"Something like 50 percent of our current government have taken drugs in their time but have managed to get away with it," British MP Norman Lamb told a room full of medicinal drug users, former addicts, and politicians on Monday in the UK parliament buildings.
He was speaking at the launch of a group called LEAP UK — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition — a collection of former undercover drugs officers, military figures, and police who are campaigning for drug law reform in the UK.
A new British branch of an existing international pressure group — originally founded in 2002 by five police officers from Canada and the US — LEAP UK aims to raise awareness of what the organization says is the failure of current drug policy based on evidence gleaned from their experiences of enforcing it — saying prohibition is costly, ineffective, makes millions for organized criminals, and doesn't tackle the root causes of addiction.