Legalizing street drugs an experiment worth considering?

Can a single city do anything to change drug policies that are delivering terror to our inner-city streets, diverting police, clogging our courts, breaking up families, and making a once-proud America quite literally the incarceration capital of the world? It's tough because federal and state drug laws, passed by tragically misguided "law-and-order" politicians, are highly intrusive. But Syracuse, N.Y., with a detailed analysis of drug-law impact by outgoing City Auditor Minchin Lewis, followed up by recent City Council hearings, is courageously asking tough questions and searching for alternatives. Lewis' audit, inspired by Syracuse drug reformer Nicolas Eyle, focused on the Syracuse police department. It discovered that 22 percent of the department's 28,800 arrests in a single year were for drug-related incidents, more than arrests for assaults, disturbances and larcenies combined. Close to 2,000 persons were charged with possession or sale of marijuana, a substance many claim is no more if not less dangerous than alcohol. Lewis found that drug arrests were focused in six poor, heavily black inner-city neighborhoods. Police raids in search of evidence were rendering housing units, many government-owned, uninhabitable, and forcing many families to split up because of government rules evicting drug users from public housing.  City Council member Stephanie Miner said she found citizens typically unconcerned about people using drugs in the confines of their homes, but deeply alarmed by the violence visited on their neighborhoods by drug dealing on the street. "The main effect of prohibition is to drive the market underground," Jeffrey Miron, a Boston University economist and drug trade expert, told the Syracuse council hearing in October. [more]

• The War on Drugs: One of America's Greatest Failures [more]