America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs.

• Author: Barnett, Randy E.

INTRODUCTION

Popular support for drug prohibition--especially among those who have given the matter any thought--is like support for George Bush just after Operation Desert Storm: very broad and very thin. Perhaps some personal experiences of mine will illustrate why.

Personal Anecdote Number One: In the early morning hours of February 24, 1979, Michael Salcedo, his brother Arthur, and their friend Frank Mussa decided to buy some marijuana. Because marijuana is illegal, they could not go to the same legitimate businesses that sell tobacco or alcohol. So the three young men set out for Latin Eagles territory on the north side of Chicago; specifically to King Kastle, a hamburger stand that gang members were known to frequent. When they arrived there, Michael approached gang members Juan Caballero, Placedo LaBoy, Nelson Aviles, and Luis Ruiz, and asked if they would sell him some marijuana. Ruiz replied truthfully that they had no marijuana to sell and did not know where any might be found. Thinking that perhaps Ruiz and the others did not trust them, Michael told Ruiz that he knew Jose Cortez, a member of the Latin Eagles. Ruiz then asked Michael if he was an Eagle. Michael said he was and boasted that he had ridden with the Eagles when they went on "hits" against their archrivals, the Latin Kings.

Had Michael actually been as knowledgeable about gangs as he was attempting to demonstrate, he would have been aware of a critical fact: the persons with whom he was speaking were members of the Latin Kings, not the Latin Eagles. Their response to Michael's braggadocio was to tell him that they did have marijuana to sell after all. The gang members then accompanied the three young men to their car, and directed them to drive to an alley where they would do the deal. Upon arriving in the alley, they instructed Michael to accompany them around a comer. After turning the corner, Ruiz revealed their deception and the four proceeded to beat Michael until they were "satisfied." Ruiz and LaBoy then returned to the car and drove around the corner to pick up Michael and the others.

After driving to another alley, Caballero and LaBoy ordered Michael and Frank out of the car, took them at gunpoint to a gangway, and told them to lie face down in the snow. Meanwhile, in the car, Aviles stabbed Arthur to death. Then, LaBoy led Frank back to the car, pushed him on top of Arthur's body, and stabbed him to death. Finally, Caballero forced Michael into the car, shoved him on the bodies of his brother and friend, and stabbed him to death. Each youths' throat was slit before each was stabbed repeatedly in the chest.

We learned these chilling facts from the court-reported confession of Juan Caballero. As an Assistant State's Attorney, I took both that statement and an oral confession from Luis Ruiz.(1) After Caballero signed his statement, I asked him, "If you had to do it over, would you do it again?" He replied, "If it was a sure thing." When I told him that there is no such thing as a sure thing, he remarked that "lots of Kings have killed people without getting caught." I responded that he got caught, but if he had it to do over, would he do it again? He answered, "I'd kill Michael for sure; I don't know about the other two."

The moral of this story: Drug prohibition kills. There were no actual illicit drugs in this story. Drug prohibition "worked" insofar as the members of the Latin Kings had no marijuana to sell on that fateful night. Yet three young men are dead, because drug prohibition made it impossible for them to buy marijuana from a safe and legal supplier, as they might have bought alcohol or tobacco. Had the local liquor or drug store sold marijuana, these young men would have lived. Perhaps smoking marijuana would have been harmful to their health; drug prohibition was fatal.

Since these three deaths in 1979, prohibition has taken the lives of thousands more. As the war on drugs has escalated, so too has the violence. When I was a prosecutor, over half of the murders I prosecuted were "drug-law related" in the sense that the victim was killed as a result of a drug deal gone bad or a robbery of someone suspected of having either valuable drugs or money from selling drugs. To illustrate the typical drug-prohibition-related murder, I might have detailed the story of brothers Robert and George King, whom I prosecuted for brutally stabbing Gregory Perkins to death with a pair of scissors. Perkins was known to sell marijuana and therefore was believed to have a large sum of money in his possession. He did not, but he died anyway.

Personal Anecdote Number Two: In 1976, when I was a law clerk for the State's Attorney's Office of Cook County, the average caseload per judge was well over 400. In those days, plea bargaining was notorious, leading to such travesties as the "Cook County Voluntary," the name used to describe how the system typically dealt with the murder of one spouse by the other. Despite clear evidence of murder, unless the victim was someone special, such cases routinely were pled out as voluntary manslaughters. Rapes routinely were reduced to aggravated battery. Car thieves and burglars had to be convicted dozens of times before being imprisoned. It simply was not possible to bring even a small fraction of cases to trial, and defense lawyers knew it. So most cases ended with extremely lenient deals.

This was just about the time that the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration began to expend federal funds on local law enforcement. One of my first tasks as a law clerk assigned to a felony trial court was to select the approximately one quarter of the docket that would be assigned to new felony trial courts opening up on the West Side. By the time I returned to the felony trial courts as an Assistant State's Attorney in 1979, the caseload in each courtroom was down to between 125 and 135. This meant that as a prosecutor I could credibly threaten to try any case on the call. This, in turn, meant that I could offer plea bargains that were in my judgment correct sentences. We tried the cases we liked and pled the rest, unaffected by caseload concerns. However, that was before the "War on Drugs" really started to heat up.(2) By the 1990's, the caseload had once again climbed to over 400, even though the number of courts had greatly increased. Give-away plea bargaining was once again rampant, especially for those accused of property crimes.(3)

The moral of this story: There is no such thing as a free crime. Every enforcement effort consumes scarce resources. The more conduct we define as criminal, the more that scarce resources have to be allocated selectively among different crimes. The more money and time that is spent enforcing drug prohibition, the less that is available to enforce other crimes, to provide treatment for drug users, to provide health care, to feed the poor, or to do anything else that people may value. Moreover, the inflation of crimes diminishes the significance attached to each. As more conduct is criminalized in order to "send a message" of societal disapproval, enforcement of each crime declines. Consequently, the message actually delivered to prospective criminals becomes less meaningful. Criminalizing more conduct has the paradoxical effect of making both law-abiding and law-breaking citizens breathe easier at night--the former in the short run and the latter in the long run.

Personal Anecdote Number Three: During the time I was a prosecutor, all drug cases in Chicago were funneled through two preliminary hearing courts. Rumor had it that one of these judges was corrupt; he allegedly disposed of drug cases based on payments from favored lawyers. (Eventually, this judge was indicted and convicted during the Operation Greylord federal probe of local corruption, but not until I had left the prosecutor's office and entered law teaching.) As a prosecutor assigned to the courtroom of the honest judge, I was advised to beware of police reports in which the circumstances of the arrest were ambiguously described. By permitting the reporting officers to testify later that they had committed an illegal search, such reports enabled the officers to derail unilaterally a prosecution upon receipt of a bribe.

Finally, in those days, prosecutors assigned to the Felony Review Unit were not involved in approving charges or search warrants for drug cases. Three reasons were cited for this policy. First, the volume of drug cases would have diverted scarce resources away from other more important pursuits. Second, the State's Attorney considered prosecuting drug cases to be potentially corrupting, and he wanted his prosecutors to be only minimally involved in the highly discretionary charging stage of the case. Third, in drug cases one typically had only police witnesses. Absent some evidence to the contrary, prosecutors would not question police accounts of an arrest or case and, consequently, there was not much for prosecutors to evaluate. They would of necessity simply rubber stamp the police decisions.(4)

The moral of this story: Drug prohibition greatly increases official corruption. Judges, police officers, and prosecutors are all enforcing laws in which there is no civilian complaining witness to provide an external check on police, prosecutorial, and judicial discretion. No outsider effectively knows what is going on inside the system. Given the vast amount of drug money in the black market created by prohibition, there is little to prevent law enforcement personnel from pocketing their share, save the extremely rare federal probe of local law enforcement.(5) And a police officer, prosecutor,(6) or judge corrupted by drug prohibition is very likely to be corrupted in all other matters as well.

Interestingly, when I tell these anecdotes to those who are committed to drug prohibition, most are completely unaffected by them. Shockingly, they are unmoved even by the murder of Frank...