THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605100012
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
Wednesday before last, the day before federal agents disrupted a multimillion-dollar international drug operation, Norfolk police arrested four men and a woman, charging them with illicit-drug offenses. The police seized at least seven pounds of marijuana, some heroin and cocaine, a rifle, two shotguns, six handguns and more than $10,000.
One of the defendants, James Vincent Beasley Sr., 60, of the 700 block of Reservoir Ave., was charged with the attempted capital murder of Norfolk vice-narcotics detective Robert Douros, 38. The detective was wounded by gunfire during one of four anti-drug raids in three neighborhoods. Four of the defendants, including the man charged with wounding Douros, were charged with firearms violations.
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno next day announced that ``Operation Zorro II'' had broken up a drug-trafficking network reaching from Columbia through Mexico into cities across the United States. Reno disclosed that Zorro II had ``simultaneously dismantled the organization that owned the cocaine and a second organization that ran the transportation system.''
Since Zorro II's beginning in September, federal agents had arrested 136 people, seized assets valued at $17 million and confiscated approximately 1,120 pounds of cocaine and 1,018 pounds of marijuana. The police raids in Norfolk and the success of Zorro II confirmed once again that drug trafficking is, for small fry especially, a hazardous venture: If your competitors don't nail you (usually with a bullet), the law likely will.
But does anyone - most especially local and state police and federal agents who risk their lives in pursuit of drug traffickers and their contraband - believe the drug plague will not flourish as robustly as before?
As swiftly as underworld free enterprisers engaged in manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing forbidden drugs are removed from the streets, their places are taken by others (almost always young males) itching to try their hand at making a fortune in a thriving market.
Odds are that the new volunteers won't be long in business. They will be murdered or added to an incarcerated population that last June numbered more than 1 million state prisoners, more than 99,000 federal prisoners and nearly 484,000 jail inmates.
With 565 of each 100,000 Americans behind bars, the United States' incarceration rate is higher than any other country's. Nearly a third of prisoners and jailbirds were locked up for drug-trade-related crimes.
Although they compose but 12 percent of the national population, black Americans account for more than 50 percent of all inmates. This is a disaster for the millions of African Americans engaged in honest occupations and progressing economically, socially and politically. It is a disaster, too, for this great land that wold be greater still, if so many of Americans weren't, for one reason or another, outside the mainstream.
One in three black males in their 20s is under supervision of the corrections system. One in 15 of all black males is behind bars.
This is happening when crime rates nationally have been dropping, in part because of a dip in the number of American males in their teens and early 20s. Look for more young men in the near future: Demographers and criminologists expect crime rates to again rise as we approach the millennium; violent crime will rise even faster. Meanwhile, pollsters report that 59 percent of black Americans believe the American dream - of moving up socially and economically - is unattainable for most.
These are igredients for an explosion of criminality.
Sooner or later, Americans will be compelled by the enormous economic and social costs of the drug war to take a hard look at the national drug-prohibition policy, which keeps prices high for low-cost commodities that are in substantial demand. The ban on proscribed drugs has yet to keep them out of the United States. Peddling outlawed drugs is profitable. Makers of public policy will have to consider whether the ill-effects of drug prohibition (murderous drug-trade-related violence, which destroys lives, neighborhoods and cities; increasingly burdensome criminal-justice costs; corruption of law enforcement; spread of the AIDS virus by addicts using dirty needles) doesn't outweigh the ban's merits (discouraging an indeterminate number of Americans from using illicit drugs).
Zorro II will put a dent in the illicit-drug trade, and the busts in Norfolk may bring welcome relief to drug-trade-damaged neighborhoods. We hope so in each instance. But experience suggests that any respite will be brief at best.
The Drug Policy Foundation, with offices in New York and Washington, is pushing for a blue-ribbon commission to examine the existing drug prohibition's good and bad effects and recommend changes that could enable society to manage the illicit-drug problem - and drugs are a problem, all right - in ways less costly to America in blood, tears and treasure. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr., former Secretary of State George Shultz and economist Milton Friedman (who says that strong and cunning free-market forces make drug bans unenforceable) are in the forefront of Americans urging reform.
Law enforcement has a role to play in the drug scene, but the emphasis should be on education, prevention and rehabilitation. A policy mixing legalization, regulation, taxation, zero tolerance for drugs in schools and workplaces and penalties for pushing drugs on children and crimes committed under drugs' influence seems to be the way to go.
But we won't go that way soon. President Clinton, as fearful as any other politician of bucking prohibition's defenders, is stepping up the drug war. Meanwhile, the bodies and the bills pile up. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB