Fmr Seattle Police Chief: Legalize It, All of It

Guest columnist

Legalize drugs — all of them
By Norm Stamper

Special to the Los Angeles Times

Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

"As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another -- Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush -- delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/4/135128/852

The War on Drugs is about as effective as prohibition was. Only people profiting from it are prison builders and drug cartels.

it didn't work for alcohol, and it doesn't work for other substances either.

was something he talked about a couple of months ago on one of the local radio stations. He had a problem with chemical dependency himself. (Primarily ETOH, as one would expect with his work environment.) Guess that left him with a more realistic view of how to handle the drugs issue.

That was my take on it as well.

The Republicans always cry about having a small govt and small business enterprises, etc and about allowing people to live their own lives with little givt interference.

So legalize drugs and let the folks sort themselves out.

Those who want to use, will and those who don't, won't.

The small drug dealers can make enough cash to take care of their baby mama and cut down on welfare rolls.

The weak-minded on meth can just use the shit until they drift away in liquid form. Who will ever miss them?

The crackheads can just shake themselves into oblivion.

The weed smokers can drift into creative highs and bring new Mozarts into being.

So, yeah! LEGALIZE THE CRAP! And don't bother to pass the joint. If I can buy the stuff legally then I have enough MJ to smoke my own joint ALL BY MYSELF.

Yeah...that's my new poem.....

I'll make a bet right now that in 12 months a "pot problem" will still be non-existent. Pot smokers tend to smoke pot regardless of the law. Always have, always will. Meanwhile, I'm happy to be the Guinea pig for all the regressive states. :smoke:

I'm still a bit unsure about legalizing dangerous drugs like meth, opiates and crack. Certainly decriminalization is a smart move, but I'm afraid at least a few people will indulge who wouldn't otherwise, especially with opiates. Honestly, I don't want to have open access to opium. I've never tried it, mainly because people say it's wonderful and highly addictive. It's also capable of bringing down entire countries.

My Mom lives in CO and suffers from MS. Pot is the only thing that relieves the cramps (and works within seconds). She's not adverse to stashing a little back for those really bad days, but is always nervous about it.

http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/4570.html

Hopfully your mom lives in Denver and can get some relief.

It is unfair that the pharaceutical companies keep us from legalizing marijuana because as long as it is considered a natural herb, they cannot OWN a patent on it, but once they can condense it into a DRUG, they can OWN it and that is what they want.

They don't want the little guy growing even a teacup with a seed in it. It is our wonderful government that doesn't give a fat shit if your mom is suffering and that there is a palliative for her pain. THEY DON'T CARE!

But I bet if Babs Bush had some kind of ailment and needed some coke or some weed, they would have a full pound on her nightstand.

Fcuk them all very much!

Colorado has a medical marijuana law.

Pot possession is decriminalized in Colorado.

But what I think you were referring to is the vote last month in Denver to legalize possession of up to one ounce. That was indeed approved by Denver voters, but local and state officials say it doesn't matter; they will apply state law. There is already a challenge to the arrests under state law getting underway.

"The weak-minded on meth can just use the shit until they drift away in liquid form. Who will ever miss them?"

I was NOT worthless while I was hooked, in fact, the feeling that I was is one of the major reasons I WAS hooked. And I think my children would have missed me.

I think my entire post shows a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor and I was being totally facetious, but if you are in a touchy mood today, then please just wallow in it and enjoy your offence where none was intended.

JEEZ!

I guess I am. Do me a favor and use the sarcasm thingy, will ya?

Legalize drugs and let God sort it out!

sarcasm. I gotta look up the little thing

and should be treated as such.

Legalize it and you:

Obviously eliminate the legal for the most part. (Minors?)

The medical aspects tend to be related to detoxification and malnutrition, and coexisting mental disorders, caused or made worse by drugs.

Most of the social aspects are related to secrecy, and legality.

Cultural has to do with stigma among other aspects central to a specific culture. (ie. Meth is a predominantly lower to middle class white person's drug, crack has been predominantly a lower to middle class black person's drug. (these are sterotypical but generally hold water)

The spiritual aspects have to do with attachment and dependency, do you depend on drugs, or on yourself, or a higher power, or a group, for your strength.

Look at cigarettes, liquor, beer, medicines, etc. Outlawing them doesn't remove it from society, prohibition never worked.

and the government subsidies. Highly lucrative profits to be made, a la corporate welfare, in the prison system.

Black people in jail...especially Black males. It's a racist policy.

And now the gov't is starting to use it against women. According to latest figures, women are the fastest growing prison population.

It is all part of the same problem: the corporate kleptocracy that has twisted our social reality into a vile corporate-logo'd for profit con game. We need a political party that speaks the truth. We need to demand the unthinkable. We need to tear down the walls of propaganda bullshit they have constructed to confuse and distract and divide us. We can do it. It may take a massive breakdown of the structure on the order of the Great Depression/WWII but it can be done.

in forums.

after you get over the shock of how sweeping a transformation is needed. legalize everything? really?

well, if the intent to reduce harm to society as whole, yeah. if you want to reduce crime. if you want safer neighborhoods. healthier families.

i remember working on this as part of a critical skills class. going in i figured "well, legalize some. not everything." but the argument according to societal good totally swayed me to the larger strategy.

going back to being "The Real Thing", and other manufacturers slipping a little "something something" into their products to make them irresistable to the consumers. There would have to be some regulation on the use of drugs, and I'm not sure I trust the FDA to see to it.

Other than that....yeah, what he said.

Coke WILLINGLY switched to caffeine because it's a more effective stimulant and equally as addictive, if not quite so...strident in its withdrawal symptoms.

tweaked the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, I worry that the crack staff at other companies out there might have perked up and thought, "Wish we could do that here."

legalization would result in many more.
My understanding is that coke was the real thing prior to the bottling era. People went to the soda fountain and the jerk asked "dope or not?" This was a single first person account so, take it for what it's worth. :shrug:

I've not seen anyone with my point of view on that before. It's refreshing.

I know I saw him do an interview tho.

I too am glad to hear my opinion voiced. :)

level headed about the whole issue.

When vicodin is a buck a milligram on the street but costs a lot at the pharmacy for the legal stuff, it's time to admit that our solution isn't one at all.

Note: my hubby knows the price because he's an internist and was told by a patient trying to get off an addiction to painkillers. He was suprised at how much it was but not much.

I am worried about the effects of drug use to those who can least fight against it: children.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002663091_mikeandliz04m.html

Baby M was a gift. Born a month prematurely, with a tuft of her father's dark hair, she arrived no bigger than a loaf of bread. Mike Testa peered into his daughter's eyes and beamed. She looks just like me, he said. Mike, 37, had yearned for a family and badly wanted this child.

His girlfriend, Liz Campo, lay exhausted after 17 hours of labor at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle...On this day, Aug. 19, 2003, their dreams were within reach.

But the next day the euphoria began to fade. Traces of methamphetamine were found in Liz's blood. Hospital officials called the state's Child Protective Services. Baby M was 2 days old when Mary Marrs, a veteran CPS investigator, showed up. Do you know why I am here? she asked Liz and Mike.

The couple rushed to explain themselves. The meth was a stupid mistake, Liz said. In a moment of grief, she'd smoked it a few days earlier, after her mother died."

if we ban anything. A close relative of mine has lung cancer brought on by 27 years of smoking. He might not make it to Christmas.

I get so depressed and angry when I see all the kids smoking. Another generation getting hooked. Why in hell do they start? What on earth can we do to stop them from starting? Most of them are completely unaware of how addictive cigarettes are until it's too late. Most of them are unaware of just how deadly cigarettes are -- they cost the average smoker 13 years of life. They start smoking because their friends smoke, often in their early teens (and guess what, it's more addictive later in life if you started that early).

The cigarette companies are really good at manipulating things. Whenever a state like California mounts an anti-smoking campaign targeted at kids, the tobacco lobbyists get to the legislature and get funding for the campaign cut off.

Years ago, I saw a lecture by a communications professor from University of British Columbia. He described how dishonest the tobacco companies are. They ran magazine ads saying how low in tar and nicotine Carltons were. But the ads talked about Carltons in a hard pack, but if you wandered into a store and bought Cartons, you would find soft packs (90% of the Carltons were soft pack) -- which had a lot more nicotine in them then the ads said. He described another tobacco company that ran ads deliberately designed to appeal to teenagers (showing shaggy kids on skateboards), and they were surprised when the ad campaign failed. They analyzed why kids didn't respond to the ads. They found out kids smoked to feel grown-up, and their ads made kids think of kids. They replaced the ads with non-descript ads showing young adults doing exuberant outdoorsy things like waterskiing. This did the trick: the kids started smoking that brand. This is what the companies that market this legal product pull. They have a lot of money and they use it to protect their product and its sales. Totally evil and completely legal.

It involves much of what is wrong with America today. It is so sad that we cant have a real talk about this, a true debate.

I strongly agree with the author. People are going to take drugs, period. The enormous savings to taxpayers is obvious...far fewer prisons needed, and much, much more money in tax revenue. Of course, the Republican owned private prison industry doesn't like the idea, but as a common sense measure, I certainly do.

political purpose--to enrich the sparsely populated, white, rural, Republican areas where the prisons to house this huge increase in offenders are built, to deny many black voters the right to vote (during and sometimes after incarceration, for their lifetimes), to remove black voters from urban areas, and to add to the head count in white Republican areas, who get to count the prisoners for re-districting purposes even though they can't vote.

And now it's becoming a corporate boondoggle, with privatized prisons, and extremely cheap prison labor.

The "drug war" is a scandal of immense proportions, reaching all over the world, where US forces and US-supported thugs and fascists are using it to annihilate "third world" peasants and farmers and indigenous people. Also, one thing that most people don't know about the Taliban is that they stopped the heroine trade out of Afghanistan; and that it is now flourishing again, under US occupation. (I've also heard that Iraq is now flooded with drugs.)

The Seattle police chief is right. Elimination of the "war on drugs"--which is, in essence, just another war on the poor--is critically important to long needed social reform, and to justice and peace in our country and in the world.

---------------

Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

No WAY we should legalize all of it. Hasn't anybody here ever been addicted to cigarettes??? Its barbarically difficult to stop, if you have the wrong brain chemistry. Alot of this comes from the tobacco companies tampering with it, making it more addictive. Now what do you think they are going to come up with when they things like crack or meth at their disposal?

That after an initial "euphoria" period of increased use, the rate of drug usage goes down, way down. In addition, you could then tax the drugs and put that tax money into education programs that would drop the usage rate even more.

Keeping drugs legal is stupid and foolish. A kid is pumped up full of this anti-drug shit, but like any other curious teenager, will go out and try something like dope. And when this kid finds out that dope isn't going to make him into a fiend, or permanently stupid, or any of the other DARE BS that gets thrown out there, that in fact dope feels gooooood. And that kid will start wondering, "Well hey, if they lied to me about dope, did they lie to me about crank, meth, coke, crack, heroin?" And coming to the conclusion that yes, they did, he tries them out and voila! the kid is hooked on something serious.

Legalize it all, it will be better for our society as a whole.

Nutty, friend!

If you want to do anything, decriminalize. Let people grow their own weed, but not sell it. fine. But don't let corporations open the doors of profit by addicting people to cocaine. Believe me, coca cola WILL have cocaine in it again!
And the only place I've ever been where any drugs were legal was amsterdam, and the city was crawling with drugs and crime. The reason these cities give such glowing reports of themselves is that drug lobbyists gain enough power to buy out the government really fast, just as oil execs do in the country now.

I don't think anyone wants to see giant pharmaceutical houses advertising crack or heroin they way they market other drugs.

But a regulated drug control regime does not have to be a free market free-for-all. Some states have a monopoly on liquor sales; you can only buy at the state liquor store. If we leave drug sales in the hand of the government--from, say, the Peruvian coca monopoly, ENACO, to a US government cocaine agency, to state-run drug stores, there is no private commercial interest to push push push the drugs on us.

Drugs are not legal in Amsterdam. Marijuana use and sales are permitted, but remain illegal. The Dutch don't want to violate the UN conventions on drugs, but they don't want to waste their resources on potheads, either, so in their pragmatic Dutch fashion, they just ignore the law.

Cocaine and heroin are neither legal nor permitted in Amsterdam. Yes, there are users of both in Amsterdam. But if you want to see cities "crawling with drugs and crime," Amsterdam would not compare with any American city. Drug use levels there are lower than here, and are about in the middle for Europe. The Brits are the drug-craziest.

Your comment that "the reason these cities give such glowing reports of themselves is that drug lobbyists gain enough power to buy out the government fast" is just patently absurd. Or do you know something I don't know? If so, please tell me about it.

Legalize it, regulate it, tax it, reduce the harm both of drug use and of drug prohibition.

Those are not the only choices. I'm all for prohibiting advertising of all addictive substances, or at the least regulating such advertising.

However, let us suppose that those are the only two possible choices. The yes, I would accept marketing crack cocaine to children over continuing the war on drugs.

Of course I don't want crack marketed to kids. I would like to see restrictions put in place that are similar to those on alcohol, including restrictions on sales to minors.

Under these sorts of restrictions one would be able to grow one's own pot. After all, you can grow your own malt, barely, hops, etc and make your own beer. However there are certain drugs I wouldn't want to see people producing at home, mainly meth. In fact that is one of the larger attractions for me to legalized meth, the disappearance of meth houses. Each and every one of those is a blight on the landscape, making surrounding grounds into toxic wastelands and exposing neighbors for miles around to exposure to dangerous chemicals, not to mention the severe fire hazard inherent in such operations. No, let us put the manufacture of meth and other such like inorganics into the controlled enviroments of well regulated, licensed manufacturing plants.

And while you keep pushing that panic button about coke being put back into Coke, I think that you're overreacting for two reasons. First off Coke has a time and market tested recipe for their product. The last time they seriously messed with it, they bombed out and it took them a few years to recover completely. The other reason is that it would be a publicity nightmare for Coke. Even if legalized drugs, much like alcohol, would still have a stigma attached to it, and adding it to a soft drink product like Coke would kill market share in this day and age. Besides, such a move would run up against those regulations again, like the one about not selling to children.

There is also one place that you've been where at least one drug has been legalized after a prolonged period of prohibition, here in the US, with alcohol. And yes indeed, after that initial period euphoric consumption right after prohibition was repealed, the drinking rates went down, and stayed down on a per capita basis.

I'm sorry, but there is no sane, logical reason to continue this War on Drugs. Legaize them, regulate and taxe them, and watch our society become a better place because of it.

I TOTALLY agree with the war on drugs. I'll bet the officers perceptions were partially shaped by seeing these seedy violent people get rich of things while decent companies can't touch them. This is valid and real, and it has to be dealt with. But I think you can't underestimate the threat of too much corporate power, especially at this point in our history, with oil companies dictating foreign policy in many ways. These guys put profit above everything.
I hear your point about de-criminalization, and I'm not convinced it would affect illegal drugs trade in a bad way.
Honestly, I don't know what the answer is. But I think you have to acknowledge that there is no quick fix, no simple thing like legalization is going to address the complete complexity of this problem.

when it comes to addiction rates. Even crack cocaine doesn't reach its lofty heights. But that is beside the point. So what if it is addictive? Why is the response: throw 'em in jail? How has that, the policy we have pig-headedly pursued for 20 years, after a brief respite of less than 10 years of benign neglect, and then for the 40 years prior as well, been at all effective in doing anthing other than stuffing our prisons with nonviolent offenders and enriching the unholy alliance of prison/enforcement/blackmarket prohibition profiteers?

TERRORISM.

It is always about economics and power, with the stated "reasons" being nothing but cover for alternate REASONS that more accurately reflect the actual intent:

Whoever controls your perception of reality controls you.

If you believe that the WoD was about controlling drug abuse and if you believe that the WoT is about "keeping America safe" your thinking is being controlled, manipulated, and shaped. To understand the truth one must always look not at what is said but what a policy actually does. DID the WoD stem 'drug abuse'? No, but it DID lay the groundwork for the American police state. Does the WoT keep America safe? No, but it DOES allow the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) and the Oil barons to maintain and extend US economic hegemony.

You don't get any more right wing than my cousin, a member of Opus Dei and mentioned in Susan McDougal's book as the only decent human being on Starr's team (even though he's still a deluded Right Wing Nut).

Based on his days in Bush I's justice department, he horrified his John Bircher parents (and my normal parents) by telling us that we can't win the War on Drugs, that it's corrupting our country and exacerbating the drug problem, and that drugs need to be legalized.

His mother started arguing, and he basically said "you haven't seen what I've seen - you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know until you're in the trenches of the Drug War yourself. It's not winnable. Period."

It just burdens society with unenforcible laws and an overfilled prison system.

costliest fuckup in American history.

Yet I know DAILY POT SMOKERS who are against legalization!

Prohibition of alcohol lasted how long before the nation got off it's moral high horse and gave up?

If we allowed the production of medicinal and industrial hemp and taxed it, we would see prosperous farmers, thriving American industry and zero deficits.

But that makes sense, and we live in a time when people make absolutely no sense: they fight tooth and nail to make their nation the bloodiest, saddest, most imprisoned place on the planet.

They have no problem with ripping a Daddy from the home because he sold a little pot, or imprisoning Mama cause she became addicted to the "wrong kind" of drug. (If she were a wealthy White woman addicted to the Hydrocodone her doctor prescribed, she would still be home raising her kids.)

Anybody? Hillary? Biden? Edwards? Clark? Anybody?

Dennis Kucinich had a progressive drug policy plank...

The drug war is the source of amazing injustice and a key part of ramping up the nascent American police state. Way past time to end it.

A Michael C. Rupert quote. He's a former LAPD drugs officer.

This makes me all the more proud to be from Seattle.