Gangs and drugs are coming to town, and the gang members are not tourists but our own residents. Evidence of the gang phenomenon is found everywhere graffiti, colors, signs, shootings and, of course, drugs.

Gangs at work in many Chicago neighborhoods is old news, and frequent gang shootings and drug busts are the expected norm. In February, Alderman Ed Smith, representing Chicago's West Side, led his umpteenth march against gangs and drugs, but both continue to thrive there. One marcher joining Ald. Smith complained that almost every block is controlled by a gang and that kids going home from school must know signs for five or six gangs in order to make it home safely. Less expectedly, the march of gangs and drugs is reaching into Chicago's nicer neighborhoods and the suburbs.

In November 1995, two high school students were shot to death as they sat in a van in the Clearing neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side, victims of gang gunfire. School, community and law-enforcement authorities promptly assembled in a gymnasium to read brochures and hear speakers that apprised parents how to recognize the early signs of gang growth and development. As one might expect, the brochures encouraged parents to talk to their kids, spend time with them and offer them constructive alternatives to gangs. But the march of gangs and drugs has continued incessantly despite the brochures and prayers of parents.

In December and January, a pair of double homicides struck the suburban Cook County communities of Calumet City and DesPlaines. Investigators attribute the murders to drug activity in one case and retaliation for the theft of drugs in another. February also brought gang shootings to Bridgeview with three teens shot, and an outbreak of gunplay between rival gang members hit the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago particularly hard.

Nationwide, for the first half of 1995, murders dropped 12 percent, but the collar counties of DuPage, Kane and Lake experienced soaring murder rates. The establishment of drug and gang-turf boundaries certainly contributed to the downward blip in the murder statistics of major U.S. cities including Chicago, but suburban and rural areas, not yet suffering from the full impact of the war on drugs, stand out as fertile prohibition turf as gangs advance there to stake out new drug territory.

Lamentably, gangs and drugs flourish in drug prohibition soil, and municipalities have no meaningful strategy in place to stop them. Most frustratingly, municipalities are without access to any tool to stop the gangs and drugs in an environment where black-market, prohibition forces are simply awesome. Municipalities are left to fight a holding action against gangs and drugs with very limited weapons, such as new community policing strategies, more federally-funded police, cul-de-sac crime prevention, harsher juvenile laws, anti-gang ordinances subject to constitutional attack, calls for school uniforms and the creation of gang task forces on the state and local level.

From the office of the president to the office of a local prosecutor, the escalation of anti-gang and anti- drug symbolism marks the federal contribution to the fight against gangs and drugs. Jim Burns, U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, claimed that the mass arrest of Gangster Disciple (GD) leaders, one of the nation's more successful drug gangs, had "cut the head off" the monster. Yet, GD drug sales flourish in

May 1996 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 25

Chicago and, reportedly, in thirty-five states. In January, President Clinton nominated a much-decorated soldier, General Barry McCaffrey, to replace a much- decorated chief of police, Lee Brown, as U.S. drug czar. The appointment is a symbolic escalation of a domestic drug war. But the economic force of prohibition — black-market prices and unlimited profits — goes unaddressed by political leaders. Despite slow progress, signs of hope and drug policy reform are within reach.

In January of this year, the Chicago Tribune, in a dramatic change of editorial policy, courageously called for the creation of a national commission similar to the Wickersham Commission to study and, possibly, recommend changes in America's drug-prohibition policies. President Herbert Hoover created the Wickersham Commission preliminary to the end of alcohol prohibition in the midst of Tommy-gun shootings, gang-war executions, public corruption and prohibition-invented highballs. In February, America On Line also took the lead by surveying its subscribers, "Is America winning the war on illegal drugs?"

In overwhelming response, 91.30% of 17,994 responders said, the U.S. was not winning the war. The survey results and subscriber comments — like the war is a "joke," "unwinnable from the outset" — were so lopsidedly anti-drug war that AOL's survey report said, "Maybe the AOL survey should have asked whether the U.S. should legalize drugs since so many members not only feel the present program has failed but favor legalization as the appropriate course of action."

Mounting public sentiment against the drug war could yet move the drug war issue center stage before the November elections, forcing candidates to address prohibition and its consequences. In this writer's estimation, the end of the drug war is inevitable and on the horizon.

Once the drug war is behind us, municipalities will again have a fighting chance to promote the public health, safety and welfare. Schools will be able to disassemble their metal detectors. Students will return to their books. Gone will be the warped value taught to kids by draconian, mandatory-minimum prison sentences that it is best to set up and inform on friends to save oneself from his/her own "drug crimes." Also, with the end of the drug war, municipal budgets like federal and state budgets will turn from red to black, and the march of gangs and drugs will be but a trampling of the past. •

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