The Rockefeller drug laws have now been with us for three decades, roughly coincident with the Nixonian War on Drugs, and have been just as ignominious a failure. They mandated gigantic prison sentences for drug selling convictions and thereby jammed state prisons full of non-violent offenders. Drug use has continued to rise, and the trafficking business has become more lucrative than ever.
Misha Glenny’s fascinating book McMafia outlines how easy it is to predict all this and leads inescapably to the conclusion that powerful criminal interests are just delighted with the Draconian approach to drug addiction and abuse because it creates a great business opportunity for them, just as it did for Al Capone in the 1920s. Doh. That doesn’t mean Rockefeller was in the pocket of organized crime. Perish the thought.
Meanwhile, demagogic drum-thumping will now ensue as opportunist (white) politicians raise the spectre of increased street crime when all those bad sorts get let out of jail. Given the three decades of stupidity in drug control policy, they could be right, especially as sentence reductions may occur just as we enter the worst economic environment in a half-century. We need spokespeople ready to do battle with this kneejerk response and go to bat for the kinds of rehab and re-entry programs that will make us all safer. (Don’t expect the conservative pols to support any of that spending, either.)
Speaking of conservative pols, the New York Times outlines in detail today just what a nasty bit of work our new U.S. Senator is. Turns out that Kirsten Gillebrand, named by Governor Paterson to replace Hillary, started out as an enthusiastic conniver for the tobacco companies along the path to her current glory at the right hand of Chuck Schumer.
This disaster was one of many sins committed by our laughingstock governor who may mercifully be put out of our consciousness forever in next year’s primary. Gillebrand, however, like a case of Type I diabetes, is probably with us for life.
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