Peter
Christ will be the keynote speaker at the annual convention of the Rochester
Libertarian Party on Saturday, February 26, at the Park Place Hotel (formerly
the Radisson), 175 Jefferson Road. The
convention begins at 11 a.m.; the program
starts at 12:30. A business
session begins at 2. Admission is $30, including lunch. Information:
www.rochesterlp.org; events.
Peter
Christ: We’re losing the war on drugs because we’ve chosen a policy that
doesn’t work.
Gary Walts, The Post-Standard, Syracuse
Peter
Christ defies easy labeling.
The retired police captain’s
affability could disarm even a hardened crank. An autodidact, he commands a better
knowledge of history, social policy, and law than many college graduates, even
though his terminal degree is a high school diploma. But what distinguishes
Christ (whose surname rhymes with “twist,” not “iced”) is the veiled intensity
with which he pulls these qualities into the single-minded pursuit of a goal.
He’s a man on a mission. The mission: to legalize drugs.
Christ is no burned-out stoner. He’s
more like a policy wonk bereft of a think tank. What’s driving him isn’t an
interest in the drugs themselves. He’s driven by the results of decades of the
drug war — which he relentlessly labels “prohibition.”
He spent 20 years on the police
force in the Town of Tonawanda — none of
it as an undercover cop or in narcotics. It was not, in fact, his work as a cop
that led him to his anti-prohibition stance.
“I went into police work knowing
that this drug war was stupid,” he says. “I sort of had a hope when I went into
police work that maybe I would see something that would change my mind about
prohibition. All I did was become even more hardened in my position that this
is killing us. I did not have some epiphany when I retired that got me to the
position that I’m in now. I felt this way for the whole time I was on the job.”
Drawing connections to the alcohol
prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, the women’s rights movement, and a handful
of other historical benchmarks, Christ argues that time will eventually side
with the legalization movement. In 2002, along with a few other active and
retired police officers, he helped give that movement a boost by founding the
group Law Enforcement against Prohibition. Mike Smithson, coordinator of LEAP’s
speaker’s bureau, says it’s not unusual for half a dozen of his speakers to be
booked for a speaking engagement somewhere in the US. That’s
evidence, he says, that the public is ready to hear fresh ideas about drug
policy.
We interviewed Christ, who’ll be
speaking in Rochester Saturday,
February 26, about LEAP’s take on the war on drugs. What follows is an edited
transcript of that conversation.
Peter Christ: This past
summer I was back at my old department for a retirement picnic, and I stopped
up at my old police department. There were two patrolmen standing there, and they
had both worked for me, and they know how I feel about this issue.
One of them says to me, “Are you
still pounding that drug-legalization drum of yours?” And I said, ‘Yeah, as
loud and often as I can.’ And he says, “Well, you’ll never get me to agree. I
think you’re nuts.”
And I said: “Well, I understand
that, but let’s see if we agree about anything. I believe that these drugs that
we’re talking about — crack cocaine, heroine, LSD, marijuana, methamphetamine
— all these drugs have so much potential to do harm to individuals and to
society that they must be regulated and controlled. Do you agree with that?”
He says: “Well, I don’t see how I can’t agree with that. Of course, I
agree.” And I said: “OK, here’s the sad reality. When you institute a prohibition,
you give up all your ability to regulate and control. If you want to regulate
and control anything, it has to first be made legal. Then you get the ability
to bring your regulations and your controls into effect.”
That’s what we are about at LEAP:
ending the prohibition. Prohibition is a failed policy. We should have learned
that with alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933, but we thought that just
alcohol prohibition was wrong. We didn’t realize that it was the whole policy
of prohibition.
Right now we are supporting and
continuing a policy in this country that breeds violence and crime in our
society — not the drugs, but the policy.
City: Did you have some epiphany about this before you got into
police work?
Christ: Both my parents were born in 1904, so when prohibition started they were 16
years old. When it ended they were almost 30, so they saw prohibition. When I
was a kid, the television program “The Untouchables” came on, with Eliot Ness
crashing the truck through the brewery door and all that stuff.
And I had these two people who lived
through prohibition at home that I could talk to and ask, “Why didn’t this
work?” And they always said the same thing: It didn’t work because the people
didn’t support it — which implied that if people had supported it, it would
have worked.
As I got to be a little bit older, I
started reading a little bit more. We had actually passed a constitutional
amendment to ban alcohol, and I realized how much support it takes to pass a
constitutional amendment. That’s not an easy thing to do. There was a lot of
support for it. I just came to the conclusion after reading as much as I could
that prohibition has never worked anywhere it’s been tried.
All of our laws are prohibitions. We
prohibit murder. We prohibit robbery. Right? When you park your car, you look
for a parking-prohibited sign. So all of our laws are prohibitions. But we also
have to understand that there’s two classes of crime that we deal with in
society. The Latin terms for them are malum
per se and malum prohibitum crimes.
The malum per se are crimes just because they’re crimes. I mean,
nobody’s gotta explain to you that if somebody steals somebody’s wallet, that’s
a crime. If somebody assaults somebody, nobody’s gotta explain to you why that’s
a crime.
The malum prohibitum crimes are crimes that are determined to be crimes
by some people, but are really acts between consenting adults that are
perfectly happy to be doing what they’re doing. But other people don’t think
they should be doing that, so they make it against the law.
Some people contend that we have
less murders because we have a law against it. I never arrested anybody that
thought they were going to be arrested for what they did. That it was against
the law didn’t determine whether they were going to do it or not. But it
doesn’t increase the murders we have.
Nobody’s killing people saying: “Oh, it’s against the law. Well, I’ll show
them; I’m going to kill somebody.” That isn’t the reason people commit murder.
On the other hand, when you get into
the malum prohibitum crimes, the
consensual-behavior crimes, you have actually more crime because you prohibit
the behavior. A couple of examples: One, obviously is alcohol prohibition. We
didn’t end alcohol prohibition in 1933 because some new scientific study came
out and said that alcohol was really okay. We knew in ’33 that alcohol was just
as dangerous as we knew it was in 1920 when we banned it. But what we realized
in 13 short years is that all this violence we now had on our streets, these
drive-by shootings, these gangsters and everything else, were not being fueled
by alcohol but were being fueled by our prohibition against alcohol.
We ended the alcohol prohibition not
because alcohol was okay but because there was violence connected with it.
A few years ago there used to be a
huge underground economic engine in this country that brought money to the mob
so quick that in some cities they used to weigh the profits rather than
counting it, that’s how fast the money came in. The mob employed kids — 11-,
12-, 13-year-old kids — to help them make this money. And we tried to stamp
it out by arresting everybody, and we couldn’t put a dent in it.
And then one morning we woke up and
it was just gone. They shut the whole operation down all by themselves; they
just gave up. Amazing.
That was the same day, ironically,
that a thing called the lottery started. Before we called it the lottery, what
we used to call it when it was illegal was the “numbers racket.” They had kids
running numbers for the mob. They had people getting assaulted and robbed and
stuff like that — because of this activity. We tried to stamp it out and we
couldn’t, so we decided to legalize it and call it the lottery. We don’t have
kids working for the mob anymore, selling numbers. You don’t have to worry if
you’re going to get paid if you win. It’s a regulated, controlled marketplace.
Are there still people that are
gonna take their whole paycheck on a Friday and blow it on lottery tickets and
not feed their family? Probably. But that’s a much smaller problem than the
problem we had before. And that’s something we can deal with. You know,
education, whatever. Support groups, all kinds of things to help deal with
that. But we have it much more under our control, and that’s what we’re talking
about with drug legalization. We’re talking about moving this from a
prohibition economy to a regulated and controlled marketplace.
City: Specifically why are we losing the war on drugs?
Christ: We’ve chosen a policy off the policy shelf that doesn’t work.
City: Why doesn’t it work, though — in concrete
terms?
Christ: If you get mugged, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do? Report it. You’re
gonna give a description of a mugger to the cops. If they grab the SOB, you’re
gonna identify him. And you’re gonna testify against him in court. You’re going
to help the system get that bad guy off the street.
On the other hand, if you buy a bag
of marijuana, do you rush out and report that crime? No. In fact, if you’re
asked about it you’ll even lie, because you don’t want that person to be
arrested. That creates a problem for law enforcement. We don’t have the
cooperation of the citizenry; they’re cooperating with the other side.
It’s very easy to turn honest people
into criminals. They did it in Canada overnight.
They decided that nicotine was a serious problem. They did a study on it about
10 years ago, and the study reported that two things might reduce smoking. One
is a very active education program, and the other is raising the price on
cigarettes. So they did both.
They got the price on cigarettes
from about $3 a pack up to about $5 dollars a pack, and the number of smokers
in Canada dropped a
little bit. So they said: Some is good, and more is better; too much is just
right. They jacked the price up to $10 dollars a pack.
All of a sudden, there was smuggling
all across the Canadian border, right in this area, all along the St. Lawrence.
There was now violence, turf battles over who was gonna sell where.
And for the first time, they had
children marketing cigarettes to children in their schools. Why did this
happen? It’s human nature. If I smoke cigarettes and they’re $4 a pack, and
you’re a criminal working in the underground and you’re willing to sell me
cigarettes for $3.50, I’m not going to buy ’em from you. I’m not going to
support a criminal; I’m a good, law-abiding citizen.
But on the other hand, if the
cigarettes that I have to buy from the government are $10 dollars a pack and
you’re gonna sell them to me for $7, yeah, I’m a little more likely to buy ’em
from you now. And that’s the problem that we have with this thing. We are
trying to alter people’s behavior and are using the criminal-justice system to
do it when in reality they are not hurting other people or other people’s
property.
I was in law enforcement. We have a
very unique position in our society. I was allowed to do something to the
public that district attorneys are not allowed to do, that judges are not
allowed to do, that the president is not allowed to do. I was allowed to use
force against our own citizens.
I’m granted that power as a law
enforcement officer because I have a very specific job — protecting people
from each other. And sometimes you have to use force to accomplish that task.
On the other hand, it wasn’t our job
to protect people from themselves. That is the function of family, church,
education, and health care, not the criminal-justice system. And we do not
grant family, church, education, and health care the right to use force against
their own people.
The drug war calls on law
enforcement to protect people from themselves, and we aren’t structured to do
that. We not only don’t accomplish the job, but we also end up doing more
damage than needs to be done in the process.
Look at the million people out of
the two million that are in prison for non-violent drug offenses, as one
example. And remember that every one of those people has a mother and a father,
some of them have sisters and brothers, some of them have wives and husbands
and children: families that we’ve destroyed because we don’t like the drugs
that they use. That’s not a sensible approach to problems.
Money is important to me. I don’t
like my money being wasted on this absurdity. Back in the 1990s, we paid a
little family group that lives about halfway around the world hundreds of
millions of dollars so that they would suppress the opium crop in a little
country called Afghanistan. That little
family group was called the Taliban. And we gave them hundreds of millions of
dollars.
And in fact, they did a good job
suppressing that opium crop. They did such a good job that the underworld, the
gangsters, started growing opium in South America, where it had
never been really grown before. And now we’re over there. We kicked the Taliban
out. The opium crop — as I’m sure you’ve read — is back with a vengeance; a
bumper crop this year. Plus the bottom has fallen out of the market for opium
because of all the opium that is pouring in from South America.
So there’s one of the successes of
the drug war. We have opium on the streets of America cheaper and
purer than it’s ever been in our history.
When I was a kid growing up in the
’50s and ’60s, heroin was a big-city problem. You didn’t find heroin in every
little community in America. Today you
can buy heroin in a high school in Kansas.
The people that want to legalize,
regulate, and control are not the ones that got us to where we are today. The
drug warriors got us to where we are today. So if you’re unhappy with what’s
going on vis-à-vis drugs in our society, don’t blame the people that want to
change the policy from one that doesn’t work to one that does. Talk to the
people that want to keep doing the same policy over and over again, knowing
that they’re not going to get different results.
City: What’s your alternative?
Christ: My alternative is a regulated and controlled marketplace of some sort. The
federal government, under the Food and Drug Administration, “schedules” drugs
— that’s what they call the program — with a very heavy hand. Schedule One
drugs are banned. There can be no medical research done on them, nobody can
have them, nobody can produce them. If you’re caught with them, you go to jail.
Schedule Two drugs are drugs like
morphine, OxyContin, cocaine. These can be used by the medical profession, but
they’re very tightly controlled through a prescription-drug program. Schedule
Three drugs are prescription drugs, but less tightly controlled. Schedule Four
drugs are-over-the counter but regulated, like Robitussin; you can maybe buy
two bottles, but you can’t buy a case at a time. And then you have Schedule
Five, which is everything else: aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, everything that comes
under the Food and Drug Act.
The government’s power to ban drugs
or regulate drugs comes from the constitution. The interstate commerce clause
grants to the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce.
That’s where the scheduling program for drugs comes from.
Now it’s my argument and some other
people’s argument — the Supreme Court has not been convinced of this yet —
that prohibition is not regulation. In fact, prohibition is deregulation. If
the government has the right to regulate these things, that’s what they should
do, and they should set up some sort of a regulated structure for them.
If they took all the drugs that are
currently Schedule One and moved them to Schedule Two, did away with the
prohibition, we wouldn’t be having any more arguments about medical marijuana.
Research would be allowed, because marijuana wouldn’t be prohibited anymore.
City:Marijuana is a schedule one drug?
Christ: Yes. It’s banned. That’s why the federal government went out to California and arrested
those growers, even after the state had said it was okay for them to supply it
for sick people. And the Supreme Court upheld that.
It wasn’t until 1954 that the
Supreme Court became convinced that segregation wasn’t a good idea, so just
because the Supreme Court’s against something doesn’t mean they’re right. But they’re
what we’re stuck with.
We at LEAP have no position as an
organization on what that regulation should look like, because we all feel
differently about it. Some of us think it should be prescription drugs. Some of
our members are a little bit more libertarian and think that it should be open
market. Some of us think the government should distribute. We have all
different attitudes at LEAP. What we come together on is that prohibition has
to end. And some form of regulated marketplace has to be developed. And
whatever shape that takes, I’m sure it will change.
When I was growing up in New YorkState, the drinking
age was 18. Then they raised it to 21. Now there’s some discussion about
dropping it down to 18 or 19 again. It’s an ongoing discussion that goes on
within a society.
A few years ago, we as a society
were having the discussion about whether the “morning-after pill” should be
allowed to be sold here. And that was a pretty heated discussion: people on
television calling each other names. We decided that it should be allowed to be
sold here, so we made it a prescription drug.
Today the discussion is about
whether it should stay as a prescription drug or be sold as an over-the-counter
drug. That discussion is much more scientific, much more based on fact and
science and less based on morality and all these other things than the
discussion we had four or five years ago. And that’s a regulation discussion.
City: Personally, what do you think that legalization should look
like?
Christ: Personally? I’m kind of a libertarian about it. If I was king and I could
decide for everybody, I would mandate kindergarten through 12th-grade drug
education in every school in America. And that
would not be the scare stuff, because these drugs would be legal so you really
couldn’t scare people that if you get caught you’ll get arrested. It would be
honest, straightforward “here’s what the drugs do, this is how they work, this
is what’s good, this is what’s bad, here’s what sensible use looks like.”
By the time you graduated from high
school, if you were paying attention, you would have a good background in your
head about drugs. And then I would allow any adult to walk into any pharmacy
and buy whatever they wanted to buy. That’s my regulation. But that is not the
LEAP position; LEAP has no position on this.
There’s all kind of ways you could
set up that distribution thing. But I’ll tell you one thing that we wouldn’t
have, and that is the overdoses and the gangs and the terrorists selling drugs
so that they can finance their terrorist acts. That stuff would all be gone.
City: What stops us as a society from reassessing how well we’re
doing with the drug war and what other steps we could be taking?
Christ: Have you ever had milestones in your life, where you thought one way for a long
period of time and then all of a sudden you changed your mind about it? You
realize the process that takes, right? For a while you hang on to it, and
there’s even a period when you know it’s wrong but you still hang on to it,
because you’ve been thinking that way your whole life.
I think that’s a lot of what’s going
on in this country right now. I mean, how do we apologize to these families
we’ve destroyed by locking them up? How to we face all that stuff? It’s
difficult for people to do.
Some people have a moral vested
interest in this issue. Some people in government have a financial vested
interest, a power vested interest. District attorneys are tough to get through
to on this issue, because they got a real power thing connected with it. When
they were handed mandatory minimum sentences, they really gained more power
than the judge has, because now they can determine the sentence by what they
charge somebody with, rather than the judge determining the sentence after the
person is convicted. It’s a power thing.
But I think it’s just normal human
nature. It’s fear. One of the most common words you hear from people when you
talk about legalization is “surrendering.” Like we’re giving up. That isn’t
what we’re doing. We’re going from a policy that creates crime and violence to
a policy that diminishes crime and violence and gives us a better way to deal
with these problems.
It’s an educational process. Women
did not become intelligent enough to vote in 1920. They were always intelligent
enough to vote; it’s just that it took us 150 years of being a nation before we
decided to acknowledge that they were. Black people didn’t become human beings
in 1865, when we abolished slavery. They were always human beings. It’s just
that we had a bad policy. To change that policy we even got involved in a civil
war. So historically, this is not unusual.
But it takes a long time. This is a
long, arduous process to educate and build the grassroots. Our job at LEAP is
to make this discussion okay. I’ve had a lot of politicians say to me: “Well, I
agree with you, but man, if I said that I’d never get elected.” I always say,
“Well, I apologize for that.” If the grassroots isn’t out there to make this
acceptable to say, it’s because we in drug-policy reform haven’t done our job
good enough yet. That’s our job: to educate the public.
Do you know what is the first
prohibition we have any record of? “Do not eat the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.” Also, I’d like to point out, that was the first
example of zero tolerance. There were no exceptions; you couldn’t take a little
bite from the apple and stay in the garden. Take one bite and you’re out.
How many people had to be watched to
make that prohibition work? Two. And who was the cop for the prohibition? God.
Now if any prohibition was ever going to work, wouldn’t that have been the one?
But it failed.
Prohibition doesn’t work. And that’s
the problem with prohibition — not just that it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t
work and it creates crime and violence in our society that need not be there
except for the fact that we choose this policy to deal with this problem.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2005.
