Challenge Response

Pat Rogers responded to my challenge with the text of a potential speech that he's worked on this past and would like to update with feedback from others. I've copied the text here, and I believe he'll also post it up to his own blog soon.

America today suffers with a disease that significantly contributes to taking one in four young black men out of our economy and community while feeding the crime and violence that erodes the foundations of both our neighborhoods and the rule of law.

My rival for the Democratic nomination recently spoke out, in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, about the vitally important issue of crime. Especially in our cities. Philadelphia's 392 citizens dead, including two police officers shot down in the line of duty in 2007, is testament that there is something very wrong with current American criminal justice policies.

Economically deteriorating urban areas, with large populations filling prisons rather than jobs.

Local, county, state and federal prison and policing budgets are all stretched beyond the funding capacity of taxpayers.

Too many of our youth are more likely to see the inside of a prison cell than a college classroom as adults.

And this great 'Land of the Free' of ours is suffering with the ignoble reputation of a world record prison population dating back to the Clinton administration.

According to 2003 United Nations market estimates America's illegal drug market is worth some $ 141-billion annually. This constantly renewable black market economic engine easily outpaces the $ 1oo-billion a year spent by all local, state and federal agencies enforcing the war on drugs today. At $ 100-billion in anti drug expenditures each year police attention is diverted from other crime fighting. This reduces their effectiveness, generally, for the entire community.

And so crime continues to plague our communities. My opponent still calls for more police.

While police are an integral component of our justice system, our simplistically throwing more police on the street, as my opponent proposes, and as we have done as a nation for most of the past four decades without much success, policing has a finite capacity to protect citizens from violence, crime or addiction. Increasing crime, addiction and the increasing cost of enforcing against crime and addiction should be a warning beacon for us, a flashing light of caution that police alone have only a limited capacity to intercede against the poor personal behavior choices some people make or against the intricate biological compulsions of addiction.

We can also discern, in the stark glare of the warning beacon, the growing population of addicted children roaming our streets that should tell us that alone police have almost no capacity to dissuade under-educated, under-employed and/or under-age Americans, in all communities, urban and rural alike, from the intoxicating enticement of drugs. Or deny potential users the seeming social solace and economic inducement that the $ 141-billion a year U.S. black market for drugs can offer them.

There must be something more, in this wonderful land with the most inventive, creative and adaptive form of government ever created, something more that we as a nation can do to reduce the violent criminal gangs that plague us today. To stop the street violence that terrorizes us. To protect our children by diverting them more successfully from drug abuse and the potential of prison.

And there must also be something we can do to alleviate legitimate concerns that public safety policy initiatives might reduce the effectiveness of law enforcement or actually increase crime and violence for our police and for us all.

We, as a nation, seek out innovative ways to regulate gun access by criminals yet cheap illegal hand guns still proliferate. More supply side regulations, that allow better tracking the legal owners and suppliers of guns, is only occasionally useful and then only after a crime of violence has victimized yet another innocent person. The regulation of legal owners prevents or deters nothing in the lawlessness of the criminal economy. Such poorly directed regulations are especially useless for the crime victims and their families. Useless too for the police patrolling our neighborhoods in body armor. And these supply side laws actually achieve little in terms of reducing demand in the crime economy dependent population. It is demand that drives the market for cheap and easy to get illegal handguns. Supply will always rise up to meet demand. We see this with drugs just as we saw this with the alcohol prohibition of the last century.

The largest single demand for illegal guns in America is the illegal drug trade. It is a $ 141-billion annual marketplace that requires a lot of guns for security, to empower itself, enforce itself and regulate itself in the regulatory vacuum of a prohibition economy. This totally unregulated and massively funded demand by the drug trade is what keeps illegal guns cheap and easy to get for all small time crooks and criminals. Reduce the drug gang demand and the supply of all illicit guns will be diminished.

Reduce this subsidizing sector of demand and the price of guns will rise to compensate for the increased risk of supplying to a smaller marketplace for guns that would be more easily enforceable with existing police resources. Fewer guns on the street at higher prices will make guns less accessible to small time crooks of all sorts. Reducing the demand, I believe, is how we can actually reduce violent crime.

Some people will be concerned that we are sending the wrong message to our young people when we remove prohibition. What message are we sending when addict drug dealers have easy everyday street access to our children and, depending only on police, we can do little about it until the child steps over the line and is caught up in the drug culture and thrown into the criminal justice system? Taking control of that marketplace with licensed merchants tells children that we as a society care enough about them to put the highest levels of government regulatory ability in between them and the mistake of early drug use.

Others will fear that the drug would become more available. It is as available now as it will ever be. More available to children because many drug dealers have none of the qualms about selling to children. Qualms that legal merchants of tobacco and alcohol take seriously today.

The wrong message is continued government benign neglect that empowers a massive and corrupt black market leaving children to the amoral tender mercies of addict dealers, gangsters and other social predators who all thrive in the illegal economy. The right message is showing that we care with strong government institutions watching closely enough over well regulated merchants who 'just say no' when children come in to buy.

Scientists tell us that the disease of addiction is a genetic based disease. A biological malady that impacts 25% or more of our population no matter how many police and prisons we have. The National Institutes on Drug Abuse Genetics Working Group tells us that "Like many other psychiatric illnesses, drug abuse and dependence comprise a complex set of genetic disorders..."

"complex set of genetic disorders" This could explain why, no matter how draconian the prohibition against it, some people still fall victim to abuse of drugs. No matter how many police we put on the streets the existing user/dealers will turn on new users in order to feed their own need if there are no other medical alternatives. Yes they are wired. Genetically wired in a way that police and prisons can never undo. Genetically wired in a way that doctors and hospitals are much better equipped to untangle.If the goal of the war on drugs is to protect American children from the disease of addiction then who is better suited to deliver that mandate for the nation? A million amoral drug addict dealers and their predator gangster bosses? Or responsible medical professionals guiding a regulated market of licensed and taxed merchant members of the community. Do we want addicts with a physical imperative driving them to sell more and more and selling drugs to all comers? Or would we be better off licensing our fellow citizens, neighbors and parents. Under government oversight, people who share our values as a society to protect children in their formative years from destructive choices? Destructive choices that an addict sales force encourages.

An innovative medicalized addiction treatment program in Switzerland last year reported the unexpected outcome of young people turning away from heroin because they now perceive addiction as a disease to be avoided rather than as an act of rebellion that often motivates the destructive choices that young folks make.

If the goal of the war on drugs is to protect Americans from crime fueled by drug abuse, along with the greed inspired violence among lawless drug gangs, how better to do that than to shrink the profit potential drug marketplace. I am not saying to simply nibble at the edges of the criminal economy with more interdiction and enforcement. That, by the way, has never been more than 20-30% effective. But actually take a significant double digit percentage of the $ 141-billion a year black market out of the pockets of the addict drug dealers and criminal gangs altogether. Regulate, tax and license the criminal anarchy out of the distribution of drugs as completely and effectively as regulations today protect consumers from predatory practices in other commerce.

Even the Bush administration is looking to re-regulate financial institutions that have become too predatory due to a lack of regulation. Too much deregulation empowered predatory lending practices leaving the community with billions dollars in bad mortgages and a looming economic recession. Yes even an economic conservative like George W. Bush understands the constructive value of regulating the anarchy out of otherwise free markets.

We can do the same with the $ 141-billion criminal subsidy program that the war on drugs has turned into.

No other form of illegal activity generates the level of gang subsidizing profits that drugs generate today. Significantly reduce this profit by regulating the gangs out of the distribution and we can take from the criminal gangs their economic ability to entice more children into drug abuse.

We can do serious structural damage to the entire national drug gang culture. Drive them out of the economy altogether.

The failure of the war on drugs is not that we have not spent enough on it. Or that we have not hired enough police and built enough prisons. The failure of the war on drugs is the failure by us policy makers to see that absolutely prohibiting the distribution and sale of drugs, as the war on drugs does today, creates a regulatory vacuum that is a black market license for gangsters to step in and take the risk for the immense rewards.

The failure of the war on drugs is that we policy makers fail to see that police cannot be all things to all people. And that, in our democratic society, police alone cannot embody and represent the entirety of our rule of law. The rule of law is more than just enforcement. The rule of law is a trust between the people, policy makers and police that given a reasonable regulatory regime most citizens will choose to live within the regime leaving police free to better protect us all from the limited population of predators who try to thrive on marginal illegal market demand.

We cannot simply legalize all dangerous substances. Americans have experienced the past three dozen years of crime spawned by the easy limitless dollars of the drug markets. We will not readily accept a distinction between non-problematic casual consumption and addiction as opposed to the crime fostered by the lawlessness of any prohibition based marketplace. Or support on its surface the premise that economic prohibition is actually making drug abuse and crime worse than they might otherwise be. Many Americans though are coming to see this truth.

Last summer, after citing a litany of social ills that they attribute to the war on drugs policy, the United States Conference of Mayors, local elected executives who are on the front lines of the war on drugs, passed a resolution. "RESOLVED that the United States Conference of Mayors believes the war on drugs has failed and calls for a New Bottom Line in U.S. drug policy, a public health approach that concentrates more fully on reducing the negative consequences associated with drug abuse, while ensuring that our policies do not exacerbate these problems or create new social problems of their own; establishes quantifiable, short- and long-term objectives for drug policy; saves taxpayer money; and holds state and federal agencies accountable..."

Last December Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher-CA, speaking on the floor of the U.S. House on the 75th Anniversary of the end of Alcohol Prohibition observed:

"The war on drugs has resulted in a multimillion dollar network of violent organized crime. The war on drugs has created the deaths by drive-by shootings and turf wars among gangs in our cities. The war on drugs has overcrowded our prisons. More than half of Federal prison space is occupied by nonviolent drug users. The war on drugs has corrupted our police and crowded our courts. We apparently did not learn the lesson of the prohibition of alcoholic beverages."

More and more policy makers are coming to recognize that it is the illegal status of the drug marketplace that has given the criminals this business opportunity to prey on the addicted and our children. And that the prohibition economy provides addicts with an economic alternative to seeking treatment.

As we criminalize yet another generation of young people, compounding the percentages of criminalized generations from the 1970's-80's and 90's, we feed our prison recidivism rates, that are now well over 50%.

Thanks in large part to the drug war the New York Times observed in a 2004 editorial: "The prison population was driven up tenfold, creating a large and growing felon class - now 13 million strong - that remains locked out of the mainstream and prone to recidivism. Trailing behind the legions of felons are children who grow up visiting their parents behind bars and thinking prison life is perfectly normal. Meanwhile, the cost of building and running prisons has pushed many states near bankruptcy - and forced them to choose between building jails and schools."

Criminalizing an ever growing population of Americans for their poor intoxicant related personal behavior choices reduces their earning potential. Criminalization turns many into permanent drags on the rest of the economy. Not the least of these drags being the cost of a world record prison population at an average cost of $ 33,000 per cell and a recidivism rate fueled by failed drug testing of often incurably addicted prisoners. This not only reduces the tax base of the whole community but makes it more likely that these Americans with reduced earnings potential will be enticed into the one and only economic opportunity where they might sustain themselves, the illegal drug markets.

According to Pennsylvania's state Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard speaking to a state Appropriations Committee "Nonviolent offenders comprised nearly two-thirds of 10,000 prisoners admitted into the prison system last year, Beard said. They include such offenders as drug addicts who steal to feed their habits and low-level dealers with no firearms upon arrest."

Drug war over-crowded county, state and federal prisons warehouse people in conditions that the New York City police intelligence unit last year characterized as "A Radicalizing Cauldron". "Prisons can play a critical role in both triggering and reinforcing the radicalization process. The prison’s isolated environment, ability to create a “captive audience” atmosphere, its absence of day-to-day distractions, and its large population of disaffected young men, makes it an excellent breeding ground for radicalization."

So how do we reduce crime and the growing population that has become economically dependent on crime? How do we reduce drug abuse? Finally, how do we start to restore vitality to our poverty dense communities where the economic opportunity of illegal drugs is often the only opportunity for too many citizens? And how do we stem the flow of finite public dollars into an endless escalation of police and prisons?

In short, how do we actually win the war on drugs?

First we need to accept as a nation two principles. First, that drug use and abuse, while stupid and a sickness is not in and of itself criminal. Just poor personal behavior.Second, we need to trust that public health and licensed merchant based regulatory institutions can best constrain distribution, discourage or mitigate excessive use and free up public safety resources for fighting crime.

Exactly how do we, institutionally, achieve this?

First and easiest would be to follow the lead of the Humboldt County California commissioners who last year asked the representative in congress to lobby for decriminalization of marijuana. Three quarters of a million arrests for low addiction potential pot each year is an immense diversion of police resources to a substance that has a huge public popularity and can generate tax dollars for local governments. It would immediately free up millions of police man-hours. And it would remove billions of dollars a year from the criminal black market economy weakening drug gangs so that they cannot afford to maintain the large sales forces that they field today. Fewer dealers on the street will reduce access that children have today to all drugs.

Second, hard core incurable addicts are known, by criminal justice experts, to be a locus in the community for street crime and drug dealing. Needing to generate sometimes hundreds of dollars a day to sustain their addiction drives a constant need. For some its to find more people to share drug supplies with. And for others the need to commit more and more random acts of economic crime to fund their supply. Bringing these people into clinical support systems can both reduce incidence of drug dealing and reduce the incidence of economic crime. To do this we can quickly adopt and expand on the very successful drug maintenance/rehab programs that the Swiss and other nations have tested for taking incurable addicts out of the economic clutches of criminal predators and gangster distributors. Recognizing that, as a genetically based disease, addiction will be incurable for some people, it makes no sense to inhumanely leave these people without help and on the streets as non-people in an endless drug cold war. The outcome again will be fewer dealers generating profits for gangsters. Fewer dealers on the streets driven to turn on more new addicts. The reductions in crime will free up billions of dollars in criminal justice resources to confront a diminishing criminal supporting black market economy.

Finally, America needs to have a frank debate on the usefulness of our over-reliance on the criminal justice system to solve social and public health problems. Such a debate could eventually find a regulatory means to deprive the criminals and gangsters of all of their drug profits. While better discouraging the stupidity of drug use. Better anyway than we seem to be doing today.

What do you think? Could Barack Obama make that speech and still win in November?