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

In a word, everybody's crazy about drugs.

Whether by prescription or on the street, whether you like your pill dressed in Pfizer blue or prefer little dull ones stamped with a bat emblem, love them or hate them, we've got a thing for drugs.

Government agencies of every variety want to control or get rid of them altogether, while every little criminal — from the two-bit grifter on the corner to the really nice doctor eight floors above — seem to do all they can to keep them coming.

"Yes, we're pretty down the rabbit hole on all this," says Pat Flemming, who, for the past 20 years, has led the state's substance abuse prevention program or directed Salt Lake County's efforts. "We're at a crossroads. We're either going to keep at it as if it were some kind of war or we're going to make some real headway. We're starting to — the endmethnow campaign, for example — go in the right direction.

"Compassion and treatment is the morally right and the much more economically sensible thing to do," he said. "Continuing to turn people into criminals has never worked and never will."

The status quotient

The status quo of the state health care system, as leaders of a new statewide overhaul effort keep saying, cannot be sustained. In less than 20 years, if something isn't done, the cost of paying for insurance coverage will equal the average household income.

The status quo of drug policies and practices cannot be sustained either, a range of people, from those conducting research on drug use to drug runners, told the Deseret News.

A man who spent his career chasing drug dealers and users said current policies have hurt much more than they have helped and, in the process, have turned the United States into "incarceration nation" by filling its prisons almost as fast as cars fill a new freeway.

Jack Cole, co-founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a retired lieutenant with the New Jersey state police narcotics squad, said things have gotten past a joke, and it's way past time to wise up.

"Despite all the lives we have destroyed — the trillions in tax dollars and the 37 million arrests for nonviolent offenses — today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs," Cole said.

According to LEAP figures, more than 2.2 million U.S. citizens are currently incarcerated because of drug-related crimes, and another 1.9 million are added every year replacing those who are paroled or pass through the system.