Jack A. Cole
State Police Undercover Officer
jackacole@... (781) 393-6985 www.leap.cc

"This is Not a War on Drugs—it's a War on People."

Jack Cole knows about the war on drugs from several perspectives. He
retired as a Detective Lieutenant after a 26-year career with the New
Jersey State Police. For twelve of those years Jack worked as an
undercover narcotics officer. His investigations spanned the spectrum
of possible cases, from street drug users and midlevel drug dealers
in New Jersey to international "billion-dollar" drug trafficking
organizations. Jack ended his undercover career living nearly two
years in Boston and New York City, posing as a fugitive drug dealer
wanted for murder, while tracking members of a terrorist organization
that robbed banks, planted bombs in corporate headquarters, court-
houses, police stations, and airplanes and ultimately murdered a New
Jersey State Trooper.
After retiring, Jack dealt with the emotional residue left from his
participation in the unjust war on drugs by working to reform current
drug policy. He moved to Boston to continue his education. Jack holds
a B.A. in Criminal Justice and a Masters degree in Public Policy.
Currently writing his dissertation for the Public Policy Ph.D.
Program at the University of Massachusetts, his major focus is on the
issues of race and gender bias, brutality and corruption in law
enforcement. Jack believes ending drug prohibition will go a long way
toward correcting those problems.
Jack has taught courses to police recruits and veteran officers on
ethics, integrity, moral decision-making, and the detrimental effects
of racial profiling. As Executive Director of LEAP, he has also
presented papers at international conferences and spoken on drug
policy reform in the European Parliament, as well as presenting over
600 times to students, educators, professional, civic, benevolent,
and religious groups in Australia, Canada, Central America, Europe,
New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and across the United States. Jack is
passionate in his belief that the drug war is steeped in racism, that
it is needlessly destroying the lives of young people, and that it is
corrupting our police. His discussions give his audience an
alternative prospective of the US war on drugs from the view of a
veteran drug-warrior turned against the war.
To book a speaker, contact:
Mike Smithson, Speakers Bureau Director
speakers@...
cell: (315) 243-5844 fax: (315) 488-3630




Updated February 1, 2008

"End Prohibition Now!"
By Retired Narcotics Undercover Officer, Jack A. Cole,
I represent LEAP (law enforcement against prohibition) an
international nonprofit educational organization that was created to
give voice to all the current and former members of law enforcement
who believe the war on drugs is a failed policy and who wish to
support alternative policies that will lower the incidence of death,
disease, crime and addiction — four categories of harm that were
supposed to be alleviated by the war on drugs but which in truth were
made infinitely worse by that war. We went public with out speakers'
bureau in January 2003 and have grown from our five founding members
to over 8,500. LEAP has 100 speakers; a powerful and respected
Advisory Board, made up of a U.S. Governor, four sitting Federal
District Court judges, a sheriff, five former police chiefs, the
Mayor of Vancouver, British Colombia who is retired from the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, the former Attorney General of Colombia,
South America and from the United Kingdom, a former Chief Constable
and a Detective Chief Investigator of Scotland Yard who was
operational head of narcotic task forces for all of England.
The first thing I need to tell you good people is that the U.S.
policy of a "war on drugs" has been, is, and forever will be, a total
and abject failure. This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on
people — our own people — our children, our parents, ourselves.
I joined the New Jersey State Police in 1964 and six years later
joined their narcotic bureau. I started working in narcotics at the
beginning of the war on drugs. The war has been one of the least
partisan policy determinations in the history of US politics. Every
president since Nixon has escalated this war and its unintended
consequences but the term "war on drugs" was coined and created by
Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968 when he was running for president. Mr.
Nixon believed a "tough on crime" platform would garner a lot of
votes but if he could be in charge of a war — wow! Of course as we
all know, it worked. Mr. Nixon was elected President and by 1970 he
had convinced Congress to pass legislation giving massive funding to
any police department willing hire officers to fight his war on
drugs. To give you an idea of how large those grants were, in the New
Jersey state police during 1964 we had 1,700 officers and a seven man
narcotics unit. That number had always seemed adequate for the job we
needed to do. Six years later, when I was trying to join the
narcotics unit we still had the same numbers. Then overnight in
October 1970 we went from a seven man narcotics unit to a seventy-six
person narcotics bureau. All paid for by federal tax dollars. And
that program was replicated in police departments across the country.
When an organization is increased by eleven times it sets up
certain expectations. Since police are mainly judged by the number of
arrests they make that meant we were expected to arrest at least
eleven times as many people in the coming year for drug offenses as
we did in 1969.
One-third of the seventy-six new detectives were
designated "undercover agents." I happened to fall in that one-third
and that is how I spent most of the next fourteen years of my life.
After two-weeks training we hit the streets, where we were supposed
to start arresting drug dealers. That was not an easy job in 1970 for
a couple of reasons.
First, we really didn't have much of a problem with drugs in 1970 and
what problem we did have was basically with soft drugs, marijuana,
hashish, LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), etc. Hard drugs such as
methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin were almost unheard of back
then — certainly unheard of compared to what they are today. Drugs
were more a nuisance than a threat to our society. For instance, in
1970 people were less likely to die as a result of the drug culture
than from falling down the stairs in their on homes or choking to
death on food at their own dinner tables. Second, back then neither
we nor our bosses had any idea of how to fight a war on drugs. Our
bosses did know one thing though; they knew how to keep that federal
cash cow being milked in their personal barnyard. To accomplish that
they had to make the drug war appear to be an absolute necessity. So
early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our statistics and
lie we did. Because dealers were not on most street corners or in all
our schools — as they are now — we targeted our undercover officers
on small friendship groups of kids in college, in high school or in-
between who were "dipping and dabbing" in drugs — their term for
experimentation.
So we arrested people who were basically drug-users and charged them
as drug-dealers. We exaggerated the amount of drugs we seized by
adding the weight of any cutting agents we found (lactose, mannitol,
starch, or sucrose) to the weight of the illegal drug. So we might
seize one ounce of cocaine and four pounds of lactose — but somewhere
between the location where we seized it and the police laboratory it
all magically became cocaine. We also the inflated the worth of the
drugs we seized by releasing the "estimated street value" of those
drugs to the media, which vastly elevated their importance. For
instance in 1971 I was buying individual ounces of cocaine for
fifteen hundred dollars each but when we released the estimated
street value of one ounce of cocaine to the media it was closer to
$20,000. Just ratchet it up a little and the drug war would appear
absolutely essential. The federal dollars would keep flowing to our
departments and our bosses would be happy. Who was to question our
estimates and if they did who would they come to with their
questions? Us. We could always justify them in some way.
However, as the war on drugs ground on we no longer had to lie about
its getting worse. With each passing year of this continuing war,
the "drug problem" has become exponentially more dreadful — an
unintended effect caused by the war itself. The war publicized and
aggrandized the use and sale of drugs and peaked the interest of a
large portion of the youth of our country. In many cases, the drug
culture portrayed in movies and on television seemed exciting and
romantic to American teenagers. Many poor young people in the centers
of our larger cities looked to the drug dealer as a role model — and
the only way out of the poverty and misery of the ghetto. The dealer
was the one person in their communities with the hot cars, hotter
women, "money to burn," and leisure time in which to burn it.
In the first years the vast majority of arrests we made were for
using or transporting marijuana, the drug that was easiest to
interdict due to its sheer bulk and the fact that police officers
could actually detect the odor of the drug if large amounts were
being carried in the trunk of a vehicle they had stopped on the
highway. At that time the media equated marijuana with heroin and
cocaine; and the majority of the public hardly knew the difference
between one drug and another. Marijuana seizures were the first drug
interdictions that the police could count in the thousands of pounds
but to the public drugs were drugs and a thousand pounds was an awful
lot of drugs — this also made the drug problem appear much more
important than it actually was at the time.
There have been many unintended consequences in the war on drugs. One
of the unintended consequences of the successful interdiction of
large amounts of marijuana was that it caused many marijuana dealers
to switch to harder drugs that were less detectable and far more
profitable, pound for pound. Among those drugs were heroin, cocaine,
and methamphetamine. An even worse consequence was that in a few
short years the price of marijuana increased by 2,500 percent, from
$160 a pound to $4,000 a pound, causing many users to switch to
harder drugs, which were less detectable, more plentiful and were
becoming ever cheaper. The war on drugs actually increased drug usage
and made it more likely that those using soft drugs would choose
harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
Political motivation has always been evident in many of the drug
arrests made by police. Holdovers from the "turn-on and drop-out"
flower children of the late 1960s, most of whom also protested the
United States' involvement in the war in Vietnam, were among the
first groups we concentrated on but we quickly included activist
groups from racial and ethnic minorities, such as the Black Panthers.
After all, H.R. Haldemann, Richard M. Nixon's Chief of Staff,
recorded in his 1969 diary entry that Nixon emphasized, "You have to
face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is
to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to."
The system they devised was the war on drugs and for Nixon's purposes
he could have hardly hoped for more. The war on drugs has spawned
the most racist laws seen in the United States since slavery. Indeed,
there are more black and brown men in prison in the United States
today (1,300,020) than the total number of male slaves populating
this country in 1840 (1,244,384).
By three years into the war, we were actually arresting some real mid-
level dealers of other drugs, such as, the members of "The Breed"
Motorcycle Gang who were selling methamphetamine out of the
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.
In 1977, seven years into the drug war, I kicked down a door in the
Corona section of Queens, New York and seized around 350 thousand
dollars and what was touted by the newspapers as "the largest
shipment of Mexican brown heroin ever confiscated in the United
States." We were in the newspapers over a week on that case — the
heroin seizure, which is a little embarrassing to mention today,
amounted to nineteen pounds. But the "drug problem" kept right on
expanding, to the point that by 1978 I was working on Billion-Dollar,
international, cocaine and heroin trafficking rings.
Then in 1982 I was assigned to a deep cover investigation, living
nearly two years in Boston and New York City, posing as a fugitive
drug dealer wanted for murder, while tracking members of a terrorist
organization that robbed banks, planted bombs in corporate
headquarters, court-houses, police stations, and airplanes and
ultimately murdered a New Jersey State Trooper. It took me two years
to finish that job and when I returned to New Jersey in 1984, I never
worked another narcotic case. I was very happy about that. This is
the reason why.
This "Heroin Price and Purity" chart was created by the Federal Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) and placed on their Internet web
site in what they called "The DEA Briefing Book 2001." The chart
depicts the cost and purity of heroin — by year — from 1980 to 1999.
The cost they are talking about was the average cost that one heroin
user had to pay to "get high" one time and the purity they talk of
was the average purity of one dose of street level drugs, which the
heroin user purchased. DEA started their chart in 1980 but as I
mentioned above I started buying heroin in 1970 so I can back this
chart up ten years.
In 1970, we purchased "tre-bags" of heroin so called because they
cost three dollars per bag. We bought them in multiples of two,
because a heroin user needed to shoot two of those bags to get high.
Two bags at $3 each, so in 1970 it cost $6 to get high. At that time
the purity of the product was only about 1.5 percent (purity means
how much of the white or brown powder contained in the small glassine
envelopes was actually heroin). After ten years of fighting the "drug
war," the purity had more than doubled and the cost to get high had
dipped to $3.90. And after thirty years of "drug war" the price
to "get off" on heroin had plummeted to 80 cents in 1980 equivalent
dollars because the purity of heroin had increased by 25 times its
original level — then registering over 38 percent pure in street
buys. By the year 2000 the purity of heroin had become greater than
70 percent in Newark, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Heroin users are four times more likely to die of an overdose today
than they were in 1979. Why are so many people are overdosing on
drugs today? Addicts do not consume more and more drugs each day
until their bodies can no longer take the poison and they die. That
is a myth. They overdose because they get what is known in the trade
as a "Hot-Shot." If for any reason the drug dealer is distracted
while mixing the nearly pure heroin he gets from another country with
the cutting agent he is using to dilute the drug before reselling it
he is left with a lumpy product. On that day, some of his clients are
going to be very angry because they get the part that contains mostly
cutting agent and they think the dealer tried to beat them out of
their money. But another unlucky group of his clients will get the
part of the mix that contains mostly pure heroin. When they cook up
and inject the powder they think is 10 percent heroin and it is
really 80 or 90 percent heroin, they don't get angry they get dead —
there is no second chance for them. That is why we are hearing of
more and more cases where 5, 10, even 20 people overdose in the same
suburban town on the same day. That is due to a bad mix. And folks,
these kids who are overdosing are somebody's children — they could be
mine or yours.
According to researchers, Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen, "The
increased deadly nature of drugs under prohibition led to 15,000 more
deaths in 2000 than would have occurred had prohibition not made
drugs more dangerous [than they were in 1979], assuming everything
else remained constant.
Traditionally the worse the problem gets the more police and money we
throw into the mix. Local and State police where not the only ones
benefiting from the influx of "big bucks" being offered them to fight
the war on drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration of the federal
government had 2,775 employees when it was created in 1972, to
replace the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. By 2005 DEA
had quadrupled its staff to 10,894 but its budget, the money we give
it to fight a failed war, had increased to 34 times the original
amount — from $65 million in 1972 to over $2.1 Billion in 2006.
In 1980 we got a new man in the White House. President Ronald Reagan
told us we were doing a good job arresting people but we were going
about it the wrong way. "Think of it of an economics equation," he
said. "You are working on the supply side arresting drug dealers when
you should be working on the demand side arresting drug users. If you
arrest enough users you will frighten them away and without users
there will be no dealers.
At roughly the same time the politicians told the cops, "Just do your
job better. Arrest more people and we will back you up a hundred
percent. We will pass the harshest laws ever conceived (mandatory
minimums and `three strikes, you're out'). `Lock them up and throw
away the key' and our problem will be solved." Well, lock them up we
did — but our problem was not solved.
That was when the "war on drugs" became a self-perpetuating and ever-
expanding policy. By 2004 we had quadrupled the yearly arrest figures
of 1970, to where we are now arresting 1.9 million nonviolent drug
offenders each year — with nearly half of those arrests for marijuana
violations and because Mr. Reagan said arrest users 88 percent of the
marijuana arrests were for possession. I'm throwing around a lot of
numbers here and numbers out of context are meaningless. Just how
many are 1.9 million people? That number is larger than the
population of New Mexico. So just imagine that this year we arrest
every man, woman, child and baby in the state of New Mexico. And next
year we will have to find a new state because we continue making 1.9
million arrests every year.
More than a thousand people were arrested as a result of my
undercover work. I can't tell you how many of those young folks would
have gone on to have a perfectly productive life had I not intervened
but I am sure the number is huge. We have a saying at LEAP, "You can
get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction." A
conviction will track you every day of your life because it is on a
computer. Every time you go to get a job it is hanging over your head
like a big ugly cloud.
You know, I could even live with that if it made a bit of difference
to lowering the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction but
it doesn't. And the policies are so destructive. Think of all the
people you know personally who have ever used an illicit drug when
they were young — then put the drugs behind them and went on to lead
a perfectly happy and productive life. If you can't think of any and
I doubt that, I can name a few for you. You remember the fellow who
was in the news so much a few years ago — the one who used to smoke
but didn't inhale? That's right, President William J. Clinton. But I
don't want to just pick on Democrats. We have a man in the White
House today who used illicit drugs, George W. Bush. And Vice
Presidents, Al Gore and Dan Quail, along with former speaker of the
house, Newt Gingrich used illicit drugs. The line is too long to
enumerate but all those folks have two things in common. They all
used illicit drugs when young then put them down and went on to
become powerful politicians and once they got there they all got
selective amnesia. They forgot where they came from. Suddenly they
came to believe police have to arrest young people for doing exactly
what they did — in order to save them — and guarantee those arrested
will never achieve the levels of success of our current politicians.
And what have we accomplished with all our hard work and monetary
investment. On February 5, 1994, I clipped a photograph out of the
New York Times Newspaper. It caught my eye for several reasons. There
was no accompanying article, just the picture and that picture was
buried on page 23 of the newspaper. The event occurred in the Corona
section of Queens, New York, just down the street from where 17 years
earlier I had made the largest seizure of brown heroin — nineteen
pounds. As you can see, they did a little better than I did. The
caption relates, "police and federal authorities recovered 4,800
pounds of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $350 million…."
Nearly two and a half tons of cocaine and according to the paper of
record, the New York Times, this seizure didn't even rate a single
article — let alone being in the paper every day for a week. "How
could that be?" you might ask. How could we have degenerated to this
point where the seizure of tons of cocaine hardly matters. I'll tell
you how. It is because by 1994 the police were doing such a great job
for us, regularly seizing tons of not just cocaine but heroin. We
were seizing so much and so often that the New York Times apparently
felt it couldn't keep up with us writing articles so they just took
to summarizing those multi-ton shipments. As they did in Joseph B.
Treaster's July 15, 1994 article, "3 Arrested in Smuggling Cocaine
Found in Newark Cargo," on page B3 of the New York Times. Mr.
Treaster wrote of, the seizure of "[t]hree tons of cocaine hidden in
cargo at the Port of Newark," but he also mentioned, "Five tons of
Cocaine in Houston…three [more] tons in San Francisco…five
[additional] tons in El Paso" — all in a three-month period. So are
you getting the picture here--this is a long, long way from nineteen
pounds. We are being flooded with high grade hard drugs.
And how has the war on drugs aided our children? Has it reduced drug
availability or use in our schools? (When I give my public
presentations, I always ask how many people know who John Walters is.
Almost no one ever knows. I tell them John Walters is the Drug Czar
of the United States — the "Top Cop" — the one in charge of
coordinating the U.S. war on drugs. But I also tell them there is no
reason they should know his name since every year or so we throw out
the old Czar and appoint a new one because the old one has never been
capable of diminishing this country's "drug problem." However, I
suggest to them, we shouldn't be too hard on the drug czars because
we have given them an impossible task — we cannot arrest our way out
of our drug problem. So the only thing that really changes from the
old drug czar to the new drug czar is the new drug czar tends to lie
a whole lot better than the old one. And John Walters is really a
pip. He would have you believe we are winning this war. He pointed
to "Monitoring the Future 2002," the largest government funded study
ever done on the behaviors, attitudes, and values of American
secondary school students, college students, and young adults, and
said, "This survey confirms that our drug-prevention efforts are
working…." What did the report really say? The study asserted that
over a ten-year period, between 1991 and 2002, marijuana use among
students in all school grades across the United States increased. How
much did it increase? — 30 percent for twelfth graders; 65 percent
for tenth graders; and for eighth graders, an 88 percent increase!
How can John Walters say this study shows our drug prevention efforts
are working? Could the drug-warriors possibly be lying to us?
A 2002 drug survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse at Columbia University revealed that schoolchildren across the
country say it is easier for them to buy marijuana than it is to buy
beer and cigarettes. How can that be?
The answer is really not very complicated. When I first worked
undercover, I was hanging out with about 20 kids in front of a
bowling alley at a suburban strip-mall. They were not criminals. They
didn't mistreat anyone, rob, or steal. And they were not drug
dealers, at least not as I identify the term. In the words of one of
the more courageous Juvenile Court Judges who later threw out many of
these types of cases, "They were not selling drugs they were simply
accommodating friends." What would happen was one night "person A"
got a chance to use his parents' car so he could make the trip to New
York City to buy drugs for the whole group (at the beginning of the
war one had to go to a large city to buy drugs). The next night it
might be "person B" or "person C" who made the trip to the city.
Whoever made the run, first went to all the friends, took orders for
what each wanted and collected enough money from them to pay for the
drugs they ordered. On returning from the city, the individual doses
of drugs were handed out to those who had ordered them. No profit was
made on the transactions. Most probably didn't even earn enough to
pay for their gas.
Because I had befriended them, I could also buy drugs from them in
that manner. That after all is the job of an undercover agent. It is
not the romanticized work you see in the movies or on television.
Every war must have a spy and in the war on drugs the spy is the
undercover agent. You see, the drug culture may not involve
victimless crimes but it does involve consensual crimes. Both the
seller and the buyer get something they want from the transaction and
neither is going to report the other party to the police. That is why
it is necessary to infiltrate that world with an undercover agent who
is willing to arrest any-and-all players, whether they are dealers or
users. The job of all undercover agents is to become the best friend
and closest confidant of the persons they are targeted against — so
they can betray them and send them to jail. And when they are through
with each person they are targeted against the next and the pattern
repeats — friendship-betrayal-jail — over and over, hundreds of
times.
But I digress. Let's get back to those kids in the parking lot. None
of them were 21 years old but they could and did sell me any kind of
illegal drugs you can name. However, they often came up to me and
said, "Hey Jack, we're thirsty — will you go into the liquor store
and buy us some beer? We can't buy beer." They could get all the
illegal drugs they wanted but couldn't buy beer. How can that be?
The answer is so simple that it has apparently never occurred to our
drug czars. Beer and cigarettes are legal commodities and the people
who sell them are licensed to do so. Selling those drugs is the way
they make their livelihood and they will do whatever they can to
protect those licenses. I am not saying if drugs were legal that no
children would be able to get drugs. Nothing works perfectly. But no
illicit drug dealer is going to worry about checking your child's
birth certificate to see if he or she is old enough to buy drugs —
the street dealer only want to see one thing — "Show me the money!"
And once they've seen the money it doesn't matter if the child is
four years old, he or she will be given the drugs. We know this
because we have recorded cases of exactly that happening.
So, how much money am I talking about here? Enough money to bribe a
cop? Enough to buy a judge or a politician? Enough to convince
legitimate bankers to wash that dirty money through their banks? In
just the banks of the Southern half of Florida in one year over seven
billion dollars washed through. I'm not saying the money spent around
the world on illicit drugs each year is enough to bribe a cop. I'm
saying it's enough money to buy a whole country. Over 500 billion
dollars is spent each year on illegal drugs. That's a lot of money.
Until a year ago that was 100 billion dollars more than the US
Defense Budget and the US Defense Budget is larger than the next 13
nations with high budgets — combined. It also amounts to eight
percent of the world's total international trade, about the same as
spent in the international textile trade. One of the main
differences between the two trades is that folks in the textile
industry only make a few percent profit on their investment — in the
illegal drug industry nearly everything is profit. After all, what
are we are talking about here — simply weeds. It doesn't matter
whether we are talking about marijuana from the Cannabis plant,
cocaine from the coca bush, or heroin from the opium poppy — it is
all just weeds. Those of us charged with destroying it, cut it down
or pull it up by the roots or fly over it and spray it with poison.
We also poison the poor folks growing it but we don't seem worry
about that. However, the point is, we have to go back and destroy the
plants all over again each year. They are so hardy and they will grow
nearly anywhere that they literally have zero value — No value at
all. That is, until we make them illegal. Once we prohibit them,
their value becomes astronomically high; nearly beyond belief. So
much so that marijuana is worth more ounce-for-ounce than gold and
heroin worth more than uranium, with cocaine worth something in
between. From the locations where it is grown, mostly in third-world
countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, to where it is sold in
New York or Los Angeles, the increase in value can be up to seventeen
thousand percent! How would you business folks reading this like to
work on a mere 17,000 percent increase in value of your product?
I realized long ago that when uniformed officers arrested a robber or
rapist the number of rapes and robberies declines. They took someone
off the streets that made our communities safer for everyone. But
when I arrested a drug dealer the number of drug sales didn't change
at all. I was simply creating a job opening for a long line of people
more than willing to risk arrest for those obscene profits. It was
actually worse than that. I wasn't just creating a job opening; I was
creating a safe job opening because it they tried to get the job
while the dealer was still on the corner he would probably shoot
them. I would suggest to you that whole armies of police cannot stop
drug trafficking when the profits are this immense.
A hundred years ago there was not a single federally illicit drug in
the United States. In 1914 the US government decided it wanted to
justify making certain drugs illegal so it estimated that 1.3 percent
of the population was addicted to drugs. "We can't have that," they
said, and they passed the 1914 Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act. Fifty-six
years later the US government wanted to justify a policy starting a
war on drugs, so they conducted a survey that showed 1.3 percent of
the population was addicted to drugs. After nearly four decades of
fueling this war with over a trillion dollars of our taxes and
making nearly 38 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, what
are the results? Our court system is choked with the escalating
number of drug prosecutions and our quadrupled prison population has
made building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry; with
2.2 million incarcerated today and another 1.9 million arrested
every year for nonviolent drug offenses — more per capita than any
country in the world. Where will it end? The United States has 4.6
percent of the world's population and 22.5 percent of its prisoners —
right here in this "land of freedom"! And today, 1.3 percent of the
population is addicted to drugs.
The only thing that has changed in a hundred years, whether drugs
were legal, whether they were illicit, or whether they were illicit
and we were involved in a war against them, is that those drugs are
now cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to access.
Drug barons continue to grow richer every year and terrorists now
make fortunes on the trade, while our citizens continue dying on our
streets. This represents the very definition of a failed public
policy. Will Rogers said, "If you find yourself in a hole, the first
thing to do is stop digging." So what we're suggesting at LEAP is
that we stop digging in the hole of a failed war on drugs and start
searching for alternative strategies.
Now I am now going to make a couple of suggestions that I hope will
answer what I think is your obvious question — "Is there anything
that can be done to stop this scourge on our nation and the world?"
I believe there is.
I am going to offer you a policy model I have been working on for
some thirty years. However, I am not presenting it to convince you of
its worth as much as to open your mind to the fact that workable
alternatives to these failed drug policies do exist. If you ever get
to hear another LEAP speaker you may get an alternative policy that
differs slightly as to how we might distribute drugs once they are
legal. All LEAP requires of its speakers is that they believe the war
on drugs is a failure and that the speakers support alternative
policies that will reduce the incidence of death, disease, crime and
addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition.
We speak to thousands of very intelligent people like yourself during
our presentations and what we are hoping is that once the public's
mind is open to alternative solutions, they will think of workable
policies that are much better than any we have yet considered.
http://leap.cc/Publications/End_Prohibition_NOW_08-03-08.doc