Talking Point; The War on Drugs

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Good evening and welcome to Talking Point. Tonight our topic is the War on Drugs. Worry over illegal drug use, unites Americans from cities and small towns, rich people and poor people, even democrats and republicans. By the early 1990s it was estimated that 37% of Americans aged 12 and older had used marijuana

or cocaine or heroin or some combination of those and that's 75 million people. A study released earlier this summer found a significant increase in recent years and drug use by teenagers. It's a problem that in some way touches almost everyone, consumption of drugs, destroys users, their families and their communities. It's costly in other ways as well. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in an effort to keep drugs out of the country and to arrest dealers and users and still the United States has the highest rate of drug abuse of any industrialized country. What can we do to make our anti-drug efforts more effective? We will take up that question tonight with our three guests. Ralph Wysight is a professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University. He has studied the connection between drugs and crime and also the effectiveness of alcohol and drug education programs. He's the author of a number of books his most recent looks at crime and policing in rural

America. He's also the author of a book on commercial domestic marijuana growers. Lieutenant Colonel John Maratus is with the Illinois State Police. He's the commander for Region 4 that is roughly the eastern half of the state. He's been with the state police since 1970 and in his first 18 years worked in the areas of narcotics and organized crime. Our third guest is Tony Novak, he's an attorney and Urbana. Many of his cases involved the defense of people who are charged with drug possession and trafficking between 1977 and 81 who worked in the Champaign County Public Defenders Office and he's now in private practice. Now as we all talk, you should be thinking about the questions you would like to ask and we'll give you a chance to do that later in the program. Thanks very much, all of you, for being here, we appreciate it. Just to start I guess, I want to talk a little bit about trends of use and maybe I'll ask Ralph to talk about that. Say, let's look back, maybe 10, 15, maybe even 20 years. What can we say about the ups and downs, the trends in drug use overall?

Although there has been an increase in the very recent years, however, it's important to remember that even now uses substantially lower than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And further, the increases we're seeing that you've heard so much about are primarily, first of all, among teenagers, and secondly, they are primarily focused on marijuana. The increase in cocaine use, for example, has been miniscule, it's still less than 1% of young people use cocaine. Most of the increases we've seen have really been for marijuana use. I want to ask you specifically about a study, this was a federal study, apparently, that was released at the end of the summer, I think maybe it was in August and got a lot of attention in the media and became an issue in the presidential contest. This was a study that showed between 1992 and 1995 that marijuana use by teens between 12 and 17 had increased, they found 141% and the drug use overall doubled.

And I think that some people questioned the numbers and asked, well, did it really increase that much? Do you think that that is, the survey was reliable and indeed the increase in drug use, particularly marijuana by teens, has gone up that much? Well, 141% sounds like an outrageously large amount, but in fact, it went from something like 6% to about 8% of young people. So if you want to call that a skyrocket in numbers, then I guess we could call it that. I think it's also important to remember that when we're talking about drug use in America, we don't have a single measure of drug use that's a very good measure. We have, for example, the figures you just gave are the result of the National Household Surveys, in which representatives of the government come knocking at your door and ask you about your use of drugs. Now there shouldn't be any shock that should be any shock that those numbers may not be

perfectly dependable as indicators of what our problem is. And the other point about that is very important is the issue of drugs has not been getting the public attention that it got in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the politicians and the press. And if there's a slight increase, is it because there's been a genuine increase or because when people are asked this question, they no longer feel as uncomfortable saying that they've been using. So it's very hard to know what to make of those numbers. I would think, though, it would be possible that those numbers would be low because there would be people who would be using drugs, but would not want to admit it, so you really die. You could look at that either way, I suppose. Well, first of all, there's no doubt those numbers are low. The question is whether that distortion, that misrepresentation holds constant from 91 through 95 so that what changes we see may be a low-balling of the numbers, but we can genuinely see it, a trend, or a pattern, and we aren't even sure about that.

Well, let me, I want to turn and ask some questions to the man from law enforcement here. I guess that we could always be doing better, obviously. And although we know that it's a continuing concern, it's something that people worry about a lot and appropriately they do. But I guess I would wonder from your perspective, how do you think we're doing? I mean, are we really doing all that badly? I don't think so, I try to stay away from statistics, there are so many different types of statistics, and it depends who you ask when you ask. What perspective they're answering it from? From what I see, you know, I don't think we've won the war, but I don't think we're losing the war. I think we're probably doing much, much better than we were 10 or 15 years ago. I'm not standing here from a perspective of law enforcement say, we're the answer. That's the last thing I'm going to say. But I think, especially in older, in the 30s and 40s and 50s, people, the baby boomers who may have used it in the 60s in college, we're just not seeing it anymore.

I'm talking from a perspective of on the street, I have seven or eight drug units that work under me, and we don't work a lot with old people. So something is working, somehow, it is down in certain areas among certain people. So that would, I mean, I guess that would make it sound as if maybe the best thing to hope for was that a good percentage of people, maybe a good percentage of young people now who are using drugs, essentially would grow out of it. They would get to the point where they would say themselves, you know, this is really not good. It's not good for me. You know, maybe by that, maybe they're thinking about having a family, maybe they have children there thinking, well, I can't be using if we don't want the kids to use it. You know, maybe that's the, that's, that's what happens. Many of them stop right at that point, having children, a family, responsibility. I think later we're probably going to talk a little about enforcement, but one of the

reasons why in enforcement, we do not target users. And by users, I mean, just your casual person who may use some drugs. Sometimes they'll be caught up in it. But I can tell you right now, I've been in the business 27 years. The first 18 years was involved directly with the street. I have never in my career. I've probably put 300, 400 people in jail for various terms. I've, I have never once ever put, ever put anyone in jail on a possession case where there was not other factors, violence, they have other felony record, never once, not violence. Over the time that you have been an attorney, you're working in the public defender's office and now you're in private practice. If, as you think about the people that you have, have worked with, the people have defended, has, has there been some sort of a noticeable change or is it from your perspective

is it sort of like the same kind of people year after year or is there any difference you can detect? I think that both of the trends that you've touched on, both of the previous speakers touched on are anecdotally from my own experience are true. I think that people of my age group, the baby boomers, there's no question that the use of all the controlled substances is way down. I would guess just from the people I see in my office, from the people that I associate with, that type of thing. I also believe that there is an increase in the use of marijuana in the last few years among college age kids, maybe even a little bit younger, just again anecdotally from what I see. I mean, it's a mixed bag who, the people that come to me, most of my cases are people that hire me privately now, occasionally I get appointed to cases in federal court more than in state court.

I see some bad people, there are some, you know, criminals out there that are involved in the drug business. We have had an infiltration, I think it seems to come from big cities, in our case mainly Chicago, here in Urbana. There is a couple of criminal organizations, you could say, the vice lords and gangster disciples that have been behind, I think, to some extent the increase in sales of crack cocaine around here, which is a business that didn't exist, maybe, well for sure, I don't think 10 years ago and I can't remember when at first came to Central Illinois but definitely less than 10 years ago. So I think there are some, and some of those people would have the classic characteristics of what we think of as criminals, I mean, they use guns, they shoot each other, they beat each other up, they do bad things like that. They are hardly a majority of the people that I see that get involved in the drug trade and I see, you know, then you have all sorts of others on down that I would think of

would not have what we consider to be the normal traits of criminals, people that work for living, people that take care of their kids, people that basically decent citizens but for the fact that they may have used this possession or use of drugs or even some type of drug selling. Yeah, I think Tony leads us to a very important point that we sometimes forget when we're talking about this war on drugs and that is that there are really two big groups of drug users. There is the overwhelming majority of people who are drug users who are not addicts, who are not people living in the gutters and having this desperate life that you see on television and then there's a very small percentage who are these desperate people at the bottom whose lives have been destroyed by drugs and what you have is a small percentage, this tiny number who use a great deal of the drugs that are brought into the country who cause many of the crime problems, who cause many of the social disruptions that we worry

the most about and unfortunately when you talked about the trends that are we're seeing when we saw reductions during the 1980s and early and the very early 90s in overall drug use, those reductions were for the casual users, people who were not your down and out desperate users, we have no evidence whatsoever that any of our efforts in terms of our policies on drugs have put a dent in the size of that population of really the nasty people, the desperate people, the people who do the most harm to our society through their drug use, because by and large they aren't operating under the same sets of rules and logic that we would operate under, if you've got someone laying in a gut or sticking a dirty needle in their arm, the last thing they're worried about is what kind of sentence they might get if they get caught, that's a minor concern in their life. The as a result of this particular survey we talk about, the survey on drug use by teens, Senator Dole, other Republican candidates have been very critical of the Clinton administration

and their attitude towards drugs and have said that they have not sufficiently enough sort of stood up in a very public way and said don't use drugs, it's a bad thing, they haven't sort of put the weight of the presidency behind it and I wonder, maybe I'd ask you and anybody else can answer this, the same question, I guess I wonder what you think about how effective that is, and obviously we want the president and the governor and whoever all else to say, you know, drug use is bad and we're going to do what we can to stop it and we're going to do it with law enforcement and other sorts of things, but how important is it for someone like the president of the United States in a very sort of public upfront way to say, don't use drugs? I don't know how much effect that it has on us at the state level. I know that, you know, not getting political, just in we have federal funds that come

down, our drug units are very, very dependent on these are burned grant funds that were, we had some problems one about a year ago and they were reinstated. They're very dependent on getting federal grant officers. In the state level our governor, you know, comes out strongly against drugs and I don't know whether there's a big effect on the president saying it's good or bad or not, especially on our worst group of people because our worst group of people could have a religious experience or have a religious figure visit them and they're still tomorrow, they're going to be down there, they got $700, $800 a day habit and that's not going to stop regardless of what the president says. What do you, obviously there's a mix in our approach to dealing with drugs. I mean, there are a number of things we do. We try to keep drugs from coming into the country. Once they do, we try to arrest people who sell them and use them.

We do try to do education, particularly with young people. We try to say, tell them, this is bad, don't do it. Once people become, have a drug problem, there is possibility of treatment but, you know, maybe that you've got to pay for that yourself so maybe not everybody can afford it. So we put money into all these various sorts of things and there's a lot of discussion about which is most important, you know, how do we allocate our resources? Maybe I'll ask Tony Novak and anybody else can answer the question too. What do you think about the mix that is how we spend that money? Are we spending more than, you know, not enough on treatment or not enough on law enforcement or what do you think? I just bought a new building for my law office so I think you've got, I'm a personal point of view, I need to see more and more of that law enforcement because I've got a big mortgage to pay for but more seriously, I think you can make a good case. Maybe I've got to keep my mouth shut because of my own personal interest here and having

John arrest as many people as possible but I think you can make a good case that all these efforts are really doing very little and the big trends, even the one that John pointed out of the baby boomers stopping you, to me I think you can make a much better case that that's really a matter of growing up, a matter of personal choice as opposed to people who are young professionals or middle age professionals like me saying that, you know, oh man, I better stop doing this because I'm going to get arrested, I think they're saying I better stop doing this because it's stupid and I, so I think you can make a very good case that, you know, we're building prisons I think in this state at the rate of roughly one a year, I think the prison population has approximately doubled in this country in the last 15 years, we incarcerate more people in this country than I believe any other country in the world, at least any other country that keeps statistics like that.

We spend a huge amount of money on the interdiction aspect and yet I hear the number that we're only getting about 1% of the drugs that come into the country through our interdiction efforts. There's a civil liberties aspect to the war on drugs, excuse me, for making a speech and cut me off at any time, but I think that we have had some erosion of our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by court decisions and by a very clever tactics being used by the police. For example, I believe that John may want to contradict me, I believe that a good trained police officer knows how to do it, could stop any person he wants, driving in a motor vehicle, and could search their car without any probable cause whatsoever, just basically because he feels that's a good idea and I'd be happy to support that from cases that I deal with. That wasn't the case 5 or 10 years ago,

but I think as a result of changes in the law, somewhat changes in police tactics, there have been changes mostly don't affect the average citizen, but in terms of the erosion of civil liberties, but I think it's something that we should, we need to keep a watch on to make sure that it doesn't affect the way we live our lives. Let me just want to real quick here, I need to tell people who are listening, that in just a couple of minutes, we will begin taking your calls. If you have questions for the panel, we'd be very happy to hear from you. The number is 3-3-3-3-4-9-5. If you live outside the 2-1-7 code area, you may call collect. You can start right now and as soon as we get some people lined up, we'll go ahead and take the calls. I mean, you feel like you want to make a response to what Councilor said? No, I mean, the interesting thing about prisons, and I've heard that before, and not being an expert on prisons, but if you look inside of them and I've been inside of too many

of them, the people that are inside those prisons for the most part are not drug people, not drug offenders. Unless, unless the repeaters, and they've been arrested and convicted multiple times, or they're violent, and everybody else in there is in for violent crimes. It's not really, I know I hate to say this openly, or everybody can hear it. It's not easy to get into prison. You have to work at it, and you have to be a certain kind of a special person. It's a club, and you have to be very violent. You have to do a lot of dumb things. You have to be a repeater, and I said, I have never personally ever, and I talk to a couple of people today, and Cancakee talked to a person that is running a Cancakee unit that I used to be the director of the Megh Unit, and he's been in the business longer than I was, the district commander, Cancakee ran a drug task force in McComb. It's a college sort of background. Let me run this by. I'm going to make this statement. I'm going to

be on a whole show tonight. I'm going to make, I want to make sure that you guys are very experienced. I have never ever put a person in jail ever seen it for just possession. There are no other factors, just possession. Poor guys driving down the street, a smart cop stops him, and he's got a couple of bags, and he sees it down. He's just personally used stuff, and they just lay left. Is they neither have they? When I talk in sale here now, this guy was in selling. He just handed it right here, got caught with, got caught in a search warrant. He's another person, never did, never have. Have they gotten convicted? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. Maybe a suspended sentence or a probation. This prison isn't full of the poor person, the casual everyday user, the large block of people, just uses it. That's all they do. They don't stick up liquor stores to get it. They work and they're real folks. They don't go to jail. That's not who's in there. I've been in stateville prison more times than I care to say. I've never seen a casual drug possessor

in there. I would disagree to some extent with what you're saying. I think it's more true of federal prisons than state prisons, but we now have a special and federal court of mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines that have taken the discretion away from the judges. Not so much for possessors. You're right. I think I have a hard time disagreeing with what you'd say, and I'm trying to think hard to think of any people for straight possession going to prison on a first offense. I don't think so. It was a very large quantity maybe, but now we're talking a possession. It could be a fewer. That's right. Yeah. We have lots of possession cases that are charged as intended to deliver or conspiracy to distribute whatever, and where the rash isn't any proof of an actual sale. But there are plenty of first offenders where there was no violence involved who are charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs who go to prison on their first offense. Unless I'm the most unlucky defense lawyer in the state, I have clients like that. The cases that come to mind more tend to be prison cases, and people that have

been charged with large quantities, although in a conspiracy case, you may have a case where there's only several grams of heroin or cocaine found where you end up charging the person with conspiracy to distribute kilograms based on various statements and co-conspirators and so forth. Oh, I can think of a girlfriend that never been convicted of anything in life. The meekest mildest person you could imagine who happened to be living with a boyfriend who was a pretty active marijuana dealer and who would make trips to Arizona with a couple of empty suitcases and bring them back filled with marijuana. And this behavior was observed through clever guys that probably were working for you. And they watched them and eventually caught them with two suitcases full of marijuana and found evidence that she had wired $5,000 to him in Arizona at one point. She claimed ignorance.

The judge gave the jury an ostrich instruction saying, hey, you can't bury your head in the sand and ignore what's going on around you. And she was sent to prison as a first offender. So for an example. That's a case. It's an individual case. That's not a simple possession. No, no, not possession. I agree with you on that. But as far as first offenders non-violent who were involved in some type of conspiracy and unfortunately when we charge conspiracy, it takes into its arms, not just the ringleader, not just the kingpin, but all sorts of bit players. And often the bit players are the ones that get caught red-handed with the stuff. I mean, the bag man that's carrying the stuff, you know, the poor, you know, a mu-myrgan worker from Texas that gets stopped, you know, because he's got Texas plates and he looks Latin American. He may disagree with that, but he gets stopped for

whatever, not using his turn signal or something because the police officer really wants to see what's inside his car and finds that he's got a spare tear full of marijuana. Well, let me jump in and because I want to raise some different issues in it. And we also I want to do some callers too. Do free to give me off anything. It's a show we can give people a chance to, you know, we don't expect 30 second answers on the show. I wanted to maybe talk to Ralph and why I said it for a minute. And then we have some, we're getting some calls lined up and we will get right to you. But I just, it seems that while we're going to continue to work on interdiction, we're going to continue to arrest people who are selling drugs, obviously. The best way to reduce drug use is to deal on, work on the demand side. That is somehow to persuade people not to use that. You've done some study of drug and alcohol education programs. What do you think works best? I mean, how do you design a program that will do that? The reality is the results of most of those programs are pretty dismal

that we really haven't found programs that can take people who are going to be drifting into drug use and turn them around and stop them before they get heavily involved. I think we are becoming more appreciative of the role of people such as parents. There was a time when it was believed that if you simply gave teachers the materials and they told the students about it that the students would no longer be interested in experimenting with drugs. And that was really naive, although it was certainly an efficient way to distribute information. But I think we're more and more appreciating that you need to get parents and the community involved in these kinds of things. One of the more distressing things I see out of Washington, and by the way, I find it interesting that drugs are a political issue because I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an issue in which Democrats and Republicans are more alike. I mean, they really have to strain to find areas where they disagree, but I find it disturbing that both sides, both Democrats and Republicans, even

even Bob Dole, who is supposed to be fairly conservative, seems to be taking the position that the federal government can solve this problem if you just allow us to do more with it will fix it for you. And I don't think it's a federal problem. Obviously, it's a federal issue when you're talking about interdiction at the borders. But when you're talking about prevention and trying to stop the spread of drug use, that is a local problem, it is more importantly a family and neighborhood kind of problem rather than a federal problem. Federal government can provide some assistance, but they can't really fix it. Okay. Well, let's take some color. So we'll start on with line number one. And as person is in Champaign. Hello. Call there. Line one, Champaign. Must have been collect. You don't really take collect calls to him. Oh, yeah, we do. It's a better fact to do. Okay. Well, why don't we go on? Well, let's try. Go to three. Go to, uh, pleasant planes. Line three. Another collect.

I couldn't make it up a crime of selling or pushing drugs or being involved with it. Um, what, what is the penalty? And, uh, if I expect to get what 10 years for it, if I did this and what would I lose my, uh, all my rights, all my rights, I, that's what they used to do. You used to lose all your rights. You couldn't be, uh, suing anybody. And now they got the courts tied up soon the state of Illinois for this, that and the other, they can't even get on the docket for six or seven months because of the courts being tied up with the convicted, uh, felons, suing the state and the federal government. Now, what, what's going on with these? I thought they lost all the rights when he went to prison. Is, is, is the, is the question clear? You know, I don't, I, obviously prisoners retain the right to sue whether there used to be a time when they didn't have the right

to sue. I don't know. But what, if you're thinking that it's a good place to be in prison or that the prisons are soft on, on the people that are in there, man, I don't, I, I just have a hard time with that idea. Uh, I think that they strike me, especially the state prisons as some of the scariest places you could possibly wind up. And I think, uh, anybody that, you know, you know, has any, in all sense of pride or self worth would do everything possible to avoid getting in one of those places. I, I've been in a few of them. Man, there's scary places to be in horrible places to be. Uh, you know, you're likely to be victimized by the other inmates. Uh, so I don't, I don't know. If, if that's, if that's the point of the caller, then I guess that's my attitude. Now, uh, I was wondering about the, the rights of a prisoner. Does he have rights? I thought they lost the right, but they were convicted. Uh, prisoners do, do lose some basic rights while they are in prison. They lose the right to vote while they're in prison. They cannot

get married without permission of prison authorities, for example. But most of the lawsuits that you're talking about are not lawsuits about, uh, their right to do things that they, they would do on the outside. They're lawsuits about conditions in the institution. And, and that actually is a fairly recent development. But you, but, you know, to be honest, when you start looking at the way these lawsuits go, there was a time when the, the prison conditions were really intolerable and unacceptable. And they got so bad that the courts finally came in and said, we're going to allow inmates to sue to deal with some of these things. Bend things started getting, uh, to the point where suits were flying over every little issue. And we hear a lot about that in the press even now. Uh, two things worth noting about that. And then I'll, I'll close out. But the first point is, most of those suits, just as, as there are many civil suits that, that you and I may bring in, in a public forum on the outside, most of those suits are over minor things that are very quickly thrown out. They really don't burn up that much court time and, and they don't go very far.

But on top of that, in recent years, the last two or three years in particular, there have been a series of court decisions that have essentially allowed courts to say that if you're going to continue suing over and over for little things that are inconsequential, that burn up the efforts, the energy of the system, uh, we're going to put an order on you to stop you. You can't sue again. And that sort of action has really cut back dramatically on those kinds of lawsuits by inmates. Okay. Let's go on. We'll talk with another call. This is someone in Champaign and it's line number two. Hello. Hello. Uh, you use the word interdiction a few times. But to me, it seems like you could keep busting the little guys at the bottom of the pond. But if nobody is doing anything to really stop the traffic, except use the word interdiction, the problem will never be solved. Well, what is, is your thought that we ought to be putting more effort into those people who are bringing large

amounts of drugs into the United States? I mean, that we ought to be more serious about that or. Yes, I think we should be more serious about it. But I don't think it's going to happen because, uh, it's fairly obvious that there have to be some level of government interaction with it for it to continue to happen that way. Clinton came up and said the best way to track it is to, uh, track the money. And he got a whole lot of flack from, uh, the Congress at that time. So somebody wants to cover up something. I think that it is true that in the past, um, particularly if you go back to the turn of the century and the kind of drug problem that we had then, which was really the first big American drug epidemic, but one of the reasons that that finally ended, say by about the 20s, in addition to the fact that there were laws that, that didn't exist at the turn of the century was that there was good cooperation between the governments of the United States and the governments of some other countries where the drugs were coming from, uh, and that they all decided

that it was important to try to work on that issue from, from that point of view. Do you think that that's, it's something that we don't have now or as the problem becomes so big that dealing with it, it's just, it's like, you know, sticking your finger in the, in the dyke, it's just a, there's no, there's no way to stop drugs coming in. Well, the real problem with, with putting all of our eggs in this basket of introduction and saying that's the solution is that it ignores an important reality of our contemporary drug problem and that is that if you were to, to today, cut off all of the cocaine coming up from South America, all of the heroin coming from now, Colombia and Asia, you would still have an enormous drug problem based on methamphetamine which are produced in this country. Perhaps as much as 50% of the marijuana in this country is grown here. LSD does not come in from other countries. It is, it is developed here. We have, in many ways, a problem

that is becoming a homegrown problem. Further, interdiction has some peculiar side effects that we don't often think about. The, the coca cultivators and manufacturers in South America, for example, typically sell their product to a middle person who actually does the shipping. Well, if we catch that drug at the border, say we catch it in Florida just as it comes in, that coca producer actually has received a bonus out of this because now the person who is doing the shipping has to have another shipment to replace that one. But the grower actually has an incentive now to produce another crop to take the place of the one that was seized. So we actually increase the demand on growers to produce even more. And the drug war is filled with a host of these sort of ironic situations and unintended consequences that, no matter how well thinking and how well reasoning you might be, you probably wouldn't have guessed that that sort of thing would happen. We can't always know, but it's, it's been a very elusive and slippery war in that regard. And, and I'm

also bothered by the way, by our use of the word war, which we continuously use the press Clinton and dole both use that phrase quite often. War implies some kind of a concentrated effort where you go in and you have the battle and then there is a victory at some point. This is not a desert storm where we'll go in and be done. This is closer to a Vietnam where we'll probably never be happy with the outcome. And I think an important point to remember is that this drug problem that we have is perhaps part of our American psyche and our American character. We are a country that is known for its excesses and just about everything. We have, you know, we've talked before. We have more people in prison per capita than any country in the world now. We have high alcohol rates. We have a rate of violence. If you compare us to some of the Netherlands and some of those Dutch countries, our violence rate is about eight times their level of violence. We are a country of excesses and a lot of things, including alcohol use. And it's not surprising then if we go to excess

in our response to our problems. Let's go on. Let's talk with another call. This is someone also in Champaign is line number one. Hello. Hello. My question would be with the welfare system going through changes as we know the SSI for substance abuse and alcohol will be cut off as of January of 97. What impact do you have this foresee for the public? I think it's a really serious question about people who don't have, what we do for people who don't have the resources to pay for treatment themselves, who would be relying on somebody on the government essentially to be able to pay the bill. People who have money, they can go out and they can get treatment. What about the regular citizens? What's going to have what impacts are going to be on them or not using substance abuse? Do you foresee more crime?

What do you think? Do you think if there are less resources available for treatment that we're just going to see more crime and higher level of violence? I don't think that necessarily follows and I'm not, I don't know enough about that particular you know that those funds are going to be cut off what's going to happen. I do know that there are an awful lot of sources for help in every conceivable form that I could think of in almost every county. If somebody has a problem of almost any nature, there are places, some formal, some informal, some are help groups, some are refer you to certain county abuse programs. They may not all be private where you're paying for it, I year on insurance. But I think if somebody has a drug problem, but they don't have the money to pay for it, there are places to get that assistance even if there isn't a welfare check. I think that's right. I suppose I deal with people that get into the system, get accused

of drug crimes, almost nobody that I come in contact with is going to a private treatment facility to get drug treatment. Most of the people that, and I'm a private lawyer so they have to hire me, but even those, most of the people that come to me who are, who have a drug addiction problem or in the system because of that, usually they're pretty poor, even if they hire me, usually they don't have the means. There may be some kids, you know, well-off parents or something like that. There are some exceptions. People that have health insurance can go to car, pavilion, or something like that. But most of them get treatment through facilities that, where most of the people that are going have no money and don't pay, government pays, and places like Gateway, places like treatment alternative to street crime, task. Those would be the institutions in this town, or near this town where people go and almost nobody pays their way. They get sent there and it's paid for them now. Whether they can

cure people, that's another question. I think these problems are fairly intractable and there are small success rates I gather. I think Professor would be better able to talk about that, but hardly in Bay pays for it, so I don't imagine that the question of the change in welfare loss is going to affect that. But the real issue is whether those individuals will be able to get those publicly funded kinds of treatment programs. If they don't, then what? I don't think we know what that's going to do to the crime rate. We just don't know. Actually, what worries me much more than crime is whether or not this will mean, and again, this is all unknown. We don't know what's going to happen, but does this mean that we are going to be less likely to determine if these individuals have other kinds of medical problems that are a threat to the rest of the community. Hepatitis, HIV, for example. One of the good things about getting people into treatment is you can also discover other things because your addicts are the true addicts, the people at the

bottom or people whose number one priority is not health care, and oftentimes it takes getting into treatment for someone else to notice what else is wrong with them, and some of those other things that are wrong with them are a threat to other people in our society. It's not just are we being soft-hearted and kind to that addict. If you have Hepatitis, if you have tuberculosis, if you have those kinds of things spreading, it's a concern to everyone. It is not just that addicts problem, it's everyone's problem. Well, I hope that in part responds to the caller. We do have some other folks waiting. Let's go to Bloomington. It's line number four. Hello. Hello. Yes. I just like to make a statement or comment in regard to the state police colonel there. I moved about two buildings in an area, and then I found out they were drug infested, a lot of transfers, and going on so that I couldn't even park within a block of the

place. The state police made three raids there or three years ago, and that area is as clean as a hound's tooth. Now, and we need that. Over the years, I've seen chiefs who have been lax, and we couldn't rent in those areas. The traffic was too bad. People were afraid to move into the apartments. Still, we had to pay taxes on those places. I've seen chiefs who have worked on this, and I've seen chiefs who haven't, but we landlords need law enforcement if we're going to keep our apartments in operation. Thank you. Okay. I paid this gentleman a call. Your check is an email, sir. There is all different reasons for law enforcement. It's not always just getting the big multi kilo cocaine dealer in the city of Chicago. Bloomington is, Bloomington area is one of

the places where we have a very active drug unit that is multi has the McLean County and the Bloomington police and local officers and the state is in there, and their job is just to respond to these sorts of things. Doesn't fit into anybody's major drug cartel, but it's the every day, and see every day thing that affects people right at home. Would you say, maybe this is not possible to answer this question. How many jurisdictions or just don't really have the resources that they need? And if they had another two, three, four officers, whatever, you could see a big, there would be a big difference in, you know, and they're being able to go after people in their area who might be so. Some of the smaller communities really don't have that big of a problem. I work most of my career in the Chicago area. I've been down here since 1993. The communities that

do put the resources together in task force units with the state, and if there is a smaller community that does have a problem, they'll find a way to get in that, you know, they'll put an officer in that unit, and now they have the resources of all the communities in that unit. I haven't seen too many the task forces covered just about in the Meg units, metropolitan enforcement groups cover most of the areas of the state, and even if communities aren't in it. If the, say if this gentleman was in a very small community in a rural part of the state, they'd go there and do the same thing for him. And that's just everyday work, and it's not always drug related. Sometimes they might have a gang problem in the area that has, you know, it's drugs peripherally, but it's just a problem, and it's something that has to be done. We'll go to another call. This is line six, and the area in Urbana. Hello. Hi, this is a question maybe primarily from Mr. Novak. The argument's been made in the past that there's a lot of racial bias in the writing and the prosecution of drug laws.

I guess I'll be concise and just ask what he thinks of that. He finds any merit to the argument. Not a whole lot, but I think you could, the federal laws regarding cocaine base or what's commonly called crack cocaine, I think you could make a pretty good case for the caller's point, just to try to make it simple. And federal law, the amount of punishment is based on the amount of drug that you're caught with. But they classify different drugs differently, and they've made a decision that with crack cocaine, you take the amount that you catch the person with and you multiply times 100 in calculating the penalty. So one gram of crack cocaine gets the same punishment as 100 grams of regular cocaine, or 10 grams of crack, it's the same punishment as one kilogram of regular cocaine. And the end result can be pretty draconian actually. And crack cocaine is

not a stereotype, but it's a drug of choice to some extent among the African American community as opposed to powder cocaine maybe being the drug of choice for some middle class. I don't know white real estate salesmen or something like that. So you could, so that I think you could make a case, and I think that's one of the arguments that have been made by the members of the African American community, that that's a racially biased law. But I just think it's a fact that there's a high level of drug usage among poor African American subculture. I think you might also find somewhat of a high drug usage level among poor white people, unemployed white people as well, say. But and I'm not sure, and we're off with probably have a better idea of how the numbers break down. But I think at least for myself, anecdotally, what I see is hard to dispute that there

is a fairly high level of drug usage among young African Americans, poor young African Americans. Well, it's really a messy issue that we could spend two shows on just on this issue. There's so many angles to it. A couple of quick notes though. One of the the dilemmas is there clearly is a an overrepresentation of minorities in arrests for drug crimes, in particular for cocaine kinds of cases. And one might argue that that is racist. The problem with that argument is that when you go into these communities where these arrests are being made, it is the minority members of those communities who have called the police and want something done and want the arrests made. These are the individuals who are not using drugs who have to live with and tolerate drug trafficking and drug problems in their community. And it's a real dilemma. One of the things that you don't hear talked about very much is the fact that when we do surveys

of high school kids, and we were talking earlier about high school kids and these trends, one of the things you find in these surveys is that the percent of kids who use drugs is pretty much similar in rural and urban areas. And yet the number of arrests, the rate of arrests for drugs is much much higher in urban areas. There is something going on here that we don't have a good handle on. I think one could argue that there's some element of racism here in these crack cocaine laws. I don't see how you can deny that if when you look at the evidence on that. But in terms of everyday enforcement and routine activities, police tend to go where the trafficking is most visible. And one where area where I differ with you, I would argue maybe that minority, young minority males aren't really using drugs more, but they're using them in visible places. They may not have private residences where they can go to and be completely alone and do their drugs, and they end up doing their activities on public street corners and public areas where

the risk of apprehension is now substantially higher. That's valid. We're growing short on time. We do have some other calls. We'll try to get a few more folks in the time we have left. Champagne is next. Line three. Call their line three. Oh, I'm sorry. Line one. Champagne. From the okay. Hello. Yeah. Hello. Hi. I'm calling from the okay. And I joined the conversation late that you're having that I just feel that if people would just stop and try to see the vicious circle that we're all going through and have been going through the past 20, 25 years in this, that people have a free will. And whether they're the 13 when they start or 12 and 9 or whatever, there's a lot of dynamics that go into this, but everybody has a free will and they have a choice whether to do the drugs or not. And when we start holding people accountable,

in response to their own actions, I think that's the basis that we need to go from. What do you think we're not doing that now? It is against the law and if people get caught, well, they're rested and they're tried and sometimes they're put in jail. Well, yeah, they are. I guess what I'm saying is that definitely there's laws on the books and all that. I feel that as society we're certainly coddling people in the system, we're actually making them dependent on the system somewhat. They use drugs and they confess that to the courts and all that. So they become wards of the state, get on welfare, it's dated in the cases that they're drug users, they're dependent on drugs and that's brought up in the courts and there are a lot more welfare. It's just a cycle that everybody participates in. I don't believe in any federal funding,

more safe funding for any property. It's not constitutionally mandated. I guess I'd say that I'm a libertarian this way. Well, I appreciate the comment. It brings a question to my mind. We were talking a little earlier or I talked about the fact that in past times when drug use in this country was very high and then we saw eventually it tail off. Probably one of the reasons that it did is that over time public opinion came to be very anti-drug and then what happens is that people sort of forget about the drug problem for a while and then they forget how bad it can be and then you start to see use increase again and that's probably what happened in the 60s. Drugs hadn't really been a big problem for a long time and so I wondered whether you think, well, maybe I'll turn over here, whether you think that

part of the problem is that as a society, we're not strong enough in the way we talk about drugs and that we ought to be, we have to all get together and say in a much more upfront way. We don't think anybody should be using drugs. It's a bad thing. Drugs are bad. We're not going to joke about it. We're not going to glorify people who use drugs. We're going to make sure our kids get the message and everybody gets the message so it's bad. Well, if let me just give you a quick example on that, let's talk about smoking. I don't smoke and I can tell you cigarette smoke really bothers me and we've gone through a whole issue and I want to all the cigarette smokers call in now. But take a look where we are now. I remember when you walked into a building where you worked in a large building and you couldn't even breathe and now today it's almost a crime that cigarette smokers end up huddled in a little corner outdoors in the winter, smoking and running

back in the building because everybody in the building doesn't smoke anymore and I work in a lot of state buildings. But that's just what you're talking about. We all got together and said we don't want to smell that anymore secondhand smoke. We could do the same thing with drugs. We don't want to do this anymore and we don't think it's nice. We don't think it's cool and we don't want to be around people who do it. All of us, young people, old people, everybody. That's what happened with cigarettes. I was in a Denver airport. I was embarrassed. These people were sitting in this little glass case. I felt sorry for them. They're all just smoking like it's an opium then and all the other people are walking by, you know, they don't do it. They don't want to do it anymore. It's the same point. Are there lessons? I mean, can we learn lessons from the way we approached smoking and tobacco use and apply that to illegal drugs? Well, certainly we've seen a dramatic reduction in tobacco use without anybody going to prison for possessing tobacco or conspiring to sell it except perhaps some tobacco executives who are now feeling some heat.

But that certainly is. And I think it's a very valid and important point. We tend to rely on the law to deal with our problems. But by and large, the law can't solve problems. If you don't have the society behind these sentiments, the law will be completely ineffective. It can't create a feeling of revulsion and disgust. And I would point out also that in the case of drugs, we have a dilemma in that while we talk about how bad drugs are, we are a drug-consuming society. I don't find it at all shocking, but some people seem to be surprised that we now have teenagers who are using riddle and recreationally. Well, what's so shocking about that when they're given this drug, which is chemically very similar to cocaine, they're given this drug when they're young children, and now we're suddenly shocked that they would want to take it recreationally. That's part of our culture again, this whole view about drugs that you can't separate from

illegal drugs. Well, at that point, we, I'm sorry to say, are going to have to stop. Much more, we could talk about, we didn't touch on legalization, but we might have to save that for another day. We do, however, want to thank all of our guests. Ralph Wysight, he's professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University, Lieutenant Colonel John Maratus from the Illinois State Police, and also with us turning Tony Novak, he's an attorney in private practice in Urbana. Now, next week, at this time, we will have the first of two special programs looking at congressional races in central Illinois. You'll see conversations with candidates for Congress in the 18th district that's Ray Lehood and Mike Curran, and also in the 20th, Jay Hoffman and John Shimkis. Then in two weeks, that's October 17th, this show, talking point will return, and we'll have a show on the economic issues in this year's elections. So we hope that you will tune in for all of those programs, and for now, we say thanks for watching.

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Coming up on Club Connect, Minatine was crusading to clean up the environment. We'll introduce you to Charlie Morgan, a team who's wrestling with success, and Club Connect's own air chip, Ella, comes face-to-face with his biggest fan. The Air Channel, welcome to this week's exciting edition of Club Connect. We have a fantastic show lined up for this week. Here we have something very special. A while back, we got a letter

from a young lady named Emily D'Angelo, who said it would be...