wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Hi
I would ike to say hi to Bill Sherman,I have always admired him and wanted to tell him I often read his work when I'm in NY and i hope he emails me back!! I met him a long time ago and would like to contact him again
Emily David- Fruchter

Nearly all police corruption is the result of prohibition, originally alcohol prohibition, now the prohibition of drugs. Ending that prohibition would not only stop corruption but stop the violence of drug dealers killing each other to control the market, killing police charged with fighting this useless war, killing our children caught in crossfire. Legalized regulation of drugs would also end overdose deaths caused by people using drugs whose strength cannot be ascertained. It would end 50% of new cases of AIDS & Hepatitis because users would not have to share needles. And it would reduce the number of drug users as it has in every country that has leaned toward decriminalization or legalization.

This is a hopeless, endless problem. Drug abuse like alcohol or ANY substance abuse is a medical problem & should be treated as such. De-criminalization (not the same as full legalization) and regulation in the way that prescription drugs are dispensed is the only (even partial) solution. The enormous amount of resources consumed by the unwinnable "war on drugs" are better spent on helping people with their substance abuse issues & reducing the numbers of young people who may go on to develop such issues with education & developmental programs that can enable them to build hopeful, productive drug-free lives.

We hear that opium production in Afghanistan funds terrorism and cocaine production causes instability in Colombia. Even North Korea allegedly uses the sale of illicit drugs to supplement its coffers.

Why would legalizing drugs be crazy?! We are creating crimes where none exist and creating black markets where none would exist otherwise.

One would hope that our history with prohibition in the 1920's would teach us that more problems are caused by criminalizing drugs then we solve. Heroin or cocaine could be legal and I would NEVER try it. Those of us that want to use drugs get them if we want.

Let's face it - the war on drugs is a joke and in the end all we are doing is creating more "clients" for the prison system.

Whatever is banned becomes mysterious and thus alluring. This only perpetuates a culture of fear. We generate the drug trade by keeping drugs illegal. What is nuts is to continue on this authoritarian course that infantilizes the population. What are we afraid that we all going to become junkies?

How does low starting pay for NYC cops play into this?

How many police shootings can be attributed to cops killing each other. Could it be possible that police would kill their own if say one of them wanted to go to internal affairs, and then set up someone else to take a fall?

And is it possible to have dealers etc, summarily executed by the police? And what about the deaths of rappers? Could the police be in involved in that as well?

Say, Brian, the latest issue of The Atlantic has a profile of Diavid Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire". It details a series of episodes where a police chief allowed drug dealing to occur in a confined area of a bad neighborhood in order to control the crime that occurred around turf battles. It worked very well, but eventually the media exposed the unusual measure, the chief got canned and crime went back up. Maybe that relates a bit to what the police were doing in Brooklyn.

What do people expect?

You have police being asked to behave like criminals and live in the criminal world.

When police officers are paid next to nothing for putting their lives on the line and dealing with people the average citizen wouldn't even look at on the street these are the kinds of things that happen.

The solution is to stop the petty drug arrests and go after the large players or the source of the drugs.