Covering a bust: Sometimes an exercise in repetition, lost hope

We are sure it is no surprise to anyone-drug busts sell newspapers. But in a lot of other ways, covering these roundups can be fairly disheartening.

For the last few years, we have been trying to keep a computer file with mug shots of arrested folks that we use in the paper. This allows us to use a photo with any follow up stories-and sometimes on deadline it provides the mug shot to go with a breaking story when the law is too busy with other work to send it on yet. This week we used that file to give ourselves a little insight into whether we had “seen” any of the folks arrested in the latest drug sweep before.

Our old mug shot files turned up a few matches, and led us to further pondering of the nature of drug crimes-especially in a rural setting like our own. According to the 1997 Survey of Inmates conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice and released in 2000, 58 percent of drug prisoners - an estimated 124,885 of state inmates - have no history of violence or high level drug activity. Rates of rearrest are high among drug offenders at nearly 50 percent.

One of the distinctions we try to make for our reporting purposes is to give out the identities of people charged with such drug crimes as possession with intent to distribute, or drug trafficking. For the lesser charge of simple possession of a drug, we generally skip reporting on those folks unless they have committed some companion crime, or are notable for some other reason.

The rub comes in for all of us trying to draw these distinctions when you think about where the line is drawn for those charges. It can be sort of befuddling. For instance, possession with intent to distribute indicates that a certain threshold amount of that particular drug was found on the suspect's person. But this type of charge does not differentiate between the drug kingpin that lurks like a specter in the general public's subconscious and the much more lamentable figure of a strung out junky, standing around with a pocketful of $10 crack rocks, spreading the poison to support their own destructive habit.

On the one hand, it is always a boost to see law enforcement agencies banding together, doing in-depth long-term investigation into crimes and taking pains to try and keep our communities crime-free. On the other hand, you cannot help but wonder if the American system of fighting drugs is as effective as it can be when you see the same names, the same sad photographs, the lost youth and wretched consequences of addiction's hold.