BELFAST, Maine — When some Belfast city officials pushed back against the national War on Drugs this week, saying that creating drug-free safe zones in city parks would not solve the drug problem, some drug enforcement officers scratched their heads in confusion.
“I’ve heard of no communities that don’t want to do a safe zone,” said James Pease of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. “Where we have them in Maine, it’s working.”
The safe zone designation comes from Maine legislation passed in 2005 that increases penalties associated with dealing drugs within 1,000 feet of such a zone. If someone was caught dealing drugs in the designated area, a class C crime, for instance, would be bumped up to a class B crime, increasing the potential penalty by as much as five years.
Several city councilors said this week that the 1,000-foot extension of the safe zone around the parks in question was the problem, with one saying adamantly that he disagrees with how the War on Drugs operates.
Ultimately, the council tabled the safe zone question to decide it at a later meeting.
Councilor Mike Hurley, who has two nephews incarcerated in federal penitentiary due to drug-related convictions, said Friday that he is tough on crime — but that increasing penalties on dealers is not the way to go.
“From my perspective, those people have a problem, but they’re citizens of Belfast,” he said. “If all we’re doing is putting the same damn people in prison longer, and without any reduction in drug use, why are we doing that?”
But Pease said the intention behind creating safe zones is to keep drug dealers away from places frequented by children and teenagers, including schools and parks.
“The whole theory behind it is to keep kids safer,” he said. “The whole point of the law is to deter them from doing it where kids are hanging out. If you get caught doing it, you may pay a higher penalty.”
He said Rockland was one of the first communities in the state to adopt the safe zone designations, and he has heard from drug informants and dealers themselves that drug dealers are well aware of where the zones are located.
“They don’t want to deal in these safe zones, because they know the penalties are higher,” Pease said. “When you hear that from the people dealing drugs, you know it’s working.”
Hurley disagreed. He believes that increasing penalties on drug dealers caught 1,000 feet from parks and schools is an urban punishment, and that if the city has a problem with drug dealers, the answer should be to do more policing.
“I have no problem enforcing every law on the books,” he said. “If we have a problem in the parks, let’s put an extra cop there. I think the penalties are sufficient.”
He described the creation of safe zones as things that happen “automatically” because they make community and police leaders feel good.
“But have they had any effect?” Hurley asked. “We’ve been at this for 40 years. Our national rate of incarceration is insane. And we use more drugs.”
Chief Mike McFadden of the Belfast Police Department said he believes city councilors who did not support the safe zone designation might have thought the legislation was all-encompassing, affecting someone caught smoking marijuana as well as those caught dealing drugs. It does not, he said.
“I’m not sure the city council understood that,” McFadden said. “I fear they may have thought they’d throw a person in prison for five years for smoking a joint in a car next to the skate park. That’s not what would happen.”
The safe zones, he said, affect those people caught selling drugs.
While the chief said he knows the designations wouldn’t magically make drug usage in Belfast go away, it would help.
“Do I think it [would] have an impact on the amount of drug activity we see in this area? I do,” he said.
How can any responsible parent not desire a saner drug policy, and one that’s based on facts rather than reefer madness? Prohibition guarantees that many illegal drugs are far easier for our children to procure than even alcohol or nicotine. That’s because, even though these are both very dangerous and addictive drugs, they are at least sold in properly controlled and regulated environments.
Under our present regime, certain plants/concoctions/drugs are sold only by criminals and terrorists; the huge black-market profits are used to threaten innocent civilians, bribe law enforcement officials, and buy support from unconscionable politicians; the availability and usage rates tend to go up, not down, and our prisons have become filled to capacity with easily replaced vendors and smugglers —this list of dangerous and negative consequences is actually endless. To continue prohibition is ludicrous, and those of us who can’t see that by now, must be either severely and mentally challenged or using something far stronger than any of us have even heard of.
Why on earth should we be willing to whack ourselves with ever-bigger and more-repressive prohibition hammers, while drug use and availability keep going up, not down, and while we all plunge deeper into Loserville?
Prohibition is the most destructive, dysfunctional, dishonest and racist social policy since Slavery. Prohibition is a holocaust in slow motion. We MUST end it NOW!
And people want to vote Romney into office. A man that doesn’t drink, smoke or even partake in drinks that contain caffeine but people want him as President.
Do you folks honestly think he is going to lead the charge into making marijuana legal? I highly doubt that will be part of his plan if he is elected.
Is Obama going to jump on the make it legal bandwagon? I highly doubt it but if I was going to choose between the two that might, I would lean towards Obama since he did partake in puff puff pass back in the day.
Your rant is amusing but trust me, nothing is going to change with what you call prohibition. The drugs they are trying to get off the streets have never been legal and never will be but keep working on that rant.
Vote for Romney because we all know, he will be soft on drugs.
“And people want to vote Romney into office. A man that doesn’t drink, smoke or even partake in drinks that contain caffeine but people want him as President.
Do you folks honestly think he is going to lead the charge into making marijuana legal? I highly doubt that will be part of his plan if he is elected.”
That’s your big issue for the office of President? Proof positive that using marijuana harms brain function. Who cares if we’re bankrupt or out of work as long as we can blaze up huh?
I was being highly sarcastic.
“The drugs they are trying to get off the streets have never been legal”.
That’s flat out not true. Cannabis only became illegal throughout the USA in 1937 (with the Marihuana Tax Act, which was essentially prohibition disguised as a tax regulation – you had to have government tax stamps to buy cannabis, and the government never gave you the tax stamps).
Likewise, the beginning of the prohibition of heroin and cocaine was with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914. Prior to that, you could get heroin and/or cocaine in a myriad patent medicines with no legal problem at all.
LSD was discovered in 1943 and had a good couple of decades of legal use in the USA before it was criminalised in 1968. MDMA (‘ecstasy’) was first synthesised in 1912, but probably not used in humans until 1967, when Alexander Shulgin made a batch and realised it had potential as a psychotherapeutic tool. It leaked out onto the party scene and remained legal to possess until 1985.
Unless a government specifically makes laws to criminalise the production of drugs before they are even invented (which both the US and UK governments, and presumably many others, have now done, with various ‘analogue’ legislation), a drug is legal to possess until it is banned. In the case of naturally occurring drugs, they will have been legal for untold millennia before they were banned. So to say they have never been legal is obviously mistaken, though easy to assume if you have never checked out the history of these things.
As to whether they will be again, well, remember, prohibition is not an inevitable response to a problem; it is a policy choice which should only be taken if there is good evidence that it does more good than harm. Since there is abundant evidence of the harm caused by prohibition, it is not at all unreasonable to expect that some of the currently-prohibited drugs will be legal to possess again, under some sort of regulatory framework that seeks to minimise harm, rather than punishing use per se.
That is exactly what happened to alcohol, after all. It was legal before it was banned under the 18th Amendment, but it took only 13 years for people to realise that the consequences of prohibition were worse than the consequences of legal use, and the prohibition was overturned. It is taking longer with other drugs that have not been so deeply enmeshed in American culture for so long, but the case against prohibition is just as strong in pragmatic and moral terms.
I don’t want to pay to keep people in prison/jail longer because of non-violent drug crimes.
Not to mention many leave jail/prison more addicted to drugs then they were when they went in, and have a harder time getting a job.
Knox Counties jail budget is its highest ticket at $3.5 Million annually, and Knox County just raised its taxes on municipalities by 9%. I am betting that is another effect of Rockland’s Drug Free Safe Zone, higher jail costs.
Also I would ask a lawyer before trusting Chief McFadden’s opinion on if the safe zone would aggravate a civil offense (like possession of small amounts of marijuana)
you are so right drug users dealers are non-violent… ask the family members of those shot and burned in Bangor this summer.
Thanks for supporting my position percipience.
I think it would be rude to ask those family’s that question, but you are welcome to. I would also suggest you ask those people currently incarcerated for never committing any violence, but possessing controlled substances.
You also should ask this family about how the drug war treated them
http://theintelhub.com/2012/10/13/bungled-swat-raid-leaves-12-year-old-girl-badly-burned-no-meth-lab-found/
Well, it’s very simple. If you kill someone, you go to jail for murder. If you do not kill someone, you do not go to jail for murder. It does us no good at all if we conflate ‘all people who sell currently-prohibited drugs’ with ‘people who sell currently-prohibited drugs and also commit violent crimes’. Especially because the only reason the drugs industry disproportionately attracts people with a talent for violence is because it is illegal, and therefore one can only defend one’s business interests using violence.
There is a reason that rival breweries and pub owners are generally not involved in gang warfare; they are legally regulated and can use the courts to settle their disputes, and have too much to lose by turning to violence. Once we regulate other drugs the way we regulate alcohol, licenced sellers of those other drugs will have no more incentive to shoot each other than the sellers of the currently legal drugs.
Camden does not want a drug free zone either. Police look the other way even when they are told drug consumption and dealing are occurring in the Library Amphitheater. They have a MDEA office in town apparently that relieves them of any responsibility to the parents of 12 year olds who are being influenced by the current host of users. They escalate to using herion, coke and bath salts — then the police are shocked by such behavior and the community is shocked their “good” young people have fallen to such temptations.
It is not about wanting or not, I had sense they wanted more information. And gee, who would want to stand up against what the police department wanted. McFadden knows best, the cops must protect us from ourselves as they know what is best for us (being sarcastic).
As a Belfast resident, I respect Councilor (and former mayor) Mike Hurley, but I line up with Chief McFadden on this one. Do we ignore the actual testimony of drug dealers that they avoid safe zones? Isn’t keeping them out of certain places at least a small step in the right direction?
Mike obviously has a personal interest. This problem isn’t limited to Belfast (In other news, your council is clueless &
dangerously naïve or stoned… man…) It’s everywhere. I dunno about penalties & their effect as a deterrent. They might act as a deterrent to the higher ups, but those guys are not involved @ the street level anyway. I do know that there is a difference between marijuana & the pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, it is not a victimless crime. The harder drugs are behind most property crime.
I live in rockland…and no one is avoiding any “safe zones”. drug use here is rampant, violent, and extends through all classes. the war on drugs is dead.
probably because it’ll shut down all the drug dealers in belfast.. last i knew belfast was a druggy hotspot, because it’s out of the way, and between rockland, and bangor… that and it’s a fairly liberal town.. believe me I used to live there.. and I moved out for that very reason…
Instead of labelling an area and upping the penalties why not just monitor those areas more closely? The activity is already illega and police know the areas they want protected. Doesn’t take an official proclamation to achieve what they are after.
We need to make tougher drug laws for dealers and users, pressure police to enforce them and then force our judicial system to punish the drug dealers severely!
MEXICO CITY — After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico – and the violence along with it.
_ $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.
At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse – “an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction” – cost the United States $215 billion a year.
Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.
“Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use,” Miron said, “but it’s costing the public a fortune.”
___
The DARE officer in one town close by was actually selling drugs to some DARE participants.
Finally, a smart city council. We need more people to stand up against these unnecessary, made-up, feel good laws.
I for one would think that you would want your folks to have all the tools they can use in their tool boxes. Not instituting this policy is sometimes like taking a carpenters hammer. We as citizens are always asking why someone does not get what we think is the proper punishmsnt for something now an opportunity to level the playing field some and they turn their nose up at it. Support your local law enforcement not your local drug zars. The larger the safety net we can put around our young people the better off we are.
Finally a group of elected officials have stood up to the useless and misguided policies that we call “the war on drugs”. This is a very small but necessary step in getting our society straightened out. Lets get back to common sense and not put people in jail for 10 years for selling drugs to willing participants and this will free up space in our prisons for the disgusting perpetrators of domestic violence, child molestation, etc. We should not be locking up non-violent offenders. It makes me sick when I see someone get 4-5 years for growing and selling pot, yet some whack job child molester gets 2 years. We have been fleeced by the so called “war on drugs” and it looks like we are finally getting some people to take the blinders off and see the light. Again, way to go city council, now you just need to vote it down since it was only tabled at the last meeting.
Martial law would keep kids totally safe.
…at the cost of having the adults live in a totalitarian dystopia?
the war on drugs is a money grab and that’s all. “safe zones”= stiffer fines maybe longer jail time.longer jail time = the need for more tax dollars to house inmates,increased court costs(tax dollars usually pay the defense attorney and of course the d.a. and the judge).the system is fed and the cycle is perpetuated, notice the lack of mention for programs to free people from addiction and educate young people on the dangers of drug use,That might actually make a difference and the money flow might start to ebb
The War on Drugs?LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL….Tears rolling down my eyes…What a joke..
Bravo to Councilor Mike Hurley for having the courage to stand up to the forces of repressive puritanism. It’s not easy to do, I’m sure, especially with related tragedies in his own family and against the dishonest or at least incredibly naive positions of local police officials.
Goofy bandaid approaches to a very real drug problem — like declaring drug-free zones — is part of the same wrongheaded and simplistic mentality that with Prohibition in 1920 brought us a wave of gangster crime and an actual and significant boost in the rate of alcohol addiction. When the idiotic Volstead amendment was finally overturned in 1933, those same career police “experts” busy kicking in the doors of suspected inbibers and sniffing out stills in the woods didn’t simply go away. No, they transformed themselves into the first of generations of narcs whose very activities have only served to escalate the problem of dangerous drugs and fill our jails and prisons to the point where the United States now incarcerates far more people than any other nation on earth.
I know many people, particularly of a conservative and probably fundamentalist bent, would say something to the effect that society needs to crack down on drug law offenders. To them I would say that we’ve tried that experiment in this country for as long as most people alive have been on this earth and, like Prohibition, it fails to ask the fundamental question why people abuse drugs. It only criminalizes and then punishes them, bringing more tragedy into tens of millions of lives and making the problem even worse.
Oh yes, it also provides a self-serving career platform for people like Belfast Police Chief Michael McFadden and MDEA spokesperson James Pease. Because these two, like too many of our police officers, have a vested interest in continuing the insanity, it’s foolish to think they have very much useful to say on the subject.
As for those who look to the economics to ultimately decide social questions, are you as a tax-paying citizen aware that punishing a non-violent felony drug law offender in Maine by sending him or her to prison costs on average $56,000 a year?
Thanks but no Tank!
We agree Peter. What’s more, the “drug free zones” give parents a false sense of security. Unless the town is also going to mandate that children under age 18 can only be in “drug free zones” this won’t work.
You have real guts. Now show us what a man you are and post your name.
Alternatively you could prove your baseless charges.
We’ll let time tell the story. I just hope the light bulb is coming on for some people. =)
Rather cowardly, but what did I expect?
If your child gets leukemia you learn a lot about leukemia. If your wife has breast cancer you know far more than anyone who has no personal connection. So; my two nephews who are in a Federal prison camp opened my eyes to the criminal justice system and the “war on drugs” and its effect on the people who commit the crimes, the families, the communities and the society. The war on drugs is a failure. It costs an insane amount of tax dollars, destroys people and families, and instead of decreasing drug use we’ve become the largest population (and percentage of population) of drug users in any country in the world. The criminal justice system and the war on drugs and policies such as this “drug free parks” should have lead to a decreased drug usage but instead every day the newspapers are filled with tragic tales of peoples lost lives. We jail more people and spend more on prisons than any other country in the world. And it’s not working.
In Belfast; as a city council member I would not have raised this issue but it suddenly fell to me to support a policy that I cannot. It’s not a drum I chose to beat. I am a strong supporter of law enforcement. As I said: if we have a problem in Belfast parks then lets increase the policing and put an officer on patrol. Drawing a line 1000′ from every Belfast park and every Belfast school will turn all of in-town Belfast into an increased penalties zone. We already penalize people enough. We have a drug problem and a criminal justice system approach that is a total failure. Putting ever more and more people in jail is not the solution.
I think the moral of the story that was the highlight of my last comment that you flagged for review (understandably), is that you’re using your platform to promote your own agenda. The Police Chief is scratching his head, and the Agency whose sole purpose is to enforce the state’s drug laws doesn’t know what to make of the city’s (your) stance. As the article points out, members of your family were involved in a major cocaine dealing operation. I stand behind my statement that you, and the other members of the city council should be drug tested. Sounds like a fair request for a public official, don’t you think?
That’s not what you wrote at all and I flagged you myself several times. You accused the councilor of being a ringleader or a kingpin in dealing drugs. I admire Mr Hurley as a person who actually says what he believes. It would have been far easier for him to have just gone along with the police chief but what he said makes sense to me and many others feel the same way. Shame on you.
Harold Richardson
Thanks for reposting that. If I do it it gets taken down ;)
OK-I have to admit it-good comeback.
If you feel brave enough, “Director,” to try to assassinate others in a public forum, perhaps you might feel brave enough to use y0ur own name. Not only are you a mean-spirited nitwit, you’re also a coward.
I can understand your anger Peter considering the stand Searsport just took on the tank issue. I will try to be nicer. I’m sure we could go back and forth all day on things we have said about people on here, but the truth of this forum is about public opinion, and not about who is right or wrong. And sometimes if I say “look in that direction” there might be a reason. I’m against anything that has to do with the promotion of any type of illegal drug. I will approach that subject as voracious as you approach the no-tank topic. ANYTHING a town can do to protect its children, it should do. We have cast personal responsibility aside and now everyone gets referred to as “victims”. Victims of their own choices.