By Mark David Blum, Esq.

I guess congratulations to our local police agencies are in order. Eighteen more bad guys were arrested this week in the annual ‘Clean Up the Streets and Grab Headlines for Election Time’ campaign a/k/a Operation Impact. A entire (combined) pound of drugs have been taken off the street. The cost of incarceration, prosecution, defense, and maintenance of these 18 ‘evil drug dealers’ are now upon the backs of all us taxpayers. But hey, that’s their job; or at least its their job security.

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 bodies grows along with the problem.

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.

I am going to step out on a limb here and predict the newspaper headlines within the next six months. My money says there will be a headline that mirrors the one from a year ago here in Syracuse that reads something like, “reports of shootings and shots fired have gone down in recent weeks … and the surge over the last several days suggests that there's some kind of dispute in the city.” "It tells us there is something going on, some type of dispute brewing." Those words spoken by Sgt. Tom Connellan in November of last year will be heard again; like that old 45 with a scratch on it.

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 goes out and sweeps 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 now, 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. Do you get it now? 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 our elected ones 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.

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.