{news} Regulating heroin trade suggested-Drug Policy and the Green Party

[clifford thornton]

This is what happens when one runs for public office.  We have the high ground  but more importantly we
have the press.  The best thing that could happen was to exclude me and the Green Pary from bebate.  I might
also add LEAP is kicking ass in this corrupt state of Connecticut


http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_4463922<http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_4463922> 


BRIDGEPORT - Attorney Sylvester Salcedo's dark brown eyes sweep the East Side streets, taking in the sketchy terrain while he calculates the cost of the local heroin trade. It's as if he is still on patrol as a front-line officer in the nation's war on drugs, but these days his strategy for stemming heroin use and related crime amounts to a negotiated peace. 
Salcedo proposes amnesty for heroin addicts. In fact, he says Bridgeport should enter the drug trade, administering heroin under medical supervision, without fear of arrest or overdose. 

It's a far cry from the anti-drug crusades he oversaw in the 1990s as a Navy lieutenant commander in a counter-narcotics intelligence unit with a name out of a Tom Clancy novel: Joint Task Force Six. "Prohibition didn't work. Persecuting people and coercion seldom do. My idea is not to legalize drug possession, although this might be a step in that direction," at least for nonviolent offenders, he says. 

Salcedo's years on the front lines in Miami, New York and Puerto Rico convinced him


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that the $36.3 billion the government spends each year to keep drugs out of the country is wasted. Those billions might be better spent, he says, on treatment for addicts or drug-maintenance programs operating out of community health centers. 
Salcedo proposes the city declare an 11-block radius in the East Side, bounded by East Washington Avenue and Helen Street and the Yellow Mill Pond, as a free zone for heroin possession among those who register as heroin addicts. 

Membership in this "union" would entitle addicts to receive the drug, under supervision, at community health centers without fear of arrest. 

Salcedo says Bridgeport Mayor John M. Fabrizi's public admission in June that he had occasionally used cocaine after he took office is an inspiration behind amnesty for heroin addicts, and sheds a light on what he calls the nation's long and costly failures in waging the war on drugs. 

He does not propose extending amnesty to cocaine addicts, due to the differences between the two drugs. Cocaine addiction can produce "cocaine psychosis," which resembles paranoid schizophrenia and can lead to violence. Heroin use creates a powerful physical addiction, and long-term users require "maintenance" doses to enable them to go about regular life. Problems from heroin addiction range from blood-borne diseases such as HIV, poor dosage control and the high cost to obtain the drug, which can lead users to crime. 

Instead of hiding their addictions, Salcedo wants heroin users in the city's East Side to acknowledge their dependence. He envisions a registry of heroin addicts, similar to the needle-exchange program Connecticut has to curb the spread of AIDS and HIV by intravenous drug users. 

"Bona fide members of this union would be issued identification cards that would allow them to go to a nearby community center and receive the amount of heroin they need to maintain themselves," Salcedo says. 

The process would be overseen by medical professionals to ensure safety, and to make sure heroin is not sneaked out and sold on the street. Addicts would get their fix without fear of overdose or blood-borne disease. 

On the surface, none of this is expected from a retired drug warrior. It flies in the face of the conventional wisdom in law enforcement, which tends to emphasize getting tough on drugs. But Salcedo's idea has support from some who advocate decriminalizing drugs. 

Cliff Thornton, the Green Party candidate for governor and a national drug-policy reform advocate, says Salcedo's approach is similar to programs in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and other European cities. 

However, many Americans may be unaware of the experiments with a similar approach in the United States. "What they probably don't realize is that in the early 1900s, Missouri and Louisiana both offered safe injection clinics for heroin addicts," he says. "What they also don't know is that these clinics all worked out very well." 

Salcedo is legally barred from discussing details of the drug trafficking investigations he coordinated in the 1990s. What he does say is the war on drugs so frustrated him that he took a page from Vietnam veterans frustrated with that war. In 2000, he returned his medals to President Clinton in a show of protest. He has never regretted that decision. 

Thornton understands why a program to decriminalize heroin would be controversial. 

"Any time you talk about legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, you are talking about the redistributing of income and wealth and upsetting our economy," he says. "Once drugs are inside the law and you take away the high profits from drug dealers and drug cartels, you don't need the multibillion dollar drug interdiction industry anymore. 

"You don't need as many new prisons," Thornton says. "You won't need as many courts or cops to fight a drug war." 

Salcedo, a Minnesota native who spent his youth in Boston and the Philippines, is the ex-husband of former Bridgeport public schools Supt. Sonia Diaz Salcedo. 

Years of practicing criminal and family law - as well as living in Bridgeport's East Side, where drugs are as plentiful as boarded-up wood-framed houses, and broken glass has replaced grass as the most common ground cover - remind Salcedo of the impact of drugs in his own backyard. 

At night, abandoned dwellings turn into crack dens and shooting galleries. Everybody in the neighborhood - even elementary-school children - can point them out. 

"The people who live around here struggle to keep their families together. They love their children, and they want to raise them themselves. Unfortunately, they also have drug problems for which the law will punish them," Salcedo says. "They live in fear of their children being taken away from them." 

He spends countless hours in court and administrative proceedings arguing that his clients should keep custody of their children and get drug counseling and treatment rather than jail time. It's probably not the future that his Philippine-born parents, both of them doctors, envisioned for their middle child, educated at some of New England's most blue-blooded prep schools. 

"Sending a parent to jail for drug possession, like heroin, completely upends the parent-child bond," Salcedo says. "It teaches them that when you have a substance-abuse issue, you get punishment for a crime, not help for a medical condition. The lesson it provides is, if you are addicted to anything or likely to become so, hide what you are doing. Keep it a secret." 

At the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Salcedo's idea drew a skeptical reaction. "We already have methadone programs at community centers, and that works extremely well with heroin addicts," says Wayne Dailey, a spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. "From what I am hearing, what this lawyer is suggesting is a heroin maintenance program. So my question is, how does that get the individual off heroin?" 

In Connecticut, some 75,000 people identify themselves as heroin addicts, a figure state officials call "conservative"; 11,100 other drug users are enrolled in state-supported methadone programs aimed at breaking their addiction. 

In his East Side neighborhood, where his former law clients refer to him as "Mr. Counselor," Salcedo's heroin union proposal draws a more enthusiastic reaction. 

"Everything else hasn't worked. Maybe this is something that might," says an East Washington Avenue father of three, who declined to give his name. "I don't even let my kids play outside of here no more. It's too dangerous. That's why we want to move out of here." 

"The place over there," he says, gesturing to a boarded-up house, "is a shooting gallery. Best to stay as far away from it as you can when it gets dark." 

Inside Washington Avenue Park, a woman in her fifties approaches Salcedo. She notices a photographer walking backward in front of the lawyer and she wonders why he's getting this attention. 

"Mister, are you running for something?" she asks. "What you running for?" 

"Me? No, no, I'm not running for anything," Salcedo tells her. 

She frowns, biting her lower lip. He introduces himself as a guy from the neighborhood who has an idea for helping heroin addicts and their families, and for cutting violent crime on the East Side. 

"There are a lot of people around here strung out on that stuff. I've seen it," she says, introducing herself as Bernadette McBride, a transplant from the South who is studying social work at Housatonic Community College. 

"Now let me get this straight: What you are telling me is that they'd give out heroin at the community center and make sure people took their fix there, nothing left over?" she asks. 

Salcedo nods and waits for her reaction. McBride, who appears to be at least a half-foot taller than Salcedo, stares him down for a moment, trying to figure out whether he is serious. 

"You know, this idea of yours is kind of out there," McBride says, her face breaking into a smile that reveals a few missing teeth. "But, hey, like sometimes you got to think outside of the box."

Thornton for Governor
PO Box 1971
Manchester, CT 06045
votethornton at yahoogroups.com<mailto:votethornton at yahoogroups.com>
www.votethornton.com<http://www.votethornton.com/>
860 657 8438-H
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