8/23/2008 6:33:00 PM My Turn: Unenforceable laws lead to police abuses
J.D. Tuccille
Law-enforcement excesses feature prominently in the news. Doors kicked in, people killed, dogs shot, phone lines tapped, curfews imposed -- they're all examples of official overreaching at that unpleasant intersection of private activity and state disapproval. For some people, the implication of such abuses is that more scrutiny and the right people in charge will make law enforcement an enterprise which people need not fear.
But what if that's not the case? It may be that we've assigned law-enforcers goals so frustratingly elusive that even angels couldn't resist the temptation to escalate tactics to insane extremes, trampling liberty and decency along the way.
Deranged escalation recently resulted in the misguided marijuana raid on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, during which his dogs were killed. Yes, worse raids have deprived people of their lives in the past. But when even a government official like Calvo can't protect his pets from police overstepping, you know we've gone over a cliff.
But that leap into the void was probably inevitable given the government's obsession with achieving the impossible: eliminating marijuana consumption. Seventy years after Reefer Madness, decades into the War on Drugs, a survey by the World Health Organization still says that 42.4 percent of Americans have smoked grass.
After several consecutive lifetimes of failure, entering the homes of low-level government officials with guns blazing because somebody tried to deliver a package of forbidden weed may suddenly take on a false patina of sanity to prohibitionists driven mad.
In fact, there have been a lot of laws that are essentially unenforceable because a large segment of the population is unwilling to obey them. They involve activities in which there's no victim -- nobody to file a complaint or cooperate with police.
The hidden secret of law enforcement is that it's largely dependent on public cooperation. When laws have less than near-universal support -- when they're a majority preference jammed down the throats of the minority - they beg for defiance. Cops then are forced to become arm-twisters, trying to intimidate the minority into submission through increasingly brutal tactics, or else they just give up.
Prohibition is infamous on this count. Thirteen years of illegal liquor brought us mass disobedience, corruption and organized crime. A paper prepared in 1972 for the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded, "[t]he law could not quell the continuing demand for alcoholic products. Thus, where legal enterprises could no longer supply the demand, an illicit traffic developed, from the point of manufacture to consumption."
You'd think that history lesson would stick -- but it hasn't. Lawmakers still send the police to force people to stop doing things they want to do, even when there's nobody to complain and little interest in compliance.
So we see police breaking up friendly card games with headline-grabbing raids, like the infamous San Mateo incident in January that involved cops in riot gear. Of course, the games continue, only now a bit further underground.
People then turn to the Internet for their gambling fix. What's the government going to do about that?
Try something else crazy, it turns out -- like arresting executives of companies based in countries where online gambling is perfectly legal who merely change planes in the United States. That's like Saudi Arabia busting a Playboy employee because naughty pictures published on American Web sites are frowned on in Islamic countries.
That enthusiasm for enforcing the unenforceable at all costs should have all of us - even gun control advocates -- thanking the Supreme Court for taking outright gun bans off the table with the Heller decision.
Why?
Because gun owners have a history of defying gun control laws (compliance with assault weapons bans in Boston and Cleveland has hovered around 1 percent). Because the authorities would be inclined to escalate enforcement. And because resistance to such escalation would inherently involve, you know, guns.
In "Can Gun Control Work?" James B. Jacobs, director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University, concluded, "If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long 'war on handguns' might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative."
And that takes us back to drug prohibition -- the eternally failed crusade to make much of the population change its ways, "or else."
It won't work. It can't work. It never has worked.
But the authorities try, and try and try to make people knuckle under to laws that they find offensive and intrusive. And as people refuse to comply, the authorities raise the stakes, adopting tactics that most of us recognize as violations of fundamental rights and of simple human decency.
J.D. Tuccille blogs about civil liberties issues for Examiner.com. He lives in Cornville.
Reader Comments
Posted: Monday, April 12, 2010
Article comment by:
Tom Jefferson
For a simple explanation, watch: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80857310/
Tom
Posted: Monday, April 12, 2010
Article comment by:
John Tardy
I thought J.D. Tuccille's arguments regarding unenforceable laws--specifically those concerning marijuana--were well thought, and well reasoned. Brian L Carlson attempts to refute Tuccille by regaling us with an amusing anecdote, which quickly degenerates into the slippery slope of an outrageous dope-smoking strawman who has his evil little finger on the Armageddon button. (Bluntman and Chronic snigger and chuckle while playing keep away in the nuclear submarine)
Camp Mor leaps straight to the strawman sliding down the slippery slope, by asking: “while were legalizing pot, why don't we legalize heroin and crack.”
But while we’re all planting absurd strawmen instead of actually debating what Tuccille actually wrote, let me just strap on my Scarecrow costume and have a go at riding the old slippery slope. Alcohol and cigarettes are legal. So, in the one hand we have a highly flammable substance, in the other a flaming object. Well, I say, cry havoc and loose the dogs of war! What if a drunken smoker stumbles his way into the Whitehouse and interrupts a summit meeting between the President and Osama Bin Laden, sets fire to Osama’s beard with his flaming nicotine torch, and then ignites the U.S.-Al-Qaeda nuclear disarmament treaty? Then spills booze all over the place which promptly explodes…etc.
THE END OF THE WORLD! Because of a Marlboro and a pint of Jim Beam.
Posted: Monday, August 25, 2008
Article comment by:
Brian L Carlson
Laws can be enforced. I joined the military in the post Vietnam era (1976). Marijuana smoking seemed to be the number one past time for the military. The President’s helicopter crew got caught smoking pot. The guys on nuclear submarines were smoking pot too.
About 1980 the military decided that marijuana usage was out of control. Through the use of urine analysis and a zero-tolerance program the potheads were reduced to a small fraction of what they had been in the military.
J. D. Tuccille would probably say that urine analysis is a violation of our civil rights. Would you rather have potheads with their finger on the button of a nuclear submarine?
Posted: Sunday, August 24, 2008
Article comment by:
Camp Mor
J.D. Tuccille writes:"But that leap into the void was probably inevitable given the government's obsession with achieving the impossible: eliminating marijuana consumption.Is the point of your entire argument to legalize marijuana? Why stop there. Consider legalizing meth, heroin addiction and alcohol abuse? Your claim is that marijuana use is a victimless crime. Then too are all halucinating drugs victimless crimes? Illicit drugs lead to theft, spousal abuse, murder, auto fatalities and drug wars between competing drug cartels. The Mexican drug wars are spilling over into the United States. Larado Texas is becomming a war zone due to its' proxsimity to Mexico. Where have you been JD? Victimless?
