brettaustin's posterous

C. David Freitag

We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.

Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.

Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:

6,487.

To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.

I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.

Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."

That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."

Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.

So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."

I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.

"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."

Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem

Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."

"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"

"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."

So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.

That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.

But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?

"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."

I told Franklin I was surprised to hear a cop express so much sympathy for drug addicts. Even pro-drug types don't do that much. "I do have sympathy," he says. "What they're dealing with is a health issue, not a criminal issue. And as long as you treat it as a criminal issue, we're treating the symptom and not the cause."

Why Cleaning Up the Justice System Solves the Wasted-Money Problem

Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he's made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he's been surprised by another discovery: "I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they're not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize."

And why, exactly, don't we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?

"Selfish reasons," he says. "There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country."

Really? One third?

"And give back all the federal funds too. That's why very seldom will you see a police chief step forward and say, 'Yeah, we need to do this.'"

I made a stab at crunching those numbers, too. In 2003, America's local police budgets (PDF) were $43 billion dollars. A third of that: $12.9 billion. Add another $9 billion in domestic and international law enforcement (PDF) and the number rises to $21.9 billion.

Then consider America's prisons, the problems with which we've discussed here time and again. "The prison population is off the hook in this country," Franklin says. "In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we'd rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment."

So... our federal prison budget in 2007 was $6.3 billion, and 55 percent of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. The total state-prison budget for the U.S. in 2007 was $49 billion, according to this study from the Pew Foundation, which found that "at least" 44 states had gone into the red to incarcerate their citizens. Using the same 55 percent number — which is probably low — we arrive at a rough total of the prison expenses associated with the drug war: $30.4 billion.

"I know jails are a big business and keep lot of people employed," Franklin says, "but it doesn't make it right."

To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering:

15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.

"We've got serious constitutional issues involved, too," Franklin adds. "Improper search and seizure is occurring every day..."

But I'll save that for another column.

Correction appended: An earlier version of this column estimated an incorrect fraction of America's the United States local police budgets.

Sound off on the drug war! Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.

RELATED LINKS:

• Q&A: Inside Barney Frank's Plan to Legalize Marijuana
• EARLIER: Top Bush Aide Wanted to Legalize Marijuana
• EARLIER: Why Obama Really Might Decriminalize Marijuana
• FROM THE ARCHIVE: The Secret Lives of Suburban Stoners
• MUST-READ: On the Front Lines of the Mexican Drug War
• MORE RICHARDSON: New Political Analysis Every Tuesday

I am glad to see responsible Americans finally realizing what the war on drugs is costing us. I'm glad it's not just a bunch of druggies pushing for this but now responsible adults that are tired of the bloodshed and drug lords. A great read and very thought provoking.

By Andy Bloxham
Published: 8:00AM BST 15 Aug 2009

Transplant patients Sandie Lee Smith and Sean O'Brien Photo: SWNS

The British team performed two stomach, bowel and liver transplants on five different patients, including an eight-month-old baby, on the same day in a remarkable feat of coordination.

The series of operations began on June 11 when, at around midnight, surgeons at Birmingham Children's Hospital and University Hospitals Birmingham were told that two donors had become available.

The first donor gave a stomach, pancreas and small bowel to an 11-year-old boy in the first stage of the procedures.

Next, in simultaneous operations at around 8am, donor one gave half a liver to eight-month-old Lubaya Turpin and Sandie Lee Smith, 30, from Cheltenham, Glos, received the other half.

In a 'domino' transplant, Mrs Smith's liver - which was dangerous to her because her body could not process toxins - was then given to Sean O'Brien, 43, from Taunton, in Somerset.

The second team of surgeons, meanwhile, took a liver, pancreas and intestine from the second donor and gave them to a 14-year-old boy from Bradford.

The operations were carried out by surgeons Darius Mirza, Khalid Sharif, Paolo Muiesan and Simon Bramell with a team of consultants.

Four of the patients involved in the procedures met up for the first time on Thursday at Birmingham Children's Hospital.

Mr O'Brien, who has one child, was diagnosed with liver cancer four years ago but does not qualify for a healthy organ on the donor list because he is terminally-ill.

He said: ''Sometimes words aren't enough. I hugged her. I feel incredibly grateful, incredibly happy and incredibly humble.

''After the surgery my wife Sam said she'd never seen such a big smile from someone on a ventilator and I've been smiling ever since.

''It's humbling to think at a time of immense grief, families can be so selfless and think about how their loved one could enhance someone else's life.''

It is the first time that this combination of transplants has ever been performed in one day and only fifth time in history that five successful transplants have been carried out in 24 hours.

Mrs Smith said: ''I feel great, like I've got new energy and can spend more time with my kids instead of being in and out of hospital."

Lubaya's father Dwayne Turpin,23, Birmingham, added: ''Her eyes used to be yellow now that's all cleared up and they are bright white again. She has a lot more energy whereas before she would be sluggish.

''She's been a very lucky baby.''

Mr Mirza, the surgeon, said: "In the UK the organ donor rate is one of the lowest in Europe.

"People are not as generous as they used to be. Education is important to inform people of the benefits being on the register can bring to other people's lives.

"I wish we could do domino transplants more often. Instead of discarding organs they can be used by someone else taking them off the waiting list."

There have been a total of 29 domino transplants in Britain but this is the first case where a damaged liver has been successfully transplanted.

To sign up on the Organ Donor Register call 0300 123 23 23 or visit www.organdonation.nhs.uk.

Umm....Yea sounds like the NHS is terrible...yeah if you wake up in opposite world with Glenn Beck everyday. This is seriously becoming too easy. I almost feel like I'm fishing with dynamite.

Seriously...someone defend that? It's sad when John Stewart, a comedian, has more journalistic credit than you.

When Mick Jagger sings the song “Dear Doctor,” he sort of fakes an American accent. After all, the song’s protagonist asks his doctor to cut out his heart, and only in the wild and wooly free healthcare market of the U.S. would any sawbones with an ounce of ethics consider such a thing. But hey, to Republicans, that’s probably a plus about the American system. Pay for what you want, right?

In fact, it's lately been one of the GOP's favorite touchstones in the healthcare debate. Republicans love to talk about lines for care in the U.K.’s stolid socialized system: Go on the government’s dime for medicine, and you’ll die waiting for that easy surgery!

Seeking to play up this groundbreaking “Be frightened of England” angle, the Republican National Committee ran a web ad warning, "In Great Britain, individuals lose their right to make their own health care choices.” The Club for Growth, a conservative group, has a spot claiming that British bureaucrats pegged the value of six months of life at $22,750. “Under their socialized system, if your treatment costs more, you're out of luck,” the ad's narrator says as the spot cuts back and forth from weeping elderly people to Big Ben and the British flag.

Perhaps most egregiously, Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) warned that socialized medicine would be a death sentence for the vulnerable among us, like ALS-afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking. IBD editorialized, “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

Hawking is, of course, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and quite British. (The editorial has since been changed to accommodate this seemingly overwhelming disproof.)

Naturally, the British didn’t cotton to having their healthcare system conscripted to serve as a bogeyman. You see, not only are the British not currently being stomped on by the heel of a socialist-fascist-whatever Orwellian dictatorship, they actually quite like the way things over there work. In the U.K., the National Health Service (NHS) plays approximately the political role that Social Security does here. Sure, it may have been controversial to establish: Although Winston Churchill helped lay the groundwork for the NHS, he also warned during the 1945 campaign that the Labour Party's welfare state ideas would require “some kind of Gestapo” to administer. (Sound familiar?) But once it was written into law, messing with the NHS became political poison. Even Margaret Thatcher, at the height of her power, never dared to try.

That’s probably why Hawking says of British healthcare, “I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS.” The past few days have also seen a spike in the Twitter topic trend, #welovetheNHS, including tweets from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah Brown. Even David Cameron, the head of the Conservative Party and leader of the opposition, has felt compelled to declare, “I support the NHS 100 percent and the Conservative Party supports the NHS 100 percent.”

The GOP really ought to have been more careful about this. If you’re going to use another country’s policy as a foil, you first might want to check to make sure that policy is not, in fact, overwhelmingly popular. And if you really want to go ahead with it even then, probably best to pick a country that doesn’t speak English.

― Gabriel Winant

Like I've said before. GOP come up with a valid argument and then talk. All these scare tactics aren't going to work. False information in this day and age can easily be disproved. Did we really think the British people would like us using their prized healthcare system as a "bogeyman"?