Delivered at the Connecticut Correctional Center, New Haven, Thursday, September 19, 2002
It's time to end the ill-conceived "war" on drugs and call it "a failure."
It's time to treat drug addiction as a public health problem, not a criminal
justice problem. It's time to use our criminal justice resources to fight
terrorism and corporate crime. I will discuss two reasons for doing this:
limited criminal justice resources and overcrowded jails.
My colleagues, Simone
Mason, a Green Party candidate for State Representative in southern
Hamden, and Clifford Thornton, President of Efficacy, a drug policy reform
organization, will talk about others.
As a nation, we have to decide how to use our limited criminal justice
resources. We can continue to chase, arrest, prosecute and incarcerate drug
addicts and drug dealers, who, in my opinion, pose dangers only to
themselves or their customers. Or, as I recommend, we can focus our limited
crime-fighting resources on prosecuting corrupt corporate executives and
accountants who undermine and threaten our job security, our retirement
income security and the economic welfare of our nation and on tracking
terrorists who present a mortal danger to the entire civilized world.
Second, and why we are standing here in front of the Connecticut
Correctional Center, the drug war and its mandatory sentences have
contributed heavily to the jail-overcrowding crisis. The New Haven Register
reported ("Packed Jails Reaching Crisis Levels," 09/15/02) that last week
the state's prison population reached an all-time - 19,175, breaking the
record set the week before, and prison officials see no end in sight. 20%
of this prison population - about 4,000 inmates - are serving time for
narcotic-related offenses. Release these nonviolent drug offenders, many of
whom are women with children, to alternative incarceration centers and
treatment programs, and we would not have to spend millions of taxpayer
dollars sending hundreds of Connecticut inmates to Virginia.
Despite the fact that federal spending on the drug war increased from $1.65
billion in 1982 to $17.7 billion in 1999, more than half the students in the
United States in 1999 tried an illegal drug before they graduated from high
school. Meanwhile, Justice Department data released in 1999 showed that
the number of prisoners in America has more than tripled over the last two
decades from 500,000 to 1.8 million. America's overall prison population
now exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Let's admit that the drug war has failed. As long as a single American
teenager is growing a single cannabis plant in a suburban backyard, this is
a "war" that will not and cannot be "won."
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