IT'S NOT ABOUT SAYING YES TO DRUGS, IT'S ABOUT MAKING THEM LEGAL

To the editor:

On reading the David L. Harris Aug. 3 article, "Just say yes to
drugs," I was once again struck by the inaccuracies of information
reaching the public.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (leap.cc) is a nonprofit
international education organization consisting of more than 5,000
police, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens, DEA and FBI agents, and
others who fought the War on Drugs for their entire careers. The last
thing we want to do is, "Just say yes to drugs."

LEAP's mission is to reduce the multitude of harms resulting from
fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death,
disease, crime and addiction by ending drug prohibition.

This 36 years of war has accomplished none of its stated objectives.
Instead, we have already wasted more than a trillion dollars, and each
year we continue the war we spend another $69 billion tax. And today,
drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier for our children to
access than they were in 1970 when I started buying them as an
undercover narcotics officer.

All we have to show for this war is we now arrest 1.7 million people
each year in the U.S. for nonviolent drug offenses - destroy all hope
they may have for a productive future - and then wonder why they
haven't stopped using drugs. You can get over an addiction, but you
will never get over a conviction. It will track you every day of your
life.

There is a better way. If we end drug prohibition, we can stop the
violence and crime just as we did when we ended alcohol prohibition in
1933. The next day Al Capone and all his smuggling buddies were out of
business and off the streets, no longer shooting each other, police or
innocent children caught in crossfire.

Other countries do a much better job. Switzerland has had a program
since 1994 where they treat heroin users by giving them free
government heroin. Their results: not one overdose, AIDS and hepatitis
dropped to the lowest per capita rate in all of Europe; crime was cut
by 60 percent; and an there has been an 82 percent decrease in the
expected cases of new heroin users.

If we treat drug abuse as a health problem rather than a crime
problem, we can actually save most of those folks whose lives we
destroy every year.

There are more than 110 million individuals in the U.S. who have tried
an illegal drug. This is not a war on drugs, it is a war on people,
and it must end.

Jack A. Cole

Mystic Avenue

Executive Director of LEAP

(Retired a detective lieutenant after 26-year career in the New Jersey
State Police, 14 of them as an undercover narcotics officer.)