Published: June 22, 2009 12:04 pm      

Officials’ solution to war on drugs: Legalization

Ada — A group of both current and former law enforcement officials want to end the war on drugs.

“The issue has to be addressed,” said Wes Johnson, a Tulsa defense attorney and former Tulsa police officer.

Johnson is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP. LEAP is an organization committed to ending drug prohibition because of the financial toll the drug war takes on the state.

“Drug enforcement is bankrupting the state of Oklahoma,” Johnson said. “If you legalized it, you could tax it.”

Johnson said this tax on drugs would provide a revenue stream to put more money into drug prevention and treatment programs, similar to the state’s tax on tobacco.

The financial burden of the drug war in Oklahoma is evident in a May 2009 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The report stated that Oklahoma spent nearly 12 percent of its budget on costs relating to substance abuse and addiction. But only .3 percent of that is used for substance abuse prevention, treatment and research, a mere $24 million out of the total $999 million spent.

Some local officials on the frontlines of the war on drugs, like drug court case manager Brandy Melton, do not think legalizing drugs would be beneficial to drug treatment programs like drug court.

“If you legalize drugs, you might lower your incarceration costs,” she said. “But your death rate is going to go up and your hospitalization tolls are going to go up.”

Melton said the answer is not to only have incarcerations or treatment programs, but to couple those two concepts together.

“I think they should have more drug rehab programs in prison,” she said. “We’ve had people come out of prison and they’ve been put in those programs, but they’re not really getting drug treatment; I think it’s just something for them to say they’ve done while they’re in there, and it gets them two hours out of a cell.”

LEAP member Wes Johnson said if drugs were legalized, the government could control the production, price and quality of the drugs.

“There are going to be people constantly addicted to this stuff,” he said. “The government should be in the business of controlling it, not the criminal cartels.”

Judge Thomas Landrith, who presides over many drug cases, said he does believe the government regulation of drugs would necessarily lead to a greater control of who uses them.

“Our children get a hold of a lot of legal drugs that are obtained by their parents legally,” Landrith said. “They can get it out of their medicine chest; It doesn’t make any difference.”

The prescription drug problem in the area is evidence that government can never have complete control over drugs, and prescription drug overdose is the second leading cause of unnatural death in the Pontotoc County area, Pontotoc County District Attorney Chris Ross said.

According to the LEAP Web site, legalizing drugs would also “restore the public’s respect for police.” Johnson said the actions of police officers are sending negative perceptions to the public by separating children from their parents.

“They’re putting people in jails for these low-level drug charges and you have these law enforcement types stepping up to save the children,” he said. “That’s (bull).”

Assistant police chief Maj. Carl Allen said this allegation would be true if drug offenders were in jail simply because they possessed drugs.

“Under the current laws that we have, drug abuse and buying and selling of drugs accounts for a lot more crime than just the actual possessions and the buying and sellings,” Allen said. “People steal, and they victimize other people in order to get their capital to buy the drugs.”

Allen echoed the concerns by most public officials serving Ada that more problems would occur if drugs were legalized.

“If we didn’t enforce the current drug laws that we have, people would be dying,” he said. “There would be some economic benefit probably to some government agencies, but I think it would be more of a problem.”

As one could see, LEAP is a minority in the law enforcement community, as only 102 out of the 13,000 members nationwide are in Oklahoma. Only 11 of those actually have law enforcement experience, according to LEAP media director Tom Angell.

Both sides of the legalization debate will continue to express their opinions in the public policy sphere, but both sides agree that the war on drugs will likely never end.

“As long as we have demand, they’ll be supply,” Johnson said. “They’ll always be demand.”