High Society: U.S. drug policy a total failure, say users and experts

Part of the evidence he will submit are photographs of the storage shed where the alleged deal took place. They depict every possible angle — including from a Google Earth satellite. Whether from space or on the ground, to watch it would require seeing around a corner, an 8-foot setback and through a wall.

His legal battles continue, including the escalation of charges.

DeSmet's friends, those who use drugs, those who don't and the business owner who put up his bail, said his case is so far into the margins it's not even on the map of what's called for, legally or morally.

"OK, Mike is not a saint, and the stuff is illegal," one of DeSmet's friends said on condition of anonymity. "Fine. But to hamstring a guy and give him the system runaround and take his livelihood, not to mention his truck — which in another reality would be grand theft auto — then I just don't know. Are we all that desperate to just turn over common decency and common sense over a little dope?"

Yes. In so many words, yes we are, say several of the academics gathered at the law school last month. Eleven of them have written a book that in several thousand words says the country is so disoriented about the drug issue, there is little to no hope of developing any kind of coherent drug policy.

The war on drugs amounts to applying Mercurochrome on an open artery or trying to end a flu epidemic by putting the virus in jail.

Policy failure

It's failure across the board, state the authors of "Drugs and Justice: Seeking a Consistent, Coherent, Comprehensive View." The book was published this past November by Oxford University Press.

There has been a plethora of gaffes from outright meanness to knuckleheaded policies, such as the state Legislature approving standards for methamphetamine detection without the first hint of scientific data to back them up. Earlier this year, lawmakers adopted a bill designed to rectify current practice by establishing uniform contamination standards developed by the State Department of Health.

"Putting exposure from using a bathroom where the drug was smoked a couple times on the same footing as a site of a meth lab where it was made is, well, just adds more chaos to the issue," said book co-author and bioethicist Margaret Battin, a distinguished professor at the University of Utah.

"Despite the enormous expense to governments, cost to taxpayers and emotional and financial ruin of people in its wake, the gears of this vast drug policy just keep turning and grinding, and we don't have the first idea of what's really going on," she said. "We haven't even examined our rationale for why some drugs are illegal and some aren't."

But with the current drug policy, there's no big conspiracy — it's just the way things work right now, Battin said.

"But we can make them work the way that serves greater justice and the control of substances, not just criminalizing and controlling the user," she said.

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E-mail: jthalman@desnews.com