HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/police.news

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 30.5 KB

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 15:06 PDT
Subject: 5 articles from Police News
Message-ID: <1484000592@cdp>

Now on this newsgroup find five articles OCRed from the Spring '94 issue of Police
of Police News.  I was quite surprised at the anti-WOD content.
Hopefully these articles will be widely distributed.  The articles by
Judge James Gray and Judge Rose are jsut as expected, but you may
be delighted to see similar sentiments from Milton Friedman, George Schultz,
WilliamBuckley and the editor-in-chief of this "cop" mag.

Jim

=============================================================================

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 14:58 PDT
Subject: Judge Rose in Police News
Message-ID: <1484000587@cdp>

A World Gone Mad

By Ronald W. Rose United States Magistrate Judge
In Police News Spring 94

Twenty years ago as a young prosecutor, my job was to put people in jail
for dealing in drugs. As a result, many were convicted. I was absolutely
certain that vigorous enforcement and long jail terms was the way to go.
I had every confidence that throwing resources, manpower, additional
judges, mandatory minimum sentences, life without parole, etc., etc.,
etc., would soon solve the problem.

Within a few months, I tried another drug case involving the largest (at
that time~ cocaine seizure in the history of Florida - 23 pounds. It was
front page news for days. These defendants were likewise convicted and
are probably still in prison. Has this solved anything? In my opinion,
absolutely nothing was accomplished, except I got to chalk up another
victory at a cost to the taxpayers of thousands of dollars each year,
for clothing and feeding these dregs of society.

Instead of seizing pounds of cocaine, we now seize buildings full of the
stuff. The drug lords in South America are laughing at us all the way to
the bank. They know that for every mule or mid-level dealer we take out,
there are fifty more waiting to take their place. There is just so much
money to be made that the slim chance of being caught is always worth
the risk. Believe me, after twenty years as a prosecutor and judge, I
can assure you that we only catch the stupid ones.

In disadvantaged neighborhoods, drug dealers are the local heroes. Every
kid in the ghetto wants to be one. These children see it as a way out of
their despair and poverty. They can make more selling "crack" cocaine,
in one afternoon, than a hard working person with a job can make in a
week. I customarily speak with DEA agents who visit my office for search
warrants. Their attitude is universally one of despair. They spend
entire careers believing each day they come to work that their presence
makes a difference, but the problem gets worse no matter what they do.
It is getting worse in logarithmic proportions. We already have more
people in jail, per capita, than any other country on earth (About five
times as many per capita).

We used to ignore the battlefield carnage of the street gangs, as they
were only killing each other in their own neighborhoods. Now theses same
gangs are coming out of their ghettos. They are increasingly taking
their act on the road. One new tactic is to cruise the freeways at night
looking for wealthy individuals who they can follow home, brutalize,
rape and pillage, all for the sake of supporting a drug habit.

Year after year we are treated to the same tired political solutions. We
now have a "drug czar." Whoop-de-do! The first one got his picture taken
a few hundred times, gave a few speeches, declared victory and resigned.
We have spent decades throwing more judges into the system, adding
prosecutors, investigators, building prisons (but not in my backyard),
using the military, and in short spending an incredible bundle of money.
We have nothing to show for it but a bunch of photo opportunities where
a few pounds of the stuff and some seized cash are exhibited in grand
style to demonstrate how well law enforcement does its job. The carrot
is always held out that we are turning the corner; there is a light at
the end of this tunnel. Sure.

By and large law enforcement is composed of men and women truly
dedicated to their profession - individuals who would lay their lives on
the line and often do. They have an unenviable job. Yet their function
has been reduced to stamping out cockroaches without any ability to get
to the nest. A total waste of time and energy. The drug lords love it.

My solution is not politically correct and is certainly not acceptable
to those upstanding politicians (oxymoron, sorry) we have entrusted to
make our decisions for us. It is, simply, to decriminalize the use and
possession of drugs. Not only decriminalize them, hut actually give them
away to anyone insane enough to want them.

Before anyone goes ballistic here, I do not advocate giving drugs to
children This should always be a capital offense. We have to take the
profit motive out of this Dante's Inferno that is killing us like the
Chinese "death from a thousand cuts." Prohibition did not work with
alcohol and it is not working with drugs. I harbor no illusions that
this solution is perfect, but it is essentially the only one remaining.

The Colombian cartels, the Jamaican gangs, the Ins Angeles street gangs,
and our local drug lords make the Mafia look like a troop of girl
scouts. The terror is coming to our shores, a little bit at a time, and
we just sit back and take it. Why can't we realize what is happening to
us before it is too late?

If we used the money presently being squandered to lose the drug war,
funnel it into drug treatment and education, the problem would largely
disappear in a few years. There would be no profit left. Drugs would be
free, drug lords would lose their millions and millions in profits,
corruption would all but disappear (except maybe in the Savings
and Loan industry), our elderly would not feel trapped in their homes,
and most importantly, our children would have a future free from the
specter of slaughter in their schools or having to endure the nightmare
of addiction. The present generation of drug user is probably beyond
hope.  Perhaps treatment will help, but we have to cut our loses and
protect what is left.

=============================================================================

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 14:59 PDT
Subject: Judge Gray in Police News
Message-ID: <1484000588@cdp>

Our Drug Laws  Have Failed

By James P. gray, U.S. Superior Court Judge

In Police News, Spring 94

What we are doing is not working We have focused our attention, effort
and resources upon intercepting heroin, cocaine and marijuana, and
incarcerating those who sell and use them. We have been increasingly
successful in seizing even larger quantities of these drugs, con`vichog
greater numbers of defendants who are involved with them and sentencing
those defendants to even longer terms in our jails and prisons.
Nevertheless, the magnitude of the problem created by making these drugs
illegal continues to grow. The only practical resolution available to us
is to revise our laws so that the use by adults of heroin, cocaine and
marijuana, and the purchase by adults of these drugs generically at
licensed commercial pharmacies is legal.

Although under this proposal the purchase and use by adults of heroin,
cocaine and marijuana from the pharmacies would be legal, the sale,
transfer or furnishing hy anyone of any quantity of these drugs to
minors would he severely punished. Also, present laws concerning public
drunkenness, driving a motor vehicle while under the influence, etc.,
would not he changed, and the unlicensed sale of these drugs would
remain a violation of the law. The price of the drugs at the pharmacies
would be set at an amount that would be continually adjusted so as to
undercut the sales price of any illegal sale "on the street." This would
do away with the financial incentive to sell them illegally.

Without a doubt, some people will continue to buy and abuse these drugs
under this proposal. However, since there would be no incentive to
"push" these drugs, they would never be advertised or "on sale", and
free samples would never be given to anyone, including non-users in
order to get them "hooked", etc., the usage should not be above the
present rate, and probably, after a possible initial surge, would be
materially reduced.

All of the other results under this plan would be positive. Crime would
he materially reduced. For example, there is no violence now in the
manufacture, distribution and purchase of alcohol. Also, for those who
would continue to burglarize in support of their drug habit, they would
do so less often because of the reduced price. Since part of the sales
price at the pharmacies would be a tax, resources for the education
about and treatment of drug abuse would he substantially increased.
Police and society's other pressing needs. No new taxes would be needed
for jail or courthouse construction. Lower income areas would be
reclaimed from the drug sellers. Monies obtained by juvenile gangs and
other organized crime would be decreased. Violence and corruption in our
country and abroad would be significantly decreased. Overdoses and other
medical problems from the usage of these drttgs would be reduced because
the Food and Drug Administration would ensure that the strengths of
these drugs would be accurately set forth on the labels. Drug treatment
would be encouraged because of warning labels outside, and literature
inside the packages, including toll-free numbers to call for more
information. Clean needles would reduce the spread of AIDS.

Many good, honest and intelligent people may disagree with this proposal
on moral and/or other reasonable grounds. In addition, other people who
have vested interests in the present system may also oppose this plan.
However, in my opinion, the choice we have now is further to escalate
our efforts and the spending of our limited resources in a losing or
lost "war on drugs," or to face the reality that is upon us and legalize
these drugs under a plan of regulated distribution such as this one. The
sooner we make the change, the sooner we can stop the bleeding.

Views from the Front

George Schultz, the former Secretary of State for Reagan, says
legalization would destroy dealers profits and remove their incentive to
get young people addicted. He concedes, however, that such a proposal is
unpopular.

"Sometimes at a reception or cocktail party I advance these views and
people head for somebody else," says Schultz. "Everybody is scared to
talk about it. No politician wants to say what I just said, not for a
minute."

Patrick Murphy:

We over rely on law enforcement and interdiction. Only about 30% of our
spending is on treatment, prevention and education. In Canada the
balance is about the exact opposite.

Politicians get in a bidding war over who can talk the toughest. It
started when I was police commissioner of New York when Rockefeller was
governor.

A lot of people have gone to prison since then and drug abuse has gotten
worse. I think NAVPO's effort to show police officers another way to
look at this issue is a commendable and an enlightened approach.

Jerry V. Willimas, Former Chief of Police, Washington D.C.:
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders' suggestion that we study the idea of
decriminalizing illicit drugs took me back to the early 1970s, when
people were talking seriously about decriminalizing marijuana. One
private conversation from that time stuck in my mind. "Personally, I
don't think that marijuana is any more dangerous than my favorite
psychoactive drug, the martini," the statement went. " But I'm afraid
that decriminalization would send a signal to young people that it is
all right to use it."

The words are not exact, for I did not make notes, but that is the crux
of what President Nixon said to me some two decades ago. Here we are 20
years later, and I wonder if anyone received the signal Mr. Nixon was
talking about. In 1992, local and state law enforcement agencies
reported nearly a million arrests for drugs violations. Drug offenders
make up one-third of the felony convictions in the state courts.
In a nation where three-quarters of all robberies go unsolved and where
violent offenders go free on bail awaiting trial dates on overburdened
court dockets, we choose to clog the system with drug offenders.

=============================================================================

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 14:59 PDT
Subject: Wm Buckley in Police News
Message-ID: <1484000589@cdp>

RAT POISON

By William F. buckley

We are with reason angry at the Mexican officials who ho-hummed their
way through an investigation of the torture and killing of a U.S. drug
agent. It is true that a few years ago the government of Mexico
cooperated in a program designed to spray the marijuana crop, but it
proved temporary. Somewhat like wage and price controls. If for a season
the marijuana crop from Mexico declines, then marijuana from elsewhere -
Hawaii, for instance will increase. If there is less marijuana being
smoked today than 10 years ago, it is a reflection not of law
enforcement but of creeping social perception. It has gradually
transpired that the stuff is more harmful that originally thought, and a
culture that spends billions of dollars on health foods and barbells is
taking a longer, critical look at marijuana.

We read about cocaine. In a vivid image, someone recently said that the
big radars along the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United
States begin, night after night, to track what looks like a swarm of
locusts headed our way. Private planes, carrying coke to the American
market.

So we bag a large number of them today, and they show up on the
television news. That plane over there was carrying $10 million (or was
it $100 million?) worth of coke, hurray for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
But then the sober evaluation comes through. Last year - a splendid year
for drug apprehension - resulted in interdicting, oh, maybe to percent,
20 percent of the stuff coming in.

And of course the measure of success in the drug business, like that in
the business of robbing banks, is, what are your chances of getting
through? Answer: terrific. The odds will always be high, when you
consider that the amount of coke you can stuff into a single pocket of a
man's jacket can fetch $200,000, and that the cost of the stuff where
picked up can be as low as $1,000. A profit of 2,000 percent (modest in
the business) is a powerful engine to try to stop in a free society.

So what are we going to do about it? My resourceful brother William
Safire has a hot bundle of ideas aimed at catching the people who
launder the profits from drugs. These ideas include changing the color
of our currency, so that the boys with big sackfuls of green under their
mattresses will be forced to bring them out, revealing their scarlet
letters. Maybe we should breed 5O million drug-trained dogs to sniff at
everyone getting off a boat or an airplane; what a great idea!

No, we are face to face with the rawest datum of them all which is that
the problem would not exist, except that in the United States there is a
market for the stuff, and that the stuff is priced very high. If we
cannot effectively prevent its insinuating its way into the country,
what is it that we can prevent? The answer, of course, is its price. The
one thing that could be done, overnight, is to legalize the stuff. Exit
crime, and the profits from vice.

It is hardly a novel suggestion to legalize dope. Shrewd observers of
the scene have recommended it for years. I am on record as having
opposed it in the matter of heroin. The accumulated evidence draws me
away from my own opposition, on the purely empirical ground that what we
have now is a drug problem plus a crime problem plus a problem of huge
export of capital to dope-producing countries.

Congress should study the dramatic alternative, which is legalization
followed by a dramatic educational effort in which the services of all
civic-minded, and some less than civic-minded, resources are mobilized

Ours is a free society in which oodles of people kill themselves with
tobacco and booze. Some will do so with coke and heroin. But we should
count in the lives saved by having the deadly stuff available at the
same price as rat poison.

=============================================================================

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 15:01 PDT
Subject: Milton Friedman in Police News
Message-ID: <1484000590@cdp>

The Same Mistake By Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics

"We seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in handling drugs"

Most crimes are not committed by people hungry for bread.  By far more
are committed by people hungry for dope.  Should we have learned a
lesson from Prohibition?  When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, Billy
Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum,
greeted it as follows: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon
be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails
into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will
smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

We know now how tragically wrong he was. New prisons and jails had to he
built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of
spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect
for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, and created a decadent
moral climate -- and in the end did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same
mistake in handling drugs. There is no disagreement about some of the
facts.  Excessive drinking of alcohol harms the drinker; excessive
smoking of cigarettes harms the smoker; excessive use of drugs harms the
user.  As among the three; awful as it is to make such comparisons,
there is little doubt that smoking and drinking kill far more people
than the use of drugs.

Consider first the addict.  Legalizing drugs might increase the number
of addicts, though it is not certain that it would.  Forbidden fruit is
attractive, particularly to the young.  More important, many persons are
deliberately made into drug addicts by pushers, who now give likely
prospects their first doses free.  It pays the pusher to do so because,
once hooked, the addict is a captive customer.  If drugs were legally
available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would largely
disappear, since the addict could buy from a cheaper source.

Whatever happens to the total number of addicts and the possible
increase of that number the individual addict would clearly be far
better off if drugs were legal.  Today, drugs are both extremely
expensive and highly uncertain in quality.  Addicts are driven to
associate with criminals to get the drugs, and they become criminals
themselves to finance the habit.  They risk constant danger of death and
disease.

Consider, next, the rest of us. The harm to us from the addiction of
others arises primary from the fact that drugs are illegal.  It has been
estimated that from one third to one half of all violent and property
crime in the United States is committed either by drug addicts engaged
in crime to finance their habit, or by conflicts among competing groups
of drug pushers, or in the course of the importation and distribution of
illegal drugs.

Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically and
immediately.  Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones
corrupted. Immense sums are at stake.  It is inevitable that some
relatively low-paid police and other government officials -- and some
high-paid ones as well - succumb to the temptation to pick up easy
money.

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and
improve law enforcement.  It is hard to conceive of any other single
measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order.  But,
you may ask, must we accept defeat?  Why not simply end the drug
traffic?  That is where experience both with Prohibition and, in recent
years, with drugs is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic.

We may he able to cut off opium from Turkey - but the opium poppy grows
in innumerable other places.  With French cooperation, we may be able to
make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin, but the simple
manufacturing operations can be carried out in innumerable other places.
We may be able to persuade Mexico to spray or allow us to spray
marijuana fields with parachute - but marijuana can be grown almost
everywhere. We may be able to cooperate with Columbia to reduce the
entry of cocaine - but success is not easy to attain in a country where
the export is a large factor in the economy.

So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to he
if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic,
or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.

Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of
drug-related crimes, hut also on the belief that relieving our police
and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will
enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to
combatting other forms of crime.  We would thus strike a double blow:
reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the
efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention.

-- "excerpted from "Tyranny of the Status Quo"

=============================================================================

From: Jim Rosenfield <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 04 Jul 94 15:03 PDT
Subject: Police News on the WOD
Message-ID: <1484000591@cdp>

A Drug Economy

By Robert LeConte
Police News Spring '94

We've been down this road before. In the 1920s, Americans amended
the U.S. Constitution to prohibit alcohol, launching, in the
process, the greatest crime wave in history.  Citizens soon
figured out that crime was worse than Demon Rum (which flowed
just as strong), and prohibition was repealed.

Currently there is talk of repealing our drugs laws, for many of
the same reasons. But the problems law enforcers face with drug
enforcement are more analogous to Vietnam than to bootleggers.
Like that armed conflict, our tough-talking politicians have us
fighting drugs like we fought communism in Southeast Asia, one
patrol at a time, with body counts and gong-ho rhetoric. But drug
busts and seizure press conferences are not winning a war in
which - as Kennedy described Vietnam - "the enemy is at any given
time, everywhere and no where."

It is possible to build enough prisons, create enough courts, and
hire enough law enforcement officers to effectively wage an
all-out war on drugs. But - and this is the important part - IT
IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Since 1981, well over 150 billion of our
tax dollars have gone to interdict roughly 10 percent of the
drugs coming into America. If tough new laws and more money
double our success rate, we're still fighting a losing battle.

Our failure has bred frustration, which is the only way to
explain some of the battlefield tactics that have grabbed
headlines. My friend Chief Gates suggested we take drug users out
"and shoot `em."  It was a comment made out of total frustration,
that he did not mean for a minute, for it would have sentenced
his own son to death (As discussed in his book "Chief").  Patrick
Buchanan suggests that we execute all drug dealers the
enforcement of which would get one thousand police officers
killed in the first year.  Jack Kilpatrick modified that view
somewhat. In his nationally syndicated column he suggested that
we get "serious" about drug enforcement by publicly hanging drug
dealers.

I wish we could indulge Mr. Kilpatrick and hang a few, televise
it live on FOX, put it on the front page of every newspaper. The
next day Kilpatrick himself could interview the street dealers
about the impact it had.  Let me save you some time - you won't
be able to find two dealers who even heard of it. Of course, you
may want to provide dealers with press clippings and the grisly
photos, but good luck scaring straight someone who attends about
ten funerals a year. "Say what? They killed who?"

As frustrating as it is to admit, arresting, prosecuting and
incarcerating non-violent drug offenders has become an
ineffective and expensive means of providing for the general
welfare. Prohibition puts coke on the gold standard and overloads
the criminal justice system with small-time dope dealers - who,
if you really wanted to punish them, would be denied a criminal
economy and forced to find real work.

There is, of course, the moral question, best addressed by our
new "Drug Czar", former New York Commissioner Lee Brown.  Last
year, Lee told POLICE NEWS that decriminalization of drugs would
mean genocide for the black community. But Director Brown, what
if I told you about a segment of America in which one out of four
men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in our criminal justice
system (the percentage jumps to 50% in Washington, D.C.); in
which the majority live below the poverty line; or in which four
out of five children are born without a father in the household?
The black community is in a genocide countdown, right now. The
problem is not so much the physical effects of drugs. The problem
is a criminal economy (and a welfare system) that makes a mockery
out of an honest day's work.

Non-violent drug abusers, who sincerely want help, do not need to
dance the arrest/hold/release cha-cha. They need intervention,
not slogans and the slammer. Those drug-abusers who are violent
need the dark end of a prison cell and they need to stay there.

I do not agree that America should simply "decriminalize" all
drugs. But, there is no question a new approach is long overdue.
I'm convinced that if the DEA and the FDA had regulated
controlled substances 20 years ago, we would not be in the
epidemic we're in now.  Crack almost certainly would not have
thrived - it was invented because the high cost of drugs made a
cheaper version more profitable. And gangs, deprived of a
criminal economy, would not have flourished, saving thousands of
innocent victims of drug warfare.

I would join other conservative voices like William F. Buckley
and former D.C. Police Chief Jerry Wilson in regulating drug use
provided the feds implement the following:

1.Police were given the resources and authority to create
drug-free zones (as they have on many streets and housing
projects), including random sobriety check points.

2.As George Will suggested in a recent column, we need to further
research ways of chemically blocking the cocaine high. (We
successfully treat heroin users with methadone a drug in which
the users have the good manners to simply lay down and fall
asleep.)

3. We should start linking aid to dependent children with mothers
who test drug-free. (The household in Chicago in which 19
children were found laying two deep on mattresses in the middle
of February received $4,000 a month in public assistance. The
seven adults who also lived in the house were arrested. One
admitted to being a drug addict. Another was out at the time of
the raid - giving birth. The child was born with a coke
addiction.

4.We should enact William F. Buckley's proposal that would put
drugs in a regulatory scheme that would take all but the most
serious cases out of the judicial system, with the stipulation
that anyone caught selling the stuff to minors will he executed.

5.The DEA needs to limit its mission to helping local law
enforcement rid our schools and streets of drugs and drug
dealers. Drugs should he kept out of public sight and absolutely
out of the hands of young people. Our pursuit of the Drug Kings
has little impact hack home. (Pablo Escobar is dead. Now all we
have to do is invade Columbia and apprehend the thousands of
other South Americans in the drug trade. Of course, we did invade
Panama, partly because of the government's drug running. Earlier
this year, our own government told us that more coke blows
through the country now than when Noriega was in power.)
Convincing any federal agency to reevaluate and refocus its
mission is not easy, but if the DEA put all its resources into
our schools and streets it could have real impact.

6.Finally, America's civil courts need to insist that those who
take drugs take full responsibility for their actions. The law
should provide little recourse for a person whose abuse results
in the lose of their drivers license, job, children and access to
unlimited health coverage.

Ultimately, whether a drug or alcohol abuser sinks or swims will
largely depend on the support they receive from family, friends
or church. Federal, state and local officials have little impact.
All the king's horses and all the King's men are not a damn bit
of good when protecting someone from self-destruction.

If, however, that drug or alcohol abuser steps over the line and
his addiction threatens the safety of others, then federal, state
and local officials need to come crashing down like a ton of
bricks.  Unfortunately, as every criminal knows, what's looming
overhead is more like a lone, ornery blue bird.

Let me put that in perspective: roughly one-fifth of all crimes
result in an arrest, only about half of those lead to convictions
in serious cases, and less than 5% of those bring a jail term.
Even that number leaves prisons so overcrowded that the average
prisoner serves just one third of his sentence. (Is that the
police force that you joined? It's not the one I joined)

The criminal justice system has become ineffective, because like
so much of our government, we think we can do it all. We can't.
Our tough talking politicians pass laws like "Lawyers in
Wonderland," where Uncle Sam will give you a handout if you're
good or a quick tour of a correctional facility if you're bad.
The government that thinks it can raise illegitimate children
with a subsidy, is the same government that thinks it can save
drug abusers from self-destruction with guns and battering rams.

Police officers need to insist that our law makers take a hard
look at our resources and set priorities. Our laws need to make a
distinction between abusers who require medical intervention and
abusers who require law enforcement intervention. And when those
laws are passed, police officers should have the resources and
authority to effectively enforce them or take them off the books.

To those civilians who will undoubtedly write to remind me that
any changes in our current strategy would make drugs more
accessible to the dopers who want them - all I can suggest is
that you walk to any number of street corners in our cities. If
you are not sure where the drug dealers are, throw a brick -
believe me, you'll hit one. Just do me one favor - throw it hard.