TheBlackPirate
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Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) said:Exit Strategies for the Drug War
By Jack A. Cole
As presented to the Strategic Meeting on Public Security and Drug Policies
Sponsored by the Brazilian Military Police and Viva Rio
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
September 19-21, 2011 (Updated June 11, 2013)
I didn’t come here today to tell you police officials from seventeen countries how to formulate
your laws or conduct your business. I know you are perfectly capable of doing that for
yourselves. I came here to warn you, no, to beg you, please don’t follow the United States down
its road to prohibition because it is a road to despair, a road to disaster, a road to destruction.
My name is Jack Cole. I am a retired detective lieutenant—26 years with the New Jersey State
Police and 14 in their Narcotic Bureau, mostly undercover. I bear witness to the abject failure of
prohibition and to the horrors produced by the U.S. war on drugs.
I am the co-founder and Board chair of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. LEAP is a
100,000 member international educational organization of police, judges, prosecutors,
correction officials, and supporters, in 120 countries. LEAP members know a system of
legalization and regulation of drugs is far more efficient and ethical than a system of prohibition.
In the words of Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle, Washington police department, “[For
the United States, the] drug war has arguably been most devastating, dysfunctional social policy
since slavery.”
The drug war is a complete failure, and even worse it is a self-perpetuating, constantly
expanding policy disaster.
If Current Drug Policy actually worked, seven things should have happened:
1. Drug supply should decrease
2. Drug purity should decrease
3. Drug prices should then increase
and therefore:
4. Drug use should decrease
5. Drug overdose deaths should decrease
6. Drug Prohibition murders should decrease
7. Drug violation arrests should decrease
In each case, the exact opposite happens. Let us look at the true outcomes of each of these
items.
1. Drug supply should decrease
The easiest way to judge whether that has happened is by looking at drug seizures over the
years. At the beginning of the drug war in 1970, law enforcers measured the largest individual
drug seizures in “pounds.” Today we measure them in “Tons.”15 tons of methamphetamine – one seizure 1
20 tons of cocaine – one seizure 2
23 tons of heroin – one seizure 3
242 tons of marijuana – one seizure 4
But nothing changed on the streets as a result of those massive seizures. They didn’t affect the
street price by so much as one penny and no drug user went to bed without his or her drug.
2. Drug purity should decrease
When I started buying heroin as an undercover officer in 1970, street level packages of powder
sold as “heroin” averaged 11⁄2% pure, the rest was cutting agent—today they average 60%
pure. 5 That is a problem 40 times greater than it was at the beginning of the war.
3. Drug prices should increase
According to DEA, since the beginning of the war, the wholesale price of cocaine has decreased
60% and the wholesale price for heroin has decreased 70%. 6
4. Drug use should decrease
DEA estimated that before we started the drug war there were about 4 million people, above the
age of 12, who had used an illegal drug. That was 2% of that population. Today DEA tells us,
there are 121 million people, above the age of 12, who have used an illegal drug. 7 That is 46%
of this population; a problem 30 times greater than 40 years ago.
5. Drug overdose deaths should decrease
In fact, after 37 years of drug war drug overdose deaths in the US had become 9 times worse
than they were when we began this bloody mess in 1970. 8
6. Drug Prohibition murders should decrease
Of course, as we all know, drug prohibition murders have increased dramatically. During 2011,
per 100,000 population, the murder rate was 4 in the United States, which is a destination
country for illicit drugs; New York registered 515 murders that year – 6 per 100,000. 9 But in
Puerto Rico, a transit location that has roughly half the population of New York City, 1,135
homicides occurred – 30 killings per 100,000 residents during the same year. 10
After Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels, during his six-year reign as President,
Mexico suffered escalating violence. There were more than 95,000 drug prohibition murders –
an average of 17 murders per 100,000 population. 11 But neither the US nor Mexico can match
the level of violence in drug transit countries such as Guatemala – 41 murders per 100,000
population 12 or Honduras, which the United Nations has labeled as the most dangerous nation
on the planet – 92 murders per 100,000 population. 13 Transit nations always suffer even more
violence than the countries of drug origin or the countries of final destination.
7. Drug violation arrests should decrease
One would think that after making more than 46 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses in
the course of the longest war in US history, we would eventually run out of people wanting to
sell drugs. Not so! In 1965 we made 65,500 of those arrests across our nation but by 2005 wehad increased that number to 1.9 million a year. Most recently the yearly total has fallen to 1.7
million in 2009; 14 still a rate 25 times larger than before the drug war.
And arrests do no good. I learned very early while working undercover that if a uniformed police
officer arrested someone in our neighborhood for rape or robbery, the number of rapes and
robberies went down. We got the bad guy. But when I arrested a person for selling drugs the
number of drugs sales didn’t change at all. I was simply creating a “job opening” for hundreds of
people more than willing to accept the risk of arrest for what they perceived as an obscenely
high income. Actually, it was worse than that. I wasn’t just creating a job opening; I was creating
a safe job opening. If a potential novice drug dealer tried to horn in on a current drug dealer’s
territory the interloper would probably get shot—but after I removed the first dealer his
replacement simply stepped into to that open slot and started selling.
With a four decades long war costing US tax payers 1.5-trillion dollars and resulting in at least
46 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, 15 one would think that at the very least we would
have had some effect on reducing the rate of people in the US who are addicted to illicit drugs.
Sadly, that is also not true.
Near the end of 1914 we created our first federal law prohibiting a drug. Before that, when all
drugs were available to everyone regardless of their age, the government told us that 1.3% of
the population was addicted. 16 Our leaders couldn’t accept that so they started making many
drugs illegal. Fifty-six years later, in 1970, when we were getting ready to start a “war on drugs,”
our government told us 1.3% of the population was addicted to drugs. 17 They couldn’t accept
that, so they started a “drug war.” Into the fifth decade of this raging drug war, today our
government tells us 1.3% of the population is addicted to drugs. 18 That is the only statistic that
has not changed in a hundred years.
But some statistics have changed dramatically. For instance, the clearance rate of arrests for
major crimes in the US has declined considerably. That means police are no longer solving
major crimes as they did before the drug war. Today, nearly 4 of 10 murders, 6 of 10 reported
rapes & arsons, 7 of 10 reported robberies, and 9 of 10 reported home burglaries go unsolved. 19
I would like to point out that before the drug war, in 1963, our police were credited with solving
91% of the murders in the US. Today they solve 61%. 20 What happened? Did police suddenly
become incompetent?
The 100,000 police, judges, and prosecutors, and supporters at Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition believe that today police spend so much time and energy chasing nonviolent drug
offenders that we no longer have enough staff to protect people from violent predators, from
child molesters, from those things that should really count. And we say, “Let us get back to
doing what we do best, protecting people from each other.” It should not be the job of law
enforcement to protect every adult from his- or herself and that is the role we have been
required to take in enforcing today’s drug laws.
If you wish to end the gun violence the choice is simple, legalize all drugs, just as we legalized
alcohol in the US in 1933. The next morning Al Capone and his smugglers were out of business.
They were no longer killing each other to control that very lucrative market. They were no longerkilling our children in crossfire and drive-by-shootings. They were no longer killing us cops,
charged with fighting that useless war.
When we then regulate those drugs, we can stop overdose deaths. No one dies of an overdose
because they inject more and more drugs. They die because they don’t know how much of that
tiny package of powder they purchase is really the drug and how much is the cutting agent. Too
much drug and they are dead. In an illegal, unregulated market, they will never know what is in
that package.
When we then regulate those drugs, we can also prevent half of all potential cases of horrible
blood born diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis C; according to the US Centers for Disease
Control 50% of all new cases of AIDS and Hepatitis C can be traced back to intravenous drug
users sharing needles, which they would not have to do if the drugs were legal and regulated.
Then, when we start treating drug abuse as a health problem instead of a crime problem, we
can save the millions of people we are today sacrificing through arrest and imprisonment on the
altar of the drug war. And we should be interested in stopping those arrests because they are
our children, our parents, ourselves. This is not a war on drugs, it is a war on people.
If you want to make a difference about this issue, join www.leap.cc.
The affect of the above talk was made clear when retired Chief Constable Tom Lloyd of
Cambridgeshire, England, UK, ask for a show of hands within the 50 ranking police officers
representing 17 countries that attended the Strategic Meeting on Public Security and Drug
Policies, to see how many agreed with me that we should end the war on drugs by legalizing and
regulating all drugs. Eighty-five percent agreed and only 5% wanted to continue the drug war, with
10 percent abstaning.
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