By Mark David Blum, Esq.

Eight months ago, in October of 2006, I congratulated local police agencies. Eighteen more bad guys were arrested that week in the annual ‘Clean Up the Streets and Grab Headlines for Election Time’ campaign … a/k/a Operation Impact. An entire (combined) pound of drugs was taken off the street. The cost of incarceration, prosecution, defense, and maintenance of those 18 ‘evil drug dealers’ is an unknown but significant weight upon the backs of all us taxpayers.

Over the years, I have written extensively on the subject of the mismatch of using the criminal justice system as a solution to the nation’s drug problem. It a dance now thirty five years old and the river of blood and pyre of bodies grows along with the problem. The best part is that you cannot blame me as we have been doing it your way for nearly half a century.

Here it is: Arresting a Drug Dealer does NOT stop demand or supply of drugs. All it does is create a job opening. This is your nation’s policy on drugs.

Last October, I “stepped out on a limb” predicting newspaper headlines within the next six months. I predicted a surge in violence and that police will blame the dispute on the drug trade. Thereafter, I ventured to hypothesize that like he did in 2005, Sgt. Tom Connellan would notify the media how “reports of shootings and shots fired have gone down in recent weeks. Those words spoken by Sgt. Connellan in November of 2005 have been heard again; like that old 45 with a scratch on it. Today they report violent crime is down in Syracuse. Does that imply a new network is set up in place?

Prohibition does not work. Every time you arrest a ‘drug dealer’, though you shut down a drug network, you also create job openings for a new one. Since the employment scene in the drug market is not one regulated by government but instead run by organized crime, whenever police go out and sweep clean a street, there is always a subsequent and lasting rush of violence and death. Vendettas last forever. The innocent are dying in the crossfire.

I ask you: When is the cycle of violence and addiction to the drug war going to stop? How many more dead and wounded children will it take before people sit down and finally put and end to this game. The only ones profiting are the criminals and the cops and the prison industry.

There is an epidemic of burgeoning violence which is the real cancer killing our society. Like hopeless addicts; folks keep engaging in the same behavior, despite knowing how bad and ineffective it is, and how doing so is going to kill … and despite that, nobody seems to care and we want it all the more.

By making these mass arrests, dealers may have been taken out of the loop and a network broke apart.

The problems is that someone new will step in and fill the void. But, should two people want the same job; instead of interviews, we get gunfire. It is that simple. Once shots are fired, they fire in two directions and then on more occasions and then it becomes intergenerational. The cycle only worsens until election time when elected officials want their jobs back and Operation Impact comes in and arrests the whole neighborhood and the cycle starts all over again.

Simply put, how it is that despite everything, there is nobody out there today who if they want any particular drug, not only can get it easily, but probably has some already. If we cannot keep drugs and CELLPHONES out of our supermax prisons, how are we ever going to keep them out of a free society? An aggressive policy of arresting entire generations from a particular neighborhood does not reduce in any way, anybody’s ability to get any drug they want. The joke on the streets is that you do not want to get arrested for drugs on the streets and go to prison because drugs are really expensive in prison.

Please do not misunderstand me. I do not bear any police officer any ill will for enforcing the law. The mistakes and failures of this policy of prohibition are not as a result of actions by police. Rather, the mistake is government using the criminal justice system to engage in what is clearly a health and education issue.

I wholly support good policing. I just wish my tax dollars were being used to fight crime … not create it.

Eighteen down. Thirty million more to go.