo Bay. We can win the War on Drugs, but we need to utilize the tools at our disposal and we cannot blur the line between the good guys and the bad guys.