STRUGGLE AGAINST THE WAR ON DRUGS

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.

Former Policeman

Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made over 800 drug arrests as
an anti-narcotics officer, but 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.

Jack Cole, who has 26 years with the New Jersey police, goes further
with its 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 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 the 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
- - and 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.

Free to Addicts

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, but the collapse of the
criminal empires that have been built on the international trade in
illegal drugs, which is 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 U.S.
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.