Crime and Drugs

0:00From Studio B at the WDSU Broadcast Center in New Orleans, 6 On Your Side Live. Good evening, I'm Norman Robinson. We begin tonight with the problem experts say is crippling every step of the recovery in New Orleans. Drugs and crime, how the two go hand in hand and what can be done to stop it. 6 On Your Side Live correspondent Camille Whitworth investigates. This is it. This is where I lay my head. 23 year old Brian Watkins is getting treatment at the Odyssey House. He was once strung out on heavy drugs, alcohol and a life of crime. I had a possession of methadone, hydrocodone and cocaine. Were you criminal? Absolutely. What were you doing?

0:45Stealing. I mean, robbing. Stealing things from my mother. You know, I stole all of her jewelry. I would steal money from friends, family, everybody, anybody. All for the high. All for the high. This place here is the last hope. If Brian wasn't here, he says he'd be slinging dope and in and out of jail. I would be doing the same thing I was doing, stealing money out the cash registers from the bar. I'd be stealing from my parents, breaking into cars, doing whatever it took. Investigators tell Six on Your Side Live New Orleans is facing the biggest drug crisis in decades. Police tell us 90% of all crime is connected to drugs, use or sales. And right now there is a backlog by more than 2,000 cases. Police say they make more drug cases says that the district attorney's office can prosecute. That's one reason Ed Carlson, executive director for the Odyssey House, put out this report.

1:51You can't work with somebody who's out running the streets shooting dope all day. You gotta be able to get them in, get them clean and sober, and then you can start to focus on dealing with them. The six page report details ways to end violent crime and curb easy accessibility to alcohol and drugs. His plan starts with treatment. You go in, you concentrate in areas, you break up the criminal activity in there and you focus on pushing treatment, you have case management services, you focus on moving people out of their addictive problems into treatment services. Carlson also adds, when people are arrested for drug charges, substance abuse treatment should be mandatory. You have to focus on a strong criminal justice side, strong courts, good system, making mandating people into treatment or locking them up if they're not going to treatment.

2:39And then you have to focus on having treatment services, prevention, intervention services, all connected with the community. Investigator for the District Attorney's Office, Mike Dorena sees drug cases come through every day. This is a small part of this big picture. You know, just treating is not going to solve the problem. Dorena thinks treatment is a start and tells us solid solutions will have to go way beyond that. Drugs-related problems are spiraling out of control. That, according to a police association president, Lieutenant Mike Glasser.

3:32We have significant problems with drugs in the city. We have more drugs in the city probably now than we had pre-contrary. Lt. Glasser says crime and drugs will destroy the city and the people if something isn't done soon. Any program that helps people wean themselves off of drug abuse is a good thing. Will that solve the problem by itself? Absolutely not. But is it something that's necessary? I would say it is. No one agrees more than Brian and others who want to break the vicious cycle of drugs and crime. In New Orleans, Camille Whitworth, 6 On Your Side Live. On the 6 On Your Side Live hot seat tonight, William Renton from the DEA, Walter Block, professor of economics at Loyola University, and Ed Carlson, executive director of the Odyssey House, Louisiana. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. We want to set the tone for tonight's discussion with this excerpt from an article written by Professor Block. Professor Block wrote, New Orleans is now undergoing an unprecedented murder rate, even for the

4:28The Big Easy. How can we dig our way out of this morass? The usual suspect solutions have all been tried, have not worked in the past and will not help us now. So let's take a deep breath, open our minds and consider something radical. Way off the beaten track, let us legalize drugs, all of them without exception, preeminently including marijuana, cocaine and yes, heroin. Professor Block, what is it about the cure that you are proposing that's not worse than the disease? I don't think anything is not worse than the disease. I think there's no real downside. I think the only thing is an upside. We'll reduce the murder rate rapidly. We will allow police to stop victim crimes as opposed to victimless crimes, people putting poisons into their own bodies.

5:19And when it's legalized the prices will come down and people will no longer have to steal, rob and commit mayhem in order to promote their habits or feed their habits because the price will be so low they won't have to steal. No one has to steal in order to get booze. We had a situation with prohibition of alcohol and we saw that people were being shot like flies in the street. Mr. Renton, as a person, a law enforcement officer with the Department of Drug Enforcement, the EA, what do you see as an answer or reaction to what Professor Block is proposing?

6:08I think Professor Block's solution is absolutely ludicrous. We have a lot of problems in this city. We have serious problems. We have serious problems in this nation. Drugs happen to be one of them. If Professor Block's solution is implemented and we sell drugs in stores, I would guess that there's poor people in the city that can't buy food and they're on federal subsistence. I don't think any taxpayer regrets paying taxes to allow people that are absolutely starving or desperate straits to purchase food and to feed themselves. So you see crime worsening in the event that drugs are legalized?

6:59What about that, Mr. Carlson? I'm afraid I have to agree. All the studies actually show by legalizing drugs, what happens is you lose your motivation towards treatment. A lot of the problems associated with it has to do with the fact that once a person is addicted, regardless of what the problems and issues, and there are plenty of people out there who steal money for alcohol just because alcohol is legal. Once a person becomes addicted, they lose their ability to be able to choose whether or not they can use that substance. So the point of reference is even some of the governments in various different places, they had looked at trying to actually even giving people the drugs as a way of dealing with it. But what happens is you create this underclass population that becomes addicted without any motivation towards moving them towards treatment. Professor Block.

7:45Let me just say that I don't favor the use of drugs. I oppose them. I'm talking about the legalization of them. The logical implication of what these people on either side of me are saying is that we should go back to the prohibition of alcohol. And yet, surely we wouldn't want to do that. Now, with regard to the case in England and Amsterdam, the reason that these experiments, quasi-experiments, it wasn't really full legalization, but quasi-legalization failed, is because they didn't realize how many addicts they had. Many more addicts came out of the, under the rocks or wherever they were, so they had a statistical undercount. Do we know how many addicts we have? No, I don't think we have good data. So how would we be different? How would the outcome for us be different? Well, the outcome there wasn't bad. It's not that there were new addicts, it's that there was a severe undercount.

8:31As well, people from India, Australia and other places in the British dominions came to England to take advantage of this very humane policy. So I don't think that these were a failure. But the point is right now, this drug law is a very racist law. First of all, the Harrison Nauticotics Act was implemented as an anti-Chinese measure in 1914 because the Chinese were using opium. I thought it was an anti-Mexican. No, anti-Chinese in 1914. Right now it's anti-black in effect because blacks are disproportionately represented among those who are being killed in drug wars and also those in jail. I think from 60 to 70 percent of all people now in prison are in prison related to drug laws. Mr. Renton, are we winning the war on drugs?

9:17Some significant recent studies indicate that drug use amongst teenagers has decreased. We're doing a lot of things. I agree with Professor Block that we will never be able to arrest ourselves out of the drug. We won't be able to incarcerate everybody who abuses drugs. For those that think that people who merely possess or use drugs are disproportionately in prison, that's a fallacy. It's absolutely incorrect. It's very difficult to go to prison if you possess drugs with the intent of using them. That's a misdemeanor in federal courts. There's a number of federal laws that would prohibit what Mr. Block is suggesting, and obviously you wouldn't be able to just take New Orleans and decide that we're going to legalize it here, but, Norman, as you're well aware, we have serious problems in the city, drug abuses amongst them, the people that would be using drugs, the underclass that we talked about that would be created, what would they do? What could they possibly do? We have undereducated kids that have absolutely no social skills, no marketable skills, no chance of making a living,

10:13and would make them wards of their own addiction. And the drugs are making it worse. Absolutely, the drugs are making it worse. But to say let's legalize drugs, anybody that credibly studies drug legalization would have to admit that initially, at least initially, you'd have a spike in use. I disagree with Professor Block saying that there was addicts that came out the woodwork. You would create new addicts, you'd create new abusers. And I like that when we discuss legalization, I love to use the United Negro College Fund's commercial. How many mines in the city of New Orleans of young people And Mr. Carlson, what are we doing about treatment? If we are serious about this drug problem and doing something about it, why don't we invest more in prevention and treatment? Well, that's my question. The thing is, there are many cities around the country that have been able to utilize and create coherent systems of care and have a huge impact on the drug problem in their community.

11:06One of the things that we need to do is we need to work, have law enforcement working a lot closer with substance abuse treatment programs, prevention, intervention, and the community as a whole in a coherent system that could help to deal with the problem. A good example of this is San Francisco. San Francisco and New Orleans have a lot of things in common. One of the things they have in common is that they have a kind of laissez-faire attitude towards substance abuse, okay, drugs and alcohol. and Alcohol. During the 60s, San Francisco had a lot of problems with drugs, mainly because of the heyday of the hippie days. In the 70s, they experienced high amounts of crime. What they did was they took a multi-tier approach. They focused on treatment, intervention, prevention and working closely in the criminal justice system and the community as a whole. Now, as an example, last year, they have over 670,000 people living in their city. They only had 96 murders in the city. If we could focus on looking at models that are already being

11:59Professor Block, is this all pie in the sky to you? Well, no, I think that he's making a reasonable point, but first let me just say that both of these opponents of mine on either side of me, I guess I was put in the middle because I'm the prettiest here. Well, yes, of course. Both of them are ducking my question. My question is, would you favor going back to the prohibition of alcohol? Now, the point with regards to the Odyssey House, they're doing a great job, but so is narcotics anonymous and alcoholics anonymous. The point is that if we legalize it, we turn it from both a social and a medical problem to just a medical problem, where my colleague over here can perhaps help out, and my colleague over here can stop real crimes instead of stopping victimless crimes.

12:49and Victimless Crimes. Now, he says, yes, we're winning or we're not winning. Look, not only are we not winning, but we can't win, because every time we start to win, we set the seeds of our own destruction of the winning. For example, every time they interject some drugs, the supply curve, if I can use the economic terminology, shifts to the left. There's less drugs available, which means the prices go higher and the profits go high. Mr. Renton, you get the last word, 30 seconds. The very success breeds failure, so they can't win. Mr. Winn. I'm not for going back and criminalizing alcohol, but we have a number of social problems related to alcohol abuse, drunken driving, most people say we ought to legalize marijuana, most proponents of drug legalization say, let's start with marijuana. There's a significant problem here with marijuana being used in driving and accidents killing people.

13:38I mean, under Mr. Block's theory, anything that we can't control, we ought to legalize, we could legalize burglaries, but there's consequences to that. Thank you, gentlemen. This discussion will obviously go forward. Mr. Renton, Professor Block and Mr. Carlson, thank you for being here. You're very welcome.