County Council Chairman Terry Ryan and Prosecutor Adam Cornell’s announcement that they want to “re-start” the prosecution of low-level drug cases in the county, in a “re-worked budget,” is simply blatant political exploitation of the addiction crisis to fund more prosecutor staff (“Low-level drug cases could restart in new county budget plan,” The Herald, Nov. 8). It’s yet another effort to increase an already bloated ‘public safety’ budget that currently consumes 75 percent of all county revenue, and has produced few substantive results in stemming our county-wide crisis of drug and addiction-related crime.
This “re-worked” policy would impose a felony conviction that never goes away. Worse, it’s wrapped in contradictory language from Cornell about how it is a “smart” and “compassionate” way of “getting people help so they can stop their criminal behavior.”
How is this more “compassionate” than the current (and cheaper) process, which seeks treatment for those in possession of small amounts, without criminalizing them for their illness? Does he think making them felons for life — at greater public expense, and a possible prison sentence — is going to magically turn them into law-abiding citizens? There is an abundance of evidence to show that it will not. And a felony conviction can damage the lives and future prospects of those addicts who work hard to get and stay sober.
If Ryan and Cornell want to see more criminal accountability (and budget) for crime prevention, they should get serious and address the elephant in the room: property crime, which is directly tied to the drug trade, and rampant across the county. Property owners and low-level addicts, like the ones they want to prosecute, are the main victims of this dynamic, while law enforcement often does little to investigate or hold anyone accountable.
In fairness, street addicts with small amounts of drugs do engage in petty crime to feed their drug habit, and should be held accountable. But they are a symptom, not the main problem. The deeper problem is the organized gangs, dealers, pimps and black-market fences who foster and exploit addicts and their criminal behavior for their own profit.
Ryan and Cornell’s proposal does not address our real problems with crime and addiction in any substantive way, nor does it give property owners and citizens better tools and support to combat it. And we should all be insisting that our county leaders propose a different budget that will.
Ann Morgan
Everett
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