DRUG LEGALIZATION IS GOAL OF TOURING TEAM

A retired officer is among the speakers who say the war on drugs is
too costly. He favors regulation.

Peter Christ says he never believed in the drug laws he was paid to
enforce as a police officer in upstate New York.

"I went on the job believing prohibition was a bad idea," Christ said.
"I spent 20 years enforcing these laws thinking this was a dumb way to
do it, but that's what we did."

Christ and Clifford Thornton have been speaking throughout South
Jersey, advocating change in the nation's drug policies to allow
legalization and regulation. Christ, 53, made the last stop of his
tour Friday, speaking to a group of Cherry Hill Rotarians.

One person in the audience who agreed with him was Barbara Schnepper,
48, a former assistant prosecutor in Cumberland County. Schnepper
prosecuted narcotics cases for three years.

"I quit the drug unit because I wasn't comfortable with the work," she
said after hearing Christ's presentation.

Schnepper said that even before a person was convicted, her division's
unit would move to seize the person's assets. "Even people that are
not ready for legalization yet realize what we are doing now is not
working," she said. But some were not swayed by the speakers' opinions.

"I would disagree with [Christ's] philosophy," said John Coffey, chief
of the Pennsauken Police Department. He said that while the drug war
had not been won, several battles had been.

"I don't think regulation is the answer," Coffey added. "We regulate
alcohol, and we still have a major alcohol problem."

Christ said alcohol addiction was not much different from drug
addiction. "I saw how we treated people who misused or abused
alcohol," he said. "I never understood why we treated a heroin addict
any differently."

Christ retired with the rank of captain from the Tonawanda Police Department
in New York 10 years ago. He went on to join a not-for-profit group called
ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug Policy and became its chief spokeman. The group's
goal is to open up and change discussion on drug policy in America. ReconsiDer
believes that the war on drugs is more destructive than the drugs it was
meant to eradicate.

"I see us being destroyed by this drug war, by us being forced to
arrest our way out of this problem," Christ said.

When Christ joined the Police Department in 1969, Thornton was living
in Hartford, Conn., with a different point of view. "I wanted the drug
laws to be even more draconian," he said.

Thornton, 53 and retired from the Southern New England Telephone Co.,
said that he believed that if the laws against drugs had been tougher,
his mother, Lillian, would not have spent the last eight years of her
life addicted to heroin. She died of an overdose at age 40.

"I wanted drugs eradicated from the face of the earth," Thornton said.
He eventually came around to Christ's point of view on legalization
and regulation. Thornton went on to set up his own group, Efficacy, to
try to bring about change.

Thornton said his work in this area had given him a better
understanding of his mother's behavior. It explained to him why his
mother slept all day and stayed out all night. Thornton also
understood why she wore long-sleeved shirts in the middle of summer:
to cover up the tracks that she had developed in her arms from heroin
use.

"The thing that I think we have to understand is that we are never
going to stop people from using drugs," Thornton said. "It's going to
happen as long as drugs stay outside the law, and deregulated they are
uncontrollable."