ENLIGHTENED END TO DRUG PROHIBITION SOME TIME AWAY DESPITE ITS GOOD LOGIC

Barry Cooper's new DVD, Never Get Busted Again, which went on sale
over the Internet late last month, will probably not sell very well
outside the United States because in most other countries the
possession of marijuana for personal use is treated as a misdemeanour
or simply ignored by the police. But it will sell very well in the
U.S. where many thousands of casual marijuana users are hit with
savage jail terms every year in a nationwide game of Russian roulette
in which most people indulge their habit unharmed while a few
unfortunates have their lives ruined.

Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made more than 800 drug arrests
as an anti-narcotics officer. He has now repented: "When I was raiding
homes and destroying families, my conscience was telling me it was
wrong, but my need for power, fame and peer acceptance overshadowed my
good conscience." Of course, Cooper's DVD, which teaches people how to
avoid arrest for marijuana possession, will also bring him fame, plus
a lot of money, but at least it won't hurt people.

However, Cooper lacks the courage of his own convictions. He argues
that the war on drugs is futile and counter-productive so far as
marijuana is concerned, but nervously insists that he is offering no
tips that would help dealers of cocaine or methamphetamines to escape
"justice." It's as if reformers fighting against America's alcohol
prohibition laws in the 1920s had advocated re-legalizing beer but
wanted to continue locking up drinkers of wine or spirits.

But there are bolder policemen around who are willing to say flatly
and publicly that all drug prohibition is wrong.

One is Jack Cole, 26 years with the New Jersey police, whose
organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), is supported
by growing numbers of serving policemen who have lost faith in the War
on Drugs and want to make peace. "Leap wants to end drug prohibition
just as we ended alcohol prohibition in 1933," says Cole, who argues
that neither kind of prohibition has ever had any success in curbing
consumption of the banned substances, but that each has fuelled the
growth of a vast criminal empire.

Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of the Nottinghamshire
police, was the latest senior policeman to make the case for ending
the war, pointing out last November that heroin addicts in Britain
each commit, on average, 432 robberies, assaults and burglaries a year
to raise the money for their illegal habit. Each addict steals about
$90,000 of property a year, whereas the cost of providing them with
heroin on prescription from the National Health Service in closely
supervised treatment programs would be only $24,000 a year.

So Britain's NHS should provide heroin to addicts on prescription,
said Roberts, like it used to in the 1950s and 1960s before Britain
was pressured into adopting the War on Drugs model by the U.S. (Since
then, the number of heroin addicts in Britain has risen several
hundredfold.)

Days later, it emerged that the NHS is actually experimenting with a
return to that policy at three places in Britain. Switzerland has
actually been prescribing heroin to addicts on a nationwide basis for
some years now, with very encouraging results: crime rate down, addict
death rate sharply down.

If every country adopted such a policy, legalizing all drugs and
making the so-called hard ones available to addicts free, but only on
prescription, the result would be not just improved health for drug
users and a lower rate of petty crime but the collapse of the criminal
empires that have been built on the international trade in illegal
drugs, which is now estimated to be worth $500 billion a year.

That is exactly what happened to the criminal empires that were
founded on bootlegging when alcohol prohibition was ended in the
United States in 1933.

This is probably yet another false dawn, for even the politicians who
know what needs to be done are too afraid of the gutter media to act
on their convictions. But sometime in the next 50 years, after only
few more tens of millions of needless deaths, drug prohibition will
end.