At the risk of sending thousands of "cheese eating surrender monkeys" boiling out of their holes, I will try and add the perspective of a law enforcement officer to the foregoing debate.

First, it occurs to me that back in the late sixties and early seventies when I was in college, getting my B.S. in Law Enforcement, I recall that Britain had essentially decriminalized heroin and that the drug was there for the asking at designated clinics. That policy failed at least in part due the fact that even if you make the drugs legal, the type of person using them is not. Property crimes rose at an astounding rate simply because, when you take a sufficient amount of drugs, you cannot maintain a job. This causes additional stresses on the community as the drug user has to steal to provide the other necessities of life, i.e. food, housing, 3G cell phones, Nikes and Northfaces, etc.

Later in 1978, when I was getting my Masters in Judicial Administration, my thesis was on the cost-benefit analysis of prisons on drug offenders and the result was, as it is now, overwhelmingly in favor of prison for drug offenders, setting aside the emotional issues, and concentrating on the pure economics of crime.

People generally have no clue as to the cost of law enforcement as opposed to the costs of not enforcing the laws. As an example, let us posit a situation where drugs are legal, and society has even provided a homeless type shelter for the drug addicts. Consider the costs of running such a center, with drug addicts (on drugs) as your clients. Bedlam, so you have to call, who else, the cops!

We had the same problem in the seventies when Congress passed the Kennedy Kill 'em Bill, in the early seventies, that mandated the closure of most insane asylums and most of those folks who were ill-served in the asylums got to freeze to death on the streets because we could no longer arrest them, just to get them into a warm cell. We sometimes had to wait until the person was frozen near to death and unconscious before we could call an ambulance, under implied consent that they did not wish to die, only "not go to a shelter". About half the time we were too late, and as an unattended death, it cost about $15 thousand dollars of taxpayer money for the autopsy and burial. And these people, just like the drug abusers, used up thousands of dollars in emergency room treatments, that went unpaid, driving up medical costs (whether you are insured or not).

What people do not seem to understand is that at the bottom line, it is far cheaper to lock up drug abusers than it is to let them loose on society. Consider the drug abuser who has to steal to make his next score. He breaks into a house and steals a lap top or whatever is portable enough to carry away. Let us say the lap top is worth a thousand dollars. The drug abuser is only going to get about twenty dollars from the "fence" (they are a drag on the market), thus he has to steal a lot of items in order to provide for not only the drugs under the current situation, but for food and the like under drug decriminalization. Now for the cost; an officer arrives to take a report from the victim who has just arrived home. (Thank God she was out during the crime, or the medical costs would start tracking immediately). When that officer steps out of his cruiser the cost is well over ten thousand dollars by the time he knocks on the front door. You have his salary, medical and leave benefits, cost of selection and back-ground investigation, initial training and annual retraining, all of his gear including cruiser, guns, radios, uniforms, PLUS the cost of the CAD system and dispatchers, the record keeping, evidence tracking, CSI type work, (have you ever figured out the cost of a single DNA work-up, which may be unsuccessful?). And remember this is an amortized amount paid every year from your taxes. Now add in the insurance costs to replace the lap top, and the possible mental effects of having your house's sanctity broken, and you will soon get to 30 thousand dollars for the 20 dollars the drug addict got from his ONE NON-VIOLENT crime.

And you have loons cruising the country saying that prison costs about the same per convict as a college education (which is true, without the non-collegiate crack head being in your house). And prisons, as a rule, are a great economic boon in the rural areas of this country. If you over-build, you can take the prisoner overload from the Federal system and actually make a profit. In Loudoun County, VA the Sheriff got an idea for using shipping containers welded together to house short-time and work-release prisoners and cut his prison budget in half. Many prisons are the economic life blood of their county, and yet no one calculates this economic return in the true cost of crime and punishment.

You have other loons who say that this time spent on "non-violent drug offenders" could be better spent on other more violent crime etc. etc. etc. They have no clue as to the most important rule in law enforcement, "If you make the small arrests, the big ones will take care of themselves". Consider Timothy McVeigh, who was locked up on a suspended license two days before they figured out he bombed the Murtaugh Building. If you hammer the druggies, you will solve all sorts of crime. And prison remains the highest non-drug recidivism of any program on the market, at a tenth of the cost (it was running about 30% success for 5 years in the late ninties, whereas other programs rarely do better than 10%. They will claim higher, but do poor follow-ups, which a criminal record does provide). And the simple truth teller is to ask the addict how many programs has he enrolled in the past, with the correct answer being they were all failures because here he is again… with all those little non-violent 20 dollar crimes during that period…

And so you Brits, (with a CCTV camera on every corner) I ask why, if back in the sixties all you had to do was pop in to the local clinic to get tuned up, is that program no longer workable. Hint: please don't say "Maggie" because if the program actually worked and was cost effective it would still be there…

Ahh! For some strange reason I smell cheese from under the curb-line…