From the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy:
(Washington, D.C.)—Today, Gil Kerlikowske, Director of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) announced the designation of eight new counties as High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTAs), which will further the coordination and development of drug-control efforts among Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in these areas.
The newly designated counties are:
Orange County in New York, as part of the New York/New Jersey HIDTA
Mendocino County in California, as part of the Northern California HIDTA
Porter County in Indiana, as part of the Lake County HIDTA
Lexington and Richland Counties in South Carolina, as part of the Atlanta HIDTA
Harford County in Maryland, as part of the Washington/Baltimore HIDTA
Putnam and Mercer Counties in West Virginia, as part of the Appalachia HIDTA
ONDCP’s HIDTA program provides Federal resources to designated areas to help reduce drug trafficking and its harmful consequences. Law enforcement organizations within HIDTAs assess drug-trafficking problems and design specific initiatives to decrease the production, manufacture, transportation, distribution, and chronic use of drugs and money laundering. There are currently 28 HIDTAs, which include approximately 16 percent of all counties in the United States and 60 percent of the U.S. population. HIDTA-designated counties are located in 46 states, as well as in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia.
“Close collaboration with our Federal, state, local, and tribal partners is a critical component of our efforts to reduce both the demand and supply of drugs,” said Kerlikowske. “By designating these counties as HIDTAs, we will create a powerful catalyst for cooperation among Federal, state, local, and tribal agencies working to make our communities healthier and safer.”
Overall drug use in the United States has dropped substantially over the past thirty years. In response to comprehensive efforts to address drug use at the local, state, Federal, and international levels, the rate of Americans using illicit drugs today is roughly half the rate it was in the late 70s. To build on this progress and support a public health approach to drug control outlined in the National Drug Control Strategy, the Obama Administration has committed over $10 billion for drug education programs and support for expanding access to drug treatment for addicts and over $9 billion for U.S. law enforcement efforts.
This is really no surprise. I read the article yesterday and realize I live in a county with blinders on, parents who enable their children and fail to teach them to value the rights of others, an overloaded judicial system that believes in quantity not quality and law enforcement that is undervalued. And rather than try to fix things by addressing the root cause of these problems, people pretend it’s not their problem – it’s someone else’.
I’ll be talking about this today on WAMD. Call in at 410-306-6270 or leave a comment here and I’ll read it on air.
BTW- let me do the math here for you: Even though we DO have real drug and crime problems in Harco, we’ve made the alibi into an art form and people will be bitching soon that this HIDTA designation is a bad thing.
Why? Money of course.
The HIDTA designation may in fact affect property values. Think about it. And while getting more federal monies to help fight the drug problem here is at the end of the day a good thing, the push back will come when people see their home values decrease. If things go well and those fed dollars are used correctly, it’d be a short term decrease and possibly actual make some inroads to fixing the problem instead of just shoo-ing it under the rug.
But what’ll happen is some community associations and developers will bitch to the local lawmakers that this is hurting their prop values and some how this will become a bad thing.
But what will be worse is continuing to ignore the problem. Then they will get worse and your home values will be much much worse.
We have got finally admit that this isn’t the rural Harford County our parents and Grandparents grew up in. It’s sad, but true.
For cryin’ out loud, just remove the penalties for selling/using. Legalize it! Tax it! Violent crime rates would drop drastically. How many crimes are committed every week over drug-related incidents? Law enforcement could devote more time and effort and tax dollars into fighting other major crimes. O’Malley would have even more of our tax money to pi$$ away on stupid $h*t. Maybe it’s time to “thin the herd”?