Pacific Century Fellows— Public Safety, part 2

After lunch we heard from Florence Nakakuni, U.S. Attorney, District of Hawai'i, and Charlene Thornton, the F.B.I. Special Agent in Charge, F.B.I., Honolulu. Ms. Nakakuni gave us a brief overview of the federal U.S. Attorney's office (93 U.S. Attorneys nationally) and its goals:
1) protect the national security of the United States,
2) fight crime,
3) protect the economy,
4) protect the environment,
5) ensure fairness in the marketplace.
To do that the U.S. Attorney's office prosecutes cases for the U.S., defends the U.S. in cases against it, and seeks to recover debts owed to the U.S. 90% of those crimes are criminal in nature with the trend from the last year showing violent crime going down while property crime has gone up. Much of that, according to Ms. Nakakuni and mirroring Clayton Frank from earlier in the day, is due to drugs. 50% of their criminal cases are drug related, and of those cases, 85% connect to crystal meth (followed by cocaine and then marijuana). Marijuana is still the most widely used drug, with prices around $400/ounce. 120,000 plants were seized this year, down from 300,000 ten years ago, mostly due to growing operations moving indoors and more marijuana coming in from Mexico and British Columbia. The Department of Justice is officially opposed to the legalization of marijuana for any use as it is seen, again mirroring Clayton Frank, as a gateway drug that leads inevitably to other "harder" drugs. Even medical marijuana, in their view, send the wrong message to kids that these mind-altering substances are not as dangerous as they can be. They have not been tested by the FDA so there is really no way of knowing the potency or all the negative side-effects.
Char Thornton followed with a brief overview of the F.B.I. as the principle investigating arm of the Justice Department. They currently have 56 field offices in the U.S. and 61 overseas with 30,000 employees, 13,500 of whom are agents (those who carry badges and guns). The Hawai'i office, which also covers Guam, American Samoa, the Marianas Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, has 205 agents, 103 of whom are agents. Despite our remote location, Ms. Thornton pointed out that HI definitely has the charcateristics of a potential terrorist target: prominent military bases, birthplace of the current president, and the upcoming Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. She said that pre-9/11 F.B.I. field offices had more discretion over what their priorities would be based on their particular circumstances, but now they are national priorities determined by Robert Mueller:
1) counterterrorism— internal threat
2) counter espionage/intelligence
3) cyber crime— Internet
4) public corruption— stimulus fraud in particular
5) civil rights
6) organized crime
7) white collar crime
8) violent crime
Ms. Thornton also agreed with Ms. Nakakuni and Mr. Frank that crystal meth is one of the most deleterious elements in our society, but she conceded that is it virtually impossible to stop it from coming into Hawai'i. In her opinion, law enforcement is not the way to solve that problem ("we can't arrest our way out of our crystal meth epidemic") and that focusing on the demand side is the way to contain it.

Connecting back to my earlier post on Systems Thinking, there appears to be a pretty clear 'stop' with respect to fighting crime in Hawai'i and that's crystal meth. That nothing new to people in the criminal justice system, but it makes me wonder if fighting marijuana is really a wise use of our resources. The question of causation versus correlation with respect to the whole 'gateway drug' argument is problemmatic in my mind. Just because you can draw a line from most crystal meth users to their having used marijuana at one time earlier in their lives doesn't mean the marijuana use lead to their crystal meth use. There has to be a medical explanation about how the two drugs stimulate completely different parts of the brain which would explain the completely different reactions people have when they are under the influence of them. I have a feeling if you asked a police officer if he or she would rather encounter a criminal under the influence of marijuana or meth they would always choose the marijuana user. You might hear about some families' or individual's lives being ruined by marijuana 'addiction', but every family and individual seems to get ruined by meth. So then doesn't it make more sense to focus all of our efforts on eradicating that drug and leaving the marijuana growers essentially alone? I've also heard the economic argument made that leaving marijuana growers alone will cause the product to flood the market, bring the price down and steer more kids and adults towards the cheaper (less violent, less addictive) high while also stimulating the local economy with the extra cash that will stay in the islands. I'm not entirely convinced of that argument, but I'm also not convinced by our leading crime fighters and public safety officials that it is the best way to be using our prevention dollars. Here are a couple of articles from both sides of the debate: Study Says Marijuana No Gateway Drug from Science Blog (I can't vouch for its credibility, but it was the number one hit on Google) and Marijuana is Gateway Drug for Two Debates from the New York Times.