FUZZ COOLING TO WAR ON DRUGS

U.S. Police Witnessing Calamitous Consequences Call for Global End To
Prohibition

Barry Cooper's new dvd, never get Busted Again, which went on sale
over the Internet late last month, probably won't 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, most people indulge their
habit unharmed, while a few unfortunates have their lives ruined.

Barry Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made over 800 drug
arrests as an anti-narcotics officer but 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 convictions. He argues that
the war on drugs is futile and counterproductive so far as marijuana
is concerned, but he nervously insists that he's offering no tips
that would help dealers of cocaine or methamphetamines 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.

There are bolder policemen around, though, 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've 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.

It's policemen who take the lead in these issues because they're the
ones who must deal with the calamitous consequences of the "war on
drugs." No doubt "recreational" drug use does a lot of harm, as does
the use of alcohol or tobacco, but that harm is dwarfed by the amount
of crime and human devastation caused by 40 years of "war" on drug users.

In the UK, Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of the
Nottinghamshire police, is the latest senior policeman to make the
case for ending the war. He pointed 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 the NHS should provide heroin to addicts on prescription, said
Roberts, like it used to in the 1950s and 60s, before Britain was
pressured by the U.S. into adopting the "war on drugs" model. (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 not just be improved health for
drug users and a lower rate of petty crime. Legalization would also
lead to 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 founded on bootlegging when alcohol prohibition
ended in the United States in 1933.

But what about the innocent children who'll be exposed to these drugs
if they become freely available throughout society? The answer:
nothing that doesn't happen to them now. There's no city and few
rural areas in the developed world where you can't buy any illegal
drug known to man within half an hour, for an amount of money that
can be raised by any enterprising 14-year-old.

Indeed, the supply of really nasty drugs would probably diminish if
prohibition ended, because they're mainly a response to the level of
risk the dealers must face. (Economist Milton Friedman called it the
Iron Law of Prohibition: the harder the police crack down on a
substance, the more concentrated that substance becomes - so cocaine
gives way to crack cocaine, as beer gave way to moonshine under
alcohol prohibition.)

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 a
few more tens of millions of needless deaths, drug prohibition will end.