I was blessed to serve on the executive board of the Association of Oklahoma Narcotic Enforcers, including several years as president or vice president. Every year, the executive boards of the state narcotic associations meet in Washington D.C, part of the National Narcotic Officers Association Coalition. I was honored to attend as part of the Oklahoma delegation in 2018, 2019, and 2020. In 2018, around our hotel, just blocks from Capitol Hill, we periodically observed signs of homelessness, and smelled the odor of marijuana no more than two times. In 2019, the homeless population had increased and we smelled marijuana perhaps half a dozen times during our 4 day stay. By 2020, the homeless population was markedly worse. On the first morning of that year, across from our hotel on the sidewalk sat a man wrapped in blankets, wet from the rain, rolling marijuana into a “blunt” (cigar). My colleagues saw a man unconscious and in need of medical attention (an apparent overdose), and waited with him until the ambulance arrived. Walking to our hotel the first evening from dinner, I saw another homeless man in clear distress with first responders tending to him. That same night, I walked outside of a restaurant to FaceTime my children and a mentally disturbed homeless man walked up to me and screamed something incoherent. All of those events were in the first twenty-four hours. Throughout our trip, we observed the streets were littered with discarded clothes, trash, and foil packets from cigars (clearly from the smoking of marijuana), and we smelled marijuana so often we could not keep track.
As part of the Coalition’s effort to represent its members, we spend a day on Capital Hill meeting with our respective congressional members reporting on public safety in our home states and providing information to our lawmakers. My 2020 Oklahoma delegation had commented on the impressive design of the Library of Congress, the grandiose steps leading to the Supreme Court, and the beauty of the Dome – in fact, Capitol Hill is an assemblage of beautiful architecture, skilled masonry, and aesthetic beauty. The day on Capitol Hill is an exhausting one – a day full of meetings and several miles of walking across the Capitol Hill complex. As we walked back to our hotel from our hours on the Hill, I noticed we had not seen a single homeless person. I made the comment to my group of colleagues, and we collectively noticed that after days of being inundated with severe homelessness marked by drug use and mental illness, we had experienced a temporary reprieve – as if we had been in a time warp from decades before.
But then we crossed the street leaving the Capitol grounds. And immediately -immediately- we saw several destitute homeless people, observed the trash and disgusting accessories associated with the homeless, and once again smelled the odor of marijuana. On the capital grounds, the Capital Police enforce federal law, and marijuana is against federal law on federal land. But Washington D.C. had legalized marijuana and liberal policies on enforcement provide an environment fostering drug use and the resultant homelessness. In the 1980’s, America was familiar with the disgusting squalor of a crack house – in 2020, a combination of legalizing marijuana and lax enforcement turned Washington D.C. into a virtual crack house.
And the irony hit me like a punch – here we are, traveling to Washington D.C. to tell lawmakers that the existence of drug law and the enforcement thereof will make our communities noticeably safer and better. We didn’t need to cite the west coast both before and after drug legalization, or outline the debilitating statistics from Denver after the legalization of marijuana, but the single greatest example of the visible devastation caused by reducing drug laws and the enforcement thereof was our nation’s capital itself.
