The U.S. war on drugs has failed. The Global Commission on Drug Policy now acknowledges this fact. The drug war enriches drug cartels in Latin America. It targets black people and poor people and sends nonviolent offenders to crowd our prisons and jails. It has given rise to more than 30,000 U.S. gangs that prowl neighborhoods with high-powered weapons. Despite the expenditure of well over a trillion dollars, the arrest of 45 million U.S. citizens, and the constant diminution of our rights and freedoms, this second U.S. attempt at prohibition does not work. The rate of illegal drug use has not decreased, and there is no logical benefit nor rationale in keeping these outdated policies in place.
In his book To End the War on Drugs, former cop and current Law Enforcement Against Prohibition speaker Dean Becker gathers inteviews from 115 experts who appeared as guests on his Pacifica radio Drug Truth Network program over the years. As Phillipe Lucas, a Canadian scientist and drug reformer put it, "Where else could youfind candid interviews with Gary Johnson, Tommy Chong, Grover Norquist, Ethan Nadelmann, Willie Nelson, Elvy Musikka, Kurt Schmoke, Rick Steves,Mike Gray, and Alexander Shulgin?" In the words of scientists, doctors, prison wardens, authors, activists, prosecutors, clergy and many others, Becker's book eviscerates the logic of drug prohibitionist pronouncements.
When the book was completed in March 2014, Becker sent copies to President Obama, Attorney General Senate Eric Holder, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Chief Justice Roberts asking them to "reconsider our nation's addiction to the drug war.”
Weeks later, Becker received a response from Gary R. Owen, acting chief of public affairs for the Drug Enforcement Administration, thanking him for the read:
"Dear Mr. Becker: Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. asked me to thank you for sending him a copy of your book, 'To End the War on Drugs: A Guide for Politicians, the Press and Public.' He thought the Drug Enforcement Administration might find the book an interesting read, so he has shared it with us."
—April M. Short, AlterNet Drugs Editor
The following is an excerpt from To End the War on Drugs by Dean Becker:
When we finally end this drug war, we will immediately reap huge financial rewards. The $70 billion squandered each year in waging this drug war could be used for health, education, roads, and bridges. With a small tax on these drugs, we could rake in hundreds of millions of dollars instead of constantly opening our wallets for more prisons, more welfare, and the destruction of millions of families every year, all over the contents of a baggie.
So what is it that makes this drug war work? Money. Taxpayer money, drug market money, money seized by police. Millions worldwide profit enormously, continuously, from the drug war. It's not just the politicians and their perpetual "contributions leads to legislative pay-back machine." It's the stockbrokers selling prison builders stock and the piss testers of America. It's the foreign investor in the prisoner-made knickknacks and the prison guard unions who sells the prisoner's time for $0.40 and pay the prisoners $0.06. It’s the local law enforcement departments and DEA offices who seize money, cars, and houses they say are connected to drugs.
We spend tens of billions of dollars each year trying to stop the flow of drugs worth at best 4 billion dollars at the farm gate, but because of our prohibition, we cause the final price to be 400 billion at the market gate.
[...]
It is the prohibition law and its resultant enormous profits that bring drug violence to our communities. Drug traffickers are more than willing to break every one of the Ten Commandments in order to maintain their share of this multibillion-dollar black market. That they use extortion, murder, bribery of public officials, and other illegal tactics should no longer come as any shock.
With controlled distribution of cannabis, coca leaves and opium to adults, we could immediately end this drug war, bankrupt the cartels, save billions of tax dollars, cut down on overdose deaths, free up our prisons, and reconcile the distrust between the community and law enforcement. Who speaks against it? Those who enrich themselves on the drug war as it is.
Q&A With Scott Bullock
Scott Bullock joined the Institute for Justice at its founding in 1991 and now serves as a senior attorney. In addition to litigation, Bullock works extensively on grassroots campaigns with homeowners, small business owners, and activists throughout the country to oppose condemnations for private use. Bullock directs the Institute’s campaign against civil forfeiture, a nationwide effort to challenge the ability of governments to take property from owners without a criminal conviction. He is co-author of Policing for Profit, a comprehensive report published in 2010 documenting forfeiture abuse at all levels of government. Recorded April 4, 2010.
DEAN BECKER: The Institute for Justice litigates nationwide on behalf of individuals whose rights are being violated by government. Is that a good summation of your work?
SCOTT BULLOCK: That’s a very good summation of our work. We are a nationwide organization. We’re located just outside of Washington. We have four state chapters and we’re really suing governments throughout the country who violate fundamental constitutional liberties.
We released a study that really is the first nationwide survey that looks at the abuse of civil asset forfeiture. Civil forfeiture is a concept that some people are familiar with. But if they’re not and you tell them about it, they're shocked. Because under civil forfeiture police and prosecutors can take your property away from you, without so much as charging you with a crime. In over 40 states and at the federal level, police and prosecutors can then profit from the proceeds and property that forfeit from you. We think civil forfeiture laws really represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today.
DB: The predominant use of this is in regards to suspicion of drug possession?
SB: Oh, no question about it. It is oftentimes tied to the drug war. But it’s not only related to that. They seize people’s cars for DWIs. For soliciting prostitutes and other types of crimes, because civil forfeiture laws are written very broadly and one of the major problems with them, is that property can be seized merely on the suspicion that you are doing something wrong and one of the primary things that governments seize now is cash. If the police officer suspects that you have a "larger than normal" amount of cash on you or in your vehicle, they can seize that saying, "I suspect you of being a drug dealer or engaging in money laundering" and then once that property is seized, the burden is on you to try to get the property back.
So it’s really, as we call it, this upside-down world where rather than the criminal context, where the burden is on the government to pursue you and prove that you’re guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil forfeiture, the opposite is true. The burden is on the individual to try to prove their or their property’s, innocence.
DB: Guilty till proven innocent. Now, you have given grades to the various states, if you will, on their use of this policy. Correct?
SB: That’s right and unfortunately only three states received a final grade of B or higher and 35 states received a D or an F for their laws alone. So this is a nationwide problem and unfortunately most states and at the federal level, do not have adequate protections for property owners. Some of the worst abusers are in the South. But we also have states like Michigan that very aggressively forfeit proceeds, and this is not a very good track record nationwide. One of the things that the report points out and one of the things that needs to be reformed is that, even in states, for instance like North Carolina, that have pretty good civil forfeiture Laws, that do not allow the police and prosecutors to profit from forfeiture activities. What often times agencies will do there, is pass off forfeiture prosecutions to the federal government.
Then the federal government will prosecute the forfeiture actions and under federal law, the money goes right back to law enforcement. Up to eighty percent can go right back to local police and prosecutors. So this is really an end run around the wishes of the citizens, of a particular state, and it’s one of the things that we look at very carefully in the report and call on the law to be changed to make sure that even if a state does have good laws, that they’re not permitted to bypass state procedures and go to the federal government.
There’s been horrible abuses of civil forfeiture laws where people’s currency/cash is taken, without ever charging them with a crime and then, because the property amounts oftentimes are small, people just kind of throw in the towel and don’t even fight it. Because they feel like, "I don’t have the time and the effort to work my way through this system, hire a lawyer to try to fight for me, when they might only be seizing $700 or $1500 or $2000. That’s the way a lot of these forfeitures play out. This isn’t the taking of the "big drug dealers mansion." This is taking a used car from somebody. It’s taking $1500 or $2000 in cash from folks. So it does disproportionately affect lower-income people. Often times minority groups and it’s one of the many ways that this power is abused.
DB: Can you give us an idea of the magnitude of the dollars involved?
SB: It’s exploded over the years and civil forfeiture was really kind of a backwater of the law, until the 1980s, when the federal government and a lot of state governments put this profit incentive into the law. Before that, if there was a forfeiture proceeding, the money went to typically the general revenue account of the state, where most fines and other fees that the government charges go to, and then elected officials decide how the money is spent.
But once they took this, "law enforcement can eat what they kill" approach, that is when you saw forfeiture skyrocket. It just gives you one example when the law was changed in 1986 at the federal level, the Assets Forfeiture Fund at the Department of Justice had $78 million in it. Today, even with some reforms passed in 2000, it did provide some greater protection for property owners. The property incentive wasn’t changed at that time and now that same fund has over a billion dollars in it.
DB: I remember Karen Tandy was quoted as saying that the DEA, with the capture of $2 billion during the time she was involved, had almost paid for itself.
SB: Yeah. I think some people, who are involved in this business, don’t really see any problems with it. They don’t really see the fact that "incentives matter" and that if you give people incentives to go out and take as much property as possible, they’re going to respond accordingly. So it shouldn’t be surprising then, that a lot of law enforcement effort is directed, not at capturing the bad guy, stopping violent crime.
But it goes toward, “How are we going to pay ourselves?” “How are we going to fund our agencies?” “How are we going to improve our work lives?” Or in some states, “How are we going to pay our salaries?” So that is really a perversion of law enforcement priorities. Away from what their goal should be. Which is the fair and impartial administration of justice.
DB: Scott, as one of the coauthors of the book, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, what was your focus? What did you bring to the book?
SB: What I really focused on was the analysis of the law itself. I’m a lawyer and I would not trust myself to do some of the pretty sophisticated statistical analysis that’s in the report. So, I focused on the legal analysis and then we had three criminal justice researchers, all whom are professors and have PHDs, look at the numbers and really do an analysis that showed that not only can you see, almost on an intuitive basis as to why police might prosecute and do this for profit, but they actually demonstrate this through a very careful look at the data that’s available.
What they really found was, that when laws make civil forfeiture easier and more profitable, law enforcement engages in more of it, and that’s just not an assertion. This is the first study that puts some real numbers behind that and I think some really solid research. What we see this as, is really the inauguration of a campaign that we’re going to have, that’s going to manifest itself in a number of different ways. Through litigation. Through public awareness. Through further research. Through grassroots organizing. Hopefully through legislative change that will change the laws in a very significant way, throughout the country, to stop forfeiture abuse.
We’re going to file lawsuits. As I said, we’re going to work with folks to try to change the law in various jurisdictions, throughout the country. So we hope to use this really, as the launching pad for a nationwide campaign, to try to stop these abuses.
DB: This comes at a time when the nation, the states, the county, every municipality is hurting for money. They need that money, anyway they can and without your hopeful interference with their continuing this effort, it’s bound to get worse. Right?
SB: Right, and I think that’s all the more reason to make sure protections for property owners are in place. Because the incentives to take property from folks are going to be even stronger and we don’t have "an end justifies the means" approach in this country. Or at least we should not have and people should not lose their property without being convicted of a crime and law enforcement shouldn’t be able to profit from other people’s property.
We’re not talking about criminal forfeiture here. If somebody’s convicted of a crime and you show, for instance, that someone defrauded investors and used that money to buy mansions and yachts and things like that, then sure. Nobody’s going to be opposed to the use of criminal forfeiture. But that’s where forfeiture should be confined to. It should be confined to people who are convicted of crime, in a court of law. It should not be used as a civil action against folks who may never even be charged with any type of wrongdoing.