U.S. Judge Calls Drug War Failure, Urges Legalization

Illegal drugs from cocaine to heroin should be legalized, taxed and dispensed by the state because the so-called war on drugs is failing, a federal judge said Tuesday.

“I suggest it is time to abolish the prohibition--to cease treating indulgence in mind-alteration as a crime,” U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet said in remarks that were to be delivered Tuesday evening before the Cosmopolitan Club, a social club for women and men. The press was not allowed to cover the speech.

The result “would be the elimination of the profit motive, the gangs, the drug dealers,” Sweet said. “Obviously, the model is the repeal of Prohibition and the end of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.”

Sweet, a trial judge in the Southern District of New York for more than 11 years, was the first federal judge to propose publicly that illegal drugs be legalized, according to the Drug Policy Foundation, an international, nonprofit research group.

Sweet said the current effort to stem the drug epidemic by putting more people in jail is not working.

“The war on drugs has failed to stop the traffic, or to alter the social patterns which produce the phenomena,” he said.

“It is expensive and diverting, and has come close to causing foreign excursions, subversions and has caused us to reconsider whether or not as a nation we wish to employ assassination as an expression of policy.”

Sweet’s remarks came a day after federal drug czar William J. Bennett made a speech charging that liberal intellectuals are betraying their concern for the poor by advancing “morally scandalous” arguments for repeal of drug laws.

Sweet, a former federal prosecutor and a deputy mayor under Republican Mayor John V. Lindsay, is part of a small but growing chorus of public figures advocating drug legalization or decriminalization.

Those favoring legalization come from both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum and include former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, economist Milton Friedman and political commentator William F. Buckley.

Sweet said he believes the root cause of the drug epidemic is poverty, and drug dealing will continue to attract some elements of the poor as long as the profit potential is so high.

“Perhaps we must ask not what can we do to eliminate drugs, but what can we do to eliminate or at least reduce the level of poverty,” he said.

Sweet proposed that pharmaceutical companies could manufacture the drugs; the state would control prices and distribute them to addicts for less than they currently cost; and that some of the tax revenue would be plowed back into research, education and treatment of addiction.