As a former prosecutor who has served in Elkhart, Lake and St. Joseph Counties as a drug dealing prosecutor, I can speak with some degree of first hand experience here. Drugs lead to about half or more of all crime. People do not bust your car window to steal a quarter to buy a can of soda. Robberies, thefts, and burglaries are all often committed to feed the drug addiction.
The drug war reminds me of the WWI trench warfare where no progress is made. We have three times as many citizens in prison that we did in 1975, 2,200,000. Not only do we pay at least $25,000 per year for each one of those citizens who are incarcerated ($58 billion a year), but also we lose the opportunity cost of having them work and pay taxes.
However, drugs are not the problem. We need to look at the underlying root causes. I believe that many are self-medicating their mental illnesses with drugs. For those people, jail will not work, and they will go back to the revolving door of arrest, incarceration, release and arrest. Others who have been raped or abused need counseling. Some of our youth succumb to peer pressure which can be dealt with by better education through school programs and by having students visit prisons and prisoners speak to students. Finally, some are using drugs as a substitute for an unfulfilling, emotionally attached, sexual relationship. With the break down of marriage and the ever increasing prevalence of the porn-prostitution industry that promotes self-abusing voyeurism, drugs are more and more becoming a substitute for that which our brains were wired.
Indiana Lawyer
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