On a May evening in Florida this year, Rachel Hoffman, 23, drove with $13,000 in her pocket down a backwoods road. After two hasty location changes, the drug deal — a police sting with Rachel as the informant — would take place under the concealing canopy of the forest in the middle of nowhere.
Little did Rachel know that the police had lost track of her miles earlier. She was going it alone, buying 1,500 ecstasy pills, cocaine and a handgun from two large-volume drug dealers, and she had little choice. After being caught with .25 pounds of marijuana and ecstasy in her apartment, it was either cooperate with the police or face serious criminal charges.
On May 7, 2008, at 6:41 p.m., Rachel texted her boyfriend: “It’s about to go down.” These would be her last words to him. The police found an empty bullet cartridge down a dead end road once they finally arrived, but there was no sign of Rachel and the dealers were long gone.
A few days later, the drug dealers were arrested. They led police to Rachel Hoffman’s body.
It is a sad story for everyone involved. For Rachel’s family and friends, the loss is surely devastating on a personal level, and we all can sympathize to some extent.
The story is only more tragic because it was entirely preventable. In fact, Rachel Hoffman’s death can be directly linked to a series of failed “war on drug” policies.
In this case, the system played itself out according to the logic by which it was built: if enforcing total abstinence from drug use is the ultimate goal of the government (this is the stated goal, which is impossible to achieve), then the logic follows that the government should create policies that value the reduction of drug supply over everything else, including personal safety and harm reduction.
For police, the obvious risk of sending a 23-year-old college graduate to buy large amounts of hard drugs and a gun was outweighed by the potential benefit of taking two drug dealers off of the street.
The same logic leads to almost all problems in current drug enforcement laws: it encourages harsher penalties — deterrents — while ignoring the lives that are ruined when students lose financial aid and small-time drug users are sent to jail; it forces the government to spend millions of dollars fighting drugs abroad, in Columbia and Afghanistan, while ignoring the fact that the easiest way to de-fund drug cartels and drug terrorists is to decriminalize drugs (opening legal and profitable channels for their distribution); it legitimizes the federal government’s practice of raiding dispensaries for medical marijuana in California and disregards the sick people who suffer as a result.
It will not be easy to change this philosophy, much less overhaul drug laws, because so many have failed to see the serious problems with current policy. We are a democracy, and we have put our stamp of approval on that sick and mutated embodiment of classic puritanism known as the Drug Enforcement Administration. We need them to protect us, the people say.
Where does the fear of drugs come from? Is it the detritus of past generations seeping through time and clouding a fact-based debate? Is reefer madness still resonating, fueling paranoia about the “long-haired” portion of the population turning the United States into an enviro-anarchist syndicate of some kind?
Regardless of the answers to these questions, I have a reality-based assertion to make: if the United States decriminalized marijuana and other less dangerous drugs, very little in day-to-day life would change. Your neighbor would be able to make personal consumption choices without fear of jail time, we might get some more European tourists and a couple of those “funny shops” would probably pop up on Main Street.
But we’d still be the same people: the hardworking, welcoming and open people of America, where nobody should get shot for no good reason.