Front-line frustrarion in a war no one wins - The Age

[Mr Blonde]

CARL Williams, it must be said, never pretended to be an A-grade student.
Variously described during his shortened professional life as an unemployed supermarket shelf-stacker, property developer and professional punter, he was, in reality, turning over $100,000 a month by grinding out a variety of illicit pills of questionable quality.
Tony Mokbel was never inclined to enrol in night school to complete an MBA, yet was the stunningly successful CEO of his corporation, dubbed The Company.
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Howard Marks, the charming Oxford University graduate, ran The Enterprise - a worldwide cannabis business involving 113 known associates working in 14 countries. Over 20 years he used sea-going tugs, freighters and US Navy containers to transport massive quantities of cannabis to his shifting market.
That is the top end of the tree but the roots are voracious - and increasingly, people with expertise in the field, say it will never be stopped.
Police say debt-ridden members of our Vietnamese community are risking their lives by smuggling heroin back to Melbourne on regular flights. Drug taskforce detectives have identified more than 100 who each carry up 400 grams a trip.
And local police street blitzes only temporarily disrupt the heroin deals routinely conducted in the laneways around a Richmond patch near Victoria Street.
The problem has been there since Dennis ''Mr Death'' Allen ran around the same streets in the mid-1980s, and it shows no signs of abating.
What is clear is this is a war where no one looks like winning and a growing school of frustrated experts are looking for a better way.
At the moment it is an academic argument, as no politician with any ambition to sit in the back seat of a government car with a flag on the bonnet and a hand on an assistant's thigh would ever stray from the hard line.
Number-crunchers know that tough on crime wins votes, while the alternative is a one-way ticket to a parliamentary retirement dinner. Those who question the sense of pouring more resources into this holy war are often painted as out-of-touch crackpots who want to turn our youngsters into a generation of glue sniffers.
But in the US, the country that has spent the most on drug law enforcement and still has one of the biggest problems, one of the most persuasive lobby groups is made up of those who spent their professional lives trying to clean up the mess.
More than 3500 former police, prison officials, prosecutors and judges have joined LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), which now has more than 50,000 supporters.
In Australia, where the group is still small, one of the foundation members is Greg Denham, the Yarra Drug and Health Forum executive officer.
While his title sounds a little soy latte for this columnist, we can confirm that Denham is no kaftan-wearing sociology tutor. He is a former police senior sergeant who worked at the sharp end, including the Zebra Taskforce investigating organised crime and police corruption. Denham spent 15 years in Victoria, served in the Queensland police and then spent years working in south-east Asia on an AusAID project to minimise the spread of HIV through drug users sharing needles.
He says repeated police blitzes (including the regular clean-up codenamed Elizabeth) only displaces the problem. ''Like water it always finds its own level.''
Denham says: ''For every drug trafficker that you lock up, two more pop up. The writing is on the wall that we are heading down the wrong track.
''We are pouring more and more money into a system that doesn't work.''
There are many serving police who say while we are not losing the war we are caught in the mud, going neither forward nor backwards. Some say between 60 and 80 per cent of their crime-related work is in some way drug-connected.
What is beyond dispute is that organised crime has only one rule: where there is a demand there will be a supply.
Despite arrests of people such as Tony Mokbel and despite huge seizures by federal and local authorities, the price and purity of drugs rarely changes.
There is no drought and there is no shortage. For every Mokbel there is a queue of crooks waiting to fill his patent leather shoes.
We in Melbourne have lived through a drug-related underworld war that claimed about 30 lives. Compare that to Mexico where there have been 52,000 drug-related murders in five years.
Latin American political leaders are sick of living in a state of near civil war, with corruption destroying the rule of law while massive cartels continue to supply affluent nations with illicit substances.
According to The Washington Post, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom told a December meeting of Latin leaders in Caracas: ''Our region is seriously threatened by organised crime, but there is very little responsibility taken by the drug-consuming countries.''
In other words, they are on the nose because of what we put up ours.
At the conference in Mexico, 11 Latin American and Caribbean leaders urged the big consumer countries to consider alternative strategies, including decriminalisation.
Around the world there is no shortage of police who can be bought, bankers who will wash dirty funds and lawyers eager to take drug money. No wonder some detectives feel like hamsters caught in a wheel.
LEAP co-founder Jack Cole is a man of passion and reason. You may disagree with his views but clearly he is a person who deserves to be heard.
Cole retired as a detective lieutenant after a 26 years with the New Jersey State Police - 14 in narcotics. He made his name (while using a fake one) as an undercover operative.
He first went undercover in 1970 when President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs and within three years he was convinced the policy was not only failing but was creating untold damage.
''When you arrest an offender for robbery or rape the crime rate drops because he can no longer commit crime. When you arrest a drug offender you are just creating a job opportunity.''
He maintains the ''war on drugs'' is a ''self-perpetuating, constantly expanding, policy disaster''.
He says the bulk of those initially arrested in the US are young people dabbling in selling drugs to their friends. When released, Cole says, their lack of education, combined with their criminal conviction, leaves them unemployable and they drift back to drug trafficking - this time on a larger scale.
''We have a saying at LEAP, 'You can get over an addiction but you will never get over a conviction'.''
Cole has the figures to back his views. According to the premier US narcotics agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, by 1970 about 4 million people aged over 12 had used illegal drugs, which was 2 per cent of the population.
Now it estimates the figure at 112 million, which is 46 per cent of all Americans.
DEA figures show the wholesale price of cocaine has dropped by 60 per cent and heroin by 70 per cent since Nixon's 1970 declaration of war.
In 1970 US police arrested 415,600 people on drug charges, while in 2009 the figure jumped to 1,663,582.
''We have spent over a trillion tax dollars on that war, made over 39 million arrests, and today our prisons are filled to the breaking point with 2.3 million people, far more per capita than any country in the world; 1.6 times as many as our closest competitor, Russia, and six times as many as in China.
''The results of this useless policy? Today drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to access than they were at the beginning of this war, when I started buying them as an undercover officer. That is a failed policy. When a strategy has failed this long and this miserably it is time to look for alternatives.''
He doesn't want a free market, rather a regulated system, arguing you give up any chance of control when you hand a $500 billion industry to criminals. He maintains alcohol and tobacco type regulation make more sense than prohibition, which will continue to fail.
Newspaper columnists are supposed to have strong opinions on everything, particularly those matters upon which they are spectacularly ill-informed.
The truth is this one has no idea whether decriminalising drugs would make things better or worse.
What we do know is we have to stop looking to police to solve society's problems.
As Cole accurately observes: ''Police are very good at protecting us from others but we are absolutely worthless at protecting individuals from themselves.''

Link.

That last line of the article is on to something...

 

[psytaco]

Good article. It is encouraging to see more of these types of articles, and more discussion of ending prohibition in the media.

it would of been nice to hear about the Latin American Conference. I read an article on reddit.com about it. Several leaders (and past leaders) are pushing for an end to prohibition due to how out of control the cartel violence has become, particularly in Central America. Sadly though the US flatly rejected any proposal of ending prohibition. many of these countries are still partially dependent on the US for aide, weapons and to buy their exports (particularly oil) - so the US's word has alot of influence.

Back to Australia, I think all we can do is hope that it gathers a more popular movement amongst the people, so that we start having politicians entertaining the prospect. At the moment most would probably privately agree that prohibition is not working, but to say it publicly is political suicide.

 

[Crankinit]

Yeah it's encouraging to see these articles pop up as often as they do, even 5 years ago it was unheard of. Here's to hoping the change happens sooner rather than later.

 

[spacejunk]

Back to Australia, I think all we can do is hope that it gathers a more popular movement amongst the people, so that we start having politicians entertaining the prospect. At the moment most would probably privately agree that prohibition is not working, but to say it publicly is political suicide.

the really depressing thing is that it is not so much domestic political suicide as it is crippling on a foreign-affairs level.

even if we were able to convince our elected representatives that there were better alternatives to prohibition (or if they were able to convince us!) it would almost certainly be stopped by threats from the USA.
this is known to have happened when a maintenance treatment program using heroin was proposed in the 90s in the ACT, i believe. the US state department made it clear that if this went ahead, there would be all sorts of consequences in our two countries "relationship" such as threatening to shut down tasmania's licit opium industry.
it seems that until the american government does an about-face on drugs policy, we will be sticking to the law enforcement, incarceration status quo.

i agree that it is encouraging to see these sorts of articles in the mainstream press, but i sometimes wonder why they always aim for the big targets and rarely talk about the reality of contemporary drugs policy such as the re-criminalisation of cannabis (and the banning of bongs in many states) that is happening at the moment - and the apparent abandonment of harm minimisation principles in favour of a 'say no to drugs' scare campaign, such as that seen in the anti-ecstasy ads that are around these days.

the warnings about pills would be legitimate if they got even some of their facts straight (no, it's often not MDMA and it's certainly not cooked in australian toilets) and warned of research chemical pills, and banning access to safe smoking equipment (getting kids smoking out of aluminium cans and plastic tubes and bottles again) is hardly a step forward. no criticism in much of the media though - just parroting the party line about being 'tough on drugs' to 'save our kids' and all reactionary shit.

it's great to see the anti-prohibition message getting a lot more coverage these days - hopefully laying the foundations of progressive change in the future - but in the meantime, this country seems to be moving backwards in drug law - to nary a whisper from the media.
i love that the war on drugs is being analysed and criticised, but i sometimes think such lofty, noble aims are distracting australians from campaigning for pragmatic drug policy.

 

[psytaco]

^ agreed. so are they planning on banning bongs in victoria still or is that on the back burner?

The US: I am of the firm belief that the US has both alot to gain and alot to lose by ending prohibition. we all know the positives of ending prohibition so I won't bother. However, extending prohibition allows them to continue making money from privatised prisons, where over half of the US's 2 million+ inmates are imprisoned for drug related crime. It also enables greater control of the population, particularly miniorities (keeping them fighting amongst themselves, addicted, poor and uneducated - making them less of a threat to the white ruling class). probably most importantly though prohibition enables the US to put more troops into Latin America, run military operations that are under the premise of the 'war on drugs' in these countries, supply arms to chosen leaders based on the false war on drugs. whilst they do this they either turn a blind eye to drug trafficking, or are actively involved in it as it meets their political needs. One only needs to look at the Iran-Contra scandle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair

Particularly this:
Col. North's handwritten notebooks and memoranda show that North and other U.S. officials were repeatedly informed about the Contras' ties to trafficking of drugs from Latin America into the United States and that airplanes from the U.S. used to supply arms to the Contras were being flown back with Contras personnel aboard carrying cocaine into the United States.[48][49] The matter was further examined in the 1997 report of the US Department of Justice Inspector General, where the main question under investigation was whether CIA was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, and where evidence was presented of patronizing by CIA of drug trafficking to Los Angeles, California.[50] The report however stated that the allegations were "exaggerated".

The above opinions are a bit radical, but I think they also hold plenty of merit

 

[opi8]

^ Thave have already banned bongs in Vic.

 

[psytaco]

Serioiusly?.......damn.

I haven't smoked weed in years, but was wanting to get a bong for a DMT session. that sucks. what about pipes then, can you buy them still?

 

[spacejunk]

psytaco, you're absolutely right about prison inmates being a source of employment (prison guards and staff) and cheap labour (slaves essentially). it seems like the good ol' USA and the corporations that own her have too much to gain from the way things are to ever concede to rational thought and legalise drugs.
it is how a certain section of the population are kept down - they don't have segregation or jim crow laws any more, as they went out of favour in the 1960s. but white middle class america remains in control by imprisoning whole communities with drug laws - in fact it is often said that right now in the united states there are more people imprisoned than there have ever been at any other time in human history. the tragedy is that most are non-violent drug offenders.
the idea that somehow this could change and these people would be set free to go back to their jobs and families sounds too good to be true, unfortunately.
sometimes i think about moving to portugal.

 

[drug_mentor]

Psytaco there is nothing radical at all about your opinions imho, it makes perfect sense and as you pointed out the Iran Contra scandal that is just one instance they got caught, how many do you think they were smart enough to avoid detection? My guess is a lot. Oscar Blandon I believe is still on the DEA bankroll, he certainly was for a long time, although his whereabouts are apparently "unknown". With that dudes connections in South America there is no way they are paying him and not using him or his connections imo. Even without considering that shit the prison industrial complex generates a lot of money, even if drugs could bring in more money its a pretty hard sell to those already invested in the current status quo.

Also, bongs have been illegal in victoria since the start of this year, you can still buy metal 'hash pipes', I have seena couple of glass smoking pipes but they are basically glass hash pipes and not US style spoons that I have been trying to find for ages. You can still buy 'pourers' from certain headshops and sex shops but by all accounts I have heard they aren't as good as pre ban bongs were.