DRUG WAR COSTS A LOT, DOES LITTLE

In 36 years of continuous service as a Denver police officer, I was
shot at, stabbed - threatened in several ways. That came with the
territory, and my comrades and I were well protected by our equipment
and training. But, frightening as that was, nothing threatens the
honor and prestige of our police more than our mandate to carry out
the so-called war on drugs. When we jailed a rapist or a child
molester, we made the streets safer - period. But when we arrested a
drug dealer - at any level - we just created a job opening that was
quickly filled.

And when we arrested a drug user, we were violating an American
citizen's basic right to make stupid choices (not to mention
discouraging others with drug addiction problems from seeking medical
help).

Rapists and child molesters are pathological, anti-social and
atypical. On the other hand, the government's own figures show that
more than 112 million Americans (46 percent of those ages 12 and
older) have used illegal drugs in their lives.

"They" are us, our friends, our families and our neighbors. "They"
aren't stopped by drug prohibition any more than otherwise law-abiding
citizens stopped drinking during alcohol prohibition. Drug busts and
harsh sentences make for good press, politics and crime shows, but
nobody seriously thinks they make drugs go away.

The belief that we can create drug-free national borders, states or
schools when we can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons
should end this debate. But some, especially those whose livelihoods
depend on this approach, can't get enough of this "fix."

We are a captive nation. One in four people imprisoned worldwide are
incarcerated in the United States. No other country locks up as large
a percentage of its citizens. (And think of the competition!)

The drug war, not unbridled criminality, has generated the bulk of
this unprecedented increase. From 1970 to 2006, the number of federal
prisoners guilty of violent crime rose by 300 percent while the number
guilty of drug offenses rose by 2,558 percent.

A significant percentage of those violent crimes was related not to
drug use but to drug prohibition, just as alcohol prohibition
increased violent criminality. Nearly 2 million of us are arrested
every year for nonviolent drug offenses. The federal government is out
of control, not its citizens.

Yet, today drugs are cheaper, more potent and far more widely used by
our youths than they were 38 million arrests and a trillion dollars
ago. Most ominously, it is now easier for children to buy illegal
drugs than it is to buy beer or cigarettes.

Think the next trillion tax dollars will do the trick?

It may be good politics to act tough on drugs, but the belief that we
can arrest our way out of our drug abuse problem is a dangerous
illusion that does absolutely nothing to prevent usage at any age level.

Today, hundreds of thousands of our youths are motivated by
prohibition-created prices to sell these drugs to other youths.
Moreover, those prices yield a life of street crime for low-income
users, turning the heroin user into a menace, the desperate addict who
steals metal from farms and construction sites or sets up a dangerous
meth lab in his basement to fund his addiction.

This is a totally unnecessary transformation, as the Swiss proved with
their 10-year experiment. Their study showed that 2,000 hard-core
heroin addicts saw their rates of use, disease, crime and unemployment
drop when they were provided heroin under controlled, regulated
circumstances, outside the circle of law enforcement. This
straightforward approach took out the street dealers completely, just
like we cops always dreamed of doing.

In the United States, only legalization and regulation will destroy
the cartels and street dealers.

Because of my experience and that of so many of my colleagues, I
represent Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an international
organization created and led by an array of drug warriors who call for
the legalization and regulation of all drugs.

The more dangerous the drug, the more important it is to legalize and
regulate it. We are over 10,000 strong and growing, both within and
outside of law enforcement, as is the awareness of the absolutely
predictable failure of drug prohibition.