As crazy as it sounds, some good might eventually come out of the widespread abuse of heroin and other opioids currently plaguing Vermont and New Hampshire.
With the drug problem having reached our backyard, we might actually stop treating substance abusers and street-level dealers as criminals. Saddling people with criminal records for nonviolent drug offenses could become a thing of the past.
“Parents don’t want their kids getting locked up. They want treatment,” said Jeremy Haile, an attorney with The Sentencing Project, a Washington nonprofit organization at the forefront of criminal justice reform.
On Friday, Haile spoke at a Vermont Law School symposium called “Criminal Culpability: Who Deserves Punishment?” The event was organized by VLS students who work on Vermont Law Review, the school’s legal journal.
The featured speakers, mostly law professors from around the country, focused on the national picture. But much of what they talked about easily could be applied to Vermont and New Hampshire, where drug-related deaths now surpass the number of traffic deaths each year.
The symposium provided a good history lesson that helps explain how the U.S. now has a half-million people locked up for drug offenses.
In the 1980s, Congress enacted tough drug laws, including mandatory sentences, that targeted crack cocaine users and dealers. (University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias’ death from a crack overdose in 1986, two days after he was picked No. 2 in the NBA draft by the Boston Celtics, played a big part.)
Mark Osler, who teaches at University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, grew up in Detroit and was a federal prosecutor there from 1995 to 2000.
“The problem we’re discussing, I played a role in causing,” he told the VLS audience of 150 or so.
Osler counts himself among the prosecutors who believed that America could incarcerate its way out of its drug problem. “We were wrong, of course,” he said. “We have chosen moralism over problem solving.”
Prosecutors are fond of telling judges and jurors that drug dealers must be locked up because they are “poison in our community,” Osler said. “We could say the same about fast-food joints and casinos.”
Ekow Yankah, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York, pointed out that crack has long been viewed as “the black drug” that infects only minority communities.
Except for making a lot arrests and putting people behind bars for long stretches, “we did nothing about it,” he said.
But the opioid crisis is different. “It’s hit white and rural America,” Yankah said. “Now, we have police chiefs saying, ‘Something has changed. We have to see drug addicts as people.’ ”
Having President Obama on board hasn’t hurt. Following through on a 2014 Justice Department initiative to reduce punishments for low-level drug offenders who had been imprisoned for years, Obama has commuted the sentences of 562 people. That’s more than the last nine presidents combined.
“There’s always a chance that tough-on-crime days come back,” warned Haile, the attorney with The Sentencing Project.
And it might not even take the election of you-know-who. (Sorry, I promised my wife that I’d never bring up his name in public.)
“The system is driven by prosecutors who are happy to keep locking people up,” Yankah said.
And what does Bobby Sand, who spent 15 years as Windsor County state’s attorney and now teaches at VLS, say to that?
“Prosecutors measure their success by the duration of the sentence that is imposed — how many pounds of flesh they can extract,” said Sand, the moderator for Friday morning’s discussion, when we talked during a break.
Some people argue that both states already have made substantial progress in recent years. They point to reduced prison populations and the advent of drug courts designed to give substance abusers second chances.
But in the Upper Valley, you only have to look at the mug shots and news releases on the websites of the Hartford and Lebanon police departments to see that the war on drugs continues — as futile as it might be.
I don’t blame prosecutors and police. Making arrests and locking people up are what legislators and other policymakers have ordered them to do.
Too many law-and-order types still don’t seem to grasp, as Haile put it, that “lower-level dealers are easily replaced.” If a community has four dealers, and two of them get arrested, it doesn’t mean you’ve cut your drug problem in half. (What it often means is that when a drug dealer gets out of prison, he goes back to his old ways because he has a hard time finding a decent job with a criminal record.)
“Narcotics is a market driven by demand,” said Osler, the University of St. Thomas professor. “We’re the world’s leading consumer of recreational drugs.
“Americans like drugs.”
That’s a serious public health problem, which has very little to do with criminal justice.