Even Prosecutors Know The Drug War Is Futile

I’m in a jury trial so this will be a short post. But holy shit, this is amazing. A very honest prosecutor had the courage to challenge the War on Drugs on the TDCAA message board. It’s a short thread at this point. But the point is made, even prosecutors know this is a failure. I’m assuming B Leonard can be so honest because he is not running for office anytime soon.

Prohibition is the Wizard of Oz. We need to all pay attention to this opinion from behind the curtain.

Here is BLeonard from Fort Worth

BLeonard
Member posted 11-05-04
Sometimes it happens this way: I’m scratching out a plea on a case or revocation of one more dope defendant and the fear takes me. We are losing the “war on drugs.” More than a decade ago, my father, a former prosecutor himself, told me that my job was to identify the truly bad actors and quarantine them from their prey. As to the rest? Keep them dogies rollin’. I’m not smart enough to know how to handle the drug problem but I can recognize what doesn’t work and this is it. We cannot fill our prisons with dopers and allow the predators to roam free. In my view we shouldn’t fill the prisons with dopers. And the small voice whispers,”If we did win the war on drugs what would you do all day?”
Posts: 747 | From: Fort Worth, TX, USA | Registered: 07-30-02

Now this is Texas, so of course the deviation from prosecutor group think will have some rebutall. The prohibition apologist’s response are common fallacies- think of the children, some drug dealers are also pedophiles etc, and we should jail addicts who don’t want treatment.

Martha W. Warner
Member posted 08-25-09
Drug dealers are dangerous to kids
I too had hit the wall with sending drug dealers including college kids without records to prison. Last week I tried a 28 year old man who was providing marihauna to young girls, 13 and 15 year old. While manipulating and having sex multiple times every day with the 15 year old this Defendant who was 22 started molesting her 4 year old sister while everyone was asleep.The 4 yr old also watched them put brown stuff in a paper ,roll it up and smoke it. Afterwards she was told not to tell, “Its their secret” He threatened to kill the child’s family if she ever told anyone what he was doing. After being confronted about stealing the Defendant moved out and picked up the cute wild little 13 year old and again had sex every way for about a month and half. He then gets arrested and neither girl saw him again until 4 years later.

Ok. I have a suggestion. If we stopped incarcerating every user and dealer we could focus our criminal justice resources on those who sell drugs to children. We have it backwards right now. We arrest all drug users and providers because some may be child rapists. Why not focus on the predators? If cops weren’t so busy arresting for every dime bag they find, we could better use our limited criminal justice resources.