Two cheers

This is one of those stories where what is being said is less interesting than who it is saying it.

Peter N. Letang was one of those law-and-order, tough-on-crime prosecutors. He was a Republican deputy attorney general in the state of Delaware from 1974 to 1980, and from 1986 until he stepped down Friday.

Now that he's in private practice, what does this tough former chief prosecutor have to say? The "war on drugs has failed."

Letang … said it is possible to order almost any illegal substance through contacts in Wilmington today and get it here tomorrow.

And the drugs come "in good-size quantities. … That tells me, notwithstanding all the efforts and money we are throwing at this thing, that we are not having very much success," he said.

Prohibition failed to stop the consumption of alcohol in the Roaring '20s, he said, and generations of law enforcement haven't been able to stop prostitution.

"I think we are deluding ourselves to think we are able to stem the tide, the influx of drugs. It is a situation where we have had very little success in trying to shut it down. Something has to be done to reduce the profit motive from the drug trade," he said.

Letang isn't calling for legalization — he's no Kurt Schmoke or "Bunny Colvin" — not quite at least, but after nearly 30 years of locking up drug dealers as part of the so-called War on Drugs, he's ready to try a different strategy:

Letang said he does not know what the solution is, but added, "If we can take away from your need to pay for a $500-a-day or $200-a-day habit, if we can reduce that to 10 bucks, then you'd hit a lot less people over the head or steal a lot fewer cars than you are now."

"There are many reasons why you don't want to decriminalize this. I don't think you ought to be able to go into Happy Harry's and buy it over the counter. But if there is some middle ground somewhere, we should pursue it."

If the state put all the money it spends on interdiction into treatment instead, Letang said, "You could have a counselor holding the hand of every student in the state." And then, "it might have some impact."

Instead, all interdiction seems to be doing is driving up the price of drugs, making them more and more lucrative for those who sell them.

"It is an economics argument," he said.

When the big drug dealers are taken off the street … "Boom, someone else takes his place. Pull someone else off the conveyer belt," he said. "The only thing you can try to do is take the profit incentive out of it somehow," he said.

So two cheers for Peter Letang. (Only two because he's still hedging his bets a bit here, and because he waited until after retiring to say all this.) His comments also allowed reporter Sean O'Sullivan to ask Wilmington's mayor what he thought about the War on Drugs:

Wilmington Mayor James M. Baker said he agreed with everything Letang said without reservation.

"I've said all along that if this was a real war, we would have surrendered long ago."