GANGLAND

L.A.P.D. officer Will Beall’s article in the Current section of the Sunday Times was a bleak account of reality in certain L. A. neighborhoods. His insider view focused on the uncomfortable truce between black and Hispanic gang members, brought about by their co-dependence on the illegal drug trade. He offered no solution, which is bad enough, but he completely ignored the even more chilling conclusions to which his facts point.

Beall says that most of the 39,000 gang members in Los Angeles survive by selling drugs. If that’s true, it means that the L.A.P.D. (and, by extension, the City of Los Angeles) either permits the sale of illegal drugs, or is incapable of stopping it. I suspect it’s a little of both. It also means there are 39,000 law breaking, heavily armed combatants roaming the streets of our city. The smart choice for unarmed, non-affiliated citizens would be to head for the hills, and I do not mean Beverly.

I’d like to offer a solution, if only a partial one. It seems obvious to me – legalize drugs! Before you laugh, I would remind testosterone-challenged lawmakers that, Homeland Security aside, this is still a free country. I doubt that legal drugs would have every gang member in L. A. hitting himself in the head like a V-8 commercial and saying, “I could’ve had a construction job,” but still, the benefits would be varied and immediate: gangs would lose almost their entire source of income; police would gain hundreds of thousands of man-hours for use in fighting real crimes with real victims; government would gain a modicum of respect for dealing with a serious social problem in a forthright and non-political manner.

Legalizing drugs is not the same as recommending drugs. It is simply an admission that some people are going to ruin their lives, no matter what. Using community resources to try and stop them is a waste of resources and a denial of individual freedom. Facing reality is a matter of helping the ones you can, loving the ones you can’t, and moving forward.

a foot on either side

Bart Braverman