Ecuador A Drug Policy Leader

By James E. Gierach, Palos Park, IL, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)

Dear Editor:

In 1994, the Swiss started a heroin maintenance program for addicted drug users (only) that was so successful in improving the health of addicts and stopping crime that the program was sent to the World Health Organization for study and, in 2008 Swiss voters agreed by referendum to continue the successful heroin maintenance program.

In 2000, the Portuguese decriminalized the possession of small quantities of all drugs for personal consumption, recognizing the limits of power and government’s inability to stop people from consuming drugs by outlawing them. The result – rather than crime and drug use increasing, it decreased.

In the 1970s, Hollanders decided to make marijuana, the world’s most popular illegal drug with over a hundred million users worldwide annually (http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20120105/worldwide-illegal-drug-use-estimated-200-million-people-year), de facto legal through tolerance of its now world-famous “coffee shops.” The result – as intended, the plan successfully separated “hard” and “soft” drug markets with significantly lower rates of drug use than in the U.S. On the other hand in the U.S., zero-tolerant prohibition of all drug use (hard and soft) turned out to be the “gateway” to dreaded polydrug use and higher rates of drug use.

In 2009, Bolivians exercising democratic prerogatives adopted a new constitution that afforded constitutional protection of its hallowed cultural, medicinal and historic use of the coca leaf for millenniums (coca leaf is also the prime ingredient of cocaine, powder and crack) in the high Andean country, despite being a signatory to the United Nations 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. That convention outlaws the coca plant, heroin and marijuana and farcically includes all three in Schedule I of outlawed drugs with high potential for abuse and supposedly no medicinal value. However, as of 2014 marijuana is legal in Colorado and the state of Washington, the country of Uruguay, and 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia say marijuana is medicine.

And now in 2014, Ecuadorians have disavowed the popular U.S. practice of “policing for profit,” where seized drug property and profits are plowed back into the drug-war machine, feeding law-enforcement in terms of police hiring, salaries, overtime, equipment, vehicles and buildings. Instead, Ecuador is impounding drug dealer assets and land and using the plunder to support poor and vulnerable communities with jobs for residents through development of sustainable economic projects as an alternative to illicit drug cultivation, processing and transit.

Meeting with the drug czar of Ecuador Rodrigo Vélez and ten members of the international press from Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Cuba, Ecuador and Canada and seeing those Ecuadorean projects personally last month confirms the vitality of its efforts. One shrimp farm is providing jobs and generating $80,000 every four months while a high-tech program tracks 1,805 private companies that purchase, ship, use and account for precursor drug products in real time. The press and I also inspected an operating community, corn-farm alternative.

My four-day adventure to beautiful Ecuador gave me hope for drug policy reform, a sober society, viable community crop-substitution programs, control of precursor chemicals and the possibility of approval of a UN drug prohibition treaty amendment that would end the failed war on drugs and restore peace, health and freedom while reducing the harm of drugs and the war on drugs.

(originally published by The Regional News May 7, 2014)

James Gierach in the SouthtownStar

Here's a great article about LEAP board member James Gierach. The SouthtownStar is a newspaper for the south side of Chicago. Here's my favourite quote:

“We’re running out of money,” he said. “That’s why the drug war will end. We just can’t fund it any more.”

The importance of talking to your neighbors about drug policy

The following piece by former prosecutor and LEAP speaker Jim Gierach was published in The Regional News on March 3.

Golden Neighbors Have Lots In Common

Thursday came and with it my copy of The Regional. As is my newspaper habit, I immediately turned to the editorial and letters page, only to find a letter taking the newspaper to task for consistently publishing my letters that support “the legalization of marijuana and even cocaine.” The writer called on law enforcement, parents, teachers and principals to write in supporting the [failed] war on drugs.

My initial reaction was to charge like a tenacious full back in the closing minutes of a Super Bowl, or like the driving drug prosecutor I once was, armed with an encyclopedia of facts and reams of refuting stories, anecdotage and medical, addiction, Prohibition, law-enforcement and economic theory.

I searched the phone book for the telephone number of this dismayed letter writer with thoughts of inviting him for coffee and a heart-to-heart talk, only to discover, “It’s my neighbor! A neighbor only a nine-iron from my front door.” I thought… I have to make clearer that I am completely opposed to drug use, just as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (www.leap.cc ), the organization I represent when I give anti-drug war speeches around the country, is strongly opposed to drug use. But while L.E.A.P. and I oppose drug use, even more emphatically, we oppose the drug war, because it doesn’t work, because it causes what it seeks to prevent, because it is the heart of most American crises worth discussing and, collectively, because these crises are unaffordable. In significant part, America government at the national, state, county and municipal levels can no longer pay the bills accumulating as a result of drug-war-driven crises.

I called my neighbor as I put on the coffee. Jim answered the phone. After a few words, I recognized his voice and he knew mine. “Jim, my neighbor with the Golden Retriever, Dakota, who romps with my son’s Golden Retriever, Scooter?” In disbelief, I asked, “Why didn’t you say something if my writing has been irritating you so long? You never said a word.” For 20 minutes, we bantered back and forth, our sincere and juxtaposing philosophic disagreements grated raw and our blood-pressures rising in tandem. It’s not a liberal-conservative disagreement, and it’s not a pro-drug or anti-drug disagreement, I contended.

Agreeing, respectfully, to disagree, we hugged over the phone, vowing that this genuine concern and disagreement would not come between our Golden Retrievers or us. Knowing it’s my neighbor, a good and honorable man, takes all the karate impulse out of my system. Instead of wanting to strike out, it occurred to me how much we agree. We both are opposed to drug use; we both favor of self-discipline, self-reliance and self-control; we both oppose runaway government and runaway public-sector pensions; we both abhor driving under the influence of substances; we both are angry with government’s inability to govern. We agree philosophically, so much. But my week and its friendly revelations were not over.

Another Gierach letter reader is the father of a Stagg basketball player on the same team as my son. We fathers both oppose drug use. “You want to legalize marijuana?” he asked incredulously. “No, not just marijuana – all illicit drugs,” I explained. “Illicit drugs are too dangerous not to control and regulate. Prohibiting them, paradoxically, surrenders the ability to control and regulate them.” A basketball game or two later, this week, the father who I’ve known for years from our son’s shared interest in sports, says, “Well, I can see legalizing marijuana but I still don’t know about harder drugs.” Progress.

Then, leaving church Sunday morning, I’m speaking to young man who looks vaguely familiar. “I see you’re still writing those drug articles. Keep them coming,” he said, and confidentially added, “You know, I’m in AA, and I haven’t had a drink or used drugs in 90 days. I’m looking for a new church.”

“Congratulations. That’s great!” I complimented. “Life is much better when sober and alert. But we each have to make that decision for ourselves.”

“You know, I use to think of your writing – ‘Great, this guy’s for legalizing drugs.’ But now, I understand – you’re not for drugs at all. I understand, and you’re right.” Progress.

LTE: Police pursuits and the drug war

The following Letter to the Editor was submitted by LEAP speaker James E. Gierach to the Chicago Sun-Times:

Valerie Davis, the 42-year-old woman killed this week in a cops-chase-drug-suspect scenario, would be alive today if drugs were legalized, controlled and regulated. And the drug suspect, now a murder suspect, would have been doing something else for a living, if drugs were legalized. (“Drugs suspects fleeing cops ram into car; woman killed,” Chicago Sun-Times, 11/4/09) Also a drug agent’s bullet fired in the excitement of the chase would not have risked killing innocent bystanders in the Washington Park neighborhood. In sum, drug agents escalated a drug-prohibition violation into the death of an innocent motorist that could have been anyone of us.

If drugs were legalized, some of the drug agents involved in this botched drug-enforcement operation could get a job making something and constructively contributing to American society and gross domestic product. Instead a woman is dead, needlessly, and some drug buyers will be momentarily inconvenienced as they switch drug dealers. A drug suspect will likely go to prison for murder. The taxpayers will get the bill, and Valerie’s relatives get to cry.

Truly – wasteful, counter-productive, deadly, expensive and futile folly. But that’s the drug war in a nutshell.

LEAP speakers write about gangs, violence, children and drugs

LEAP speakers have published a couple of op-ed pieces recently. First, Jim Gierach has a guest column in the Southtown Star:

Al Capone-style bootlegging, hijacking, gang-banging, shooting and corrupting have Americans, their neighborhoods, their children and their lives by the throats, and nothing short of another Wickersham Commission can save them. The Wickersham Commission was created amid the violence of Prohibition, and it astutely recommended an end to Prohibition to stop the violence.

Judge James Gray organized a top ten list of drug policy goals and published it in the Daily Pilot.

Also, I have an article titled "The Failure of Drug Prohibition - A Law Enforcement Perspective." It was published in the June / July 2009 edition of Blue Line, which is Canada's national law enforcement magazine. (Note that the graph looked OK in print but it's blurry in the online version.)