"A COWBOY WITH A CAUSE:' DRUG CRUSADER SITS DOWN WITH THE CT

He's a cowboy with a cause.

Dressed in the plain white T-shirt he designed that has 'Cops say
legalize drugs, ask me why' written across the torso, a huge belt
buckle and a cowboy hat, 18 year police force veteran Howard
Wooldridge is extremely talkative and energetic for someone who just
drove five hours to Tech from Maryland.

Students for a Sensible Drug Policy invited Wooldridge to speak in
Squires last night to advocate what he calls "focusing on drunk
drivers, not Willie Nelson." Hallucinogens, ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms,
stimulants, amphetamines, cocaine, opiates, heroin morphine, PCP,
marijuana -- he wants to legalize it all for the sake of safety.

The Collegiate Times took some time to meet up with Wooldridge, who
was one of the founding members of the Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition organization, to discuss his ideas on policy and to
explain how drugs involve everyone more than what you'd think.

Q: "So what is the government doing right now that you feel is the
failure that is creating this lapse?"

A: "Well, the government is continuing the prohibition
approach."

Q: "Which is?"

A: "Which is, you can't buy it legally. Unlike alcohol and tobacco,
the two deadliest drugs in America, which are legal, regulated and
taxed because their grandparents in 1933 realized that the prohibition
model of drug control was an abject failure so they went back to a
legal, regulated, taxed market for alcohol and that's where we need to
go with these other 10 drugs. Its not a question of how dangerous
these drugs are, or how much they might kill you.

They are dangerous, they might kill you, some of them. The question
is, what's better for Virginia, better for the United States because
the drugs are here, the drugs are here to stay. We know that after 37
years of absolute focusing upwards of 10 percent of all police time on
nothing but these illegal drugs and were further away today, than we
were a trillion dollars ago. And the damage done daily to the culture
is significant."

Q: "What examples of damage do you find?"

A: "The disrespect for government and law in general because you have
a law, for marijuana at least, has been ignored by 100 million
Americans. And so, when you create disrespect for law it's almost like
semianarchy.

And I'm not an anthropologist of sociologist -- please ask one -- how
much damage does it do when you have laws

which are disregarded by massive percentages of the population?... If
it's a bad law, what do you do? You go around it ... But after that,
you can look at it from an economic point of view.

Get real personal for V Tech: In the past 15 years, college tuition
across America has been raising roughly 10 percent per year in the face
of three percent inflation. What nobody talks about is how every
student in here and their parents have been subsidizing the massive
building of one and half million prison beds.

There are three major discussionary areas in a state budget: prisons,
higher education and hospitals --Medicare.

And you take a dollar out of colleges to build a new 1,000 bed
facility, what they've done is they say 'okay, well V-Tech is shorted
five percent this year. We're gonna have to raise tuition 10 percent
to make up for the shortfall from Richmond. This has been going on now
for going on two decades."

Q: "So what would legalizing drugs do to help the economy though?
"

A: "100 years ago the price of heroin was, dose for dose, the price of
aspirin. The illegality jacks the price up to make up for the risk of
someone going to jail or getting shot selling it.

Essentially, in my world, put all these 10 drugs in a state ABC store,
give them roughly the same rules and regulations as alcohol and
tobacco, plus no outside advertising -- at all -- and a heroin addict
could support their addiction at a dollar a day, cocaine at $2 a day
- -- still at a cost."

Q: "Would you still want it to be taxed? Because I know there's a
heavy sin tax like on tobacco and alcohol."

A: "I would start with no tax, and then you can slowly build up a tax
but the most important thing to understand legalization and regulation
it is a solution only for the crime, violence and the chaos created as
dangerous drugs are sold from sidewalks and out of private homes.

That's all that legalization/regulation does. The trick is to put the
price at such a point where you don't have smuggling and people
selling off sidewalks ... You overtax it, you induce smuggling. "

Q: "Now I know that you've done a lot of extensive traveling... how do
you think it's influenced your policy, if at all?"

A: "The irony is as we think of America as being 'life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness; we're the freest country in the world --
that is absolutely not true. The Europeans take a much more
laissez-faire attitude about what you do in the privacy of your own
home. I have been to Europe, I have been to Switzerland, I've been to
the heroin clinic in Bern, the capital, got a nice tour, and saw the
positive effects.

I've talked to police officers in the German-speaking parts, auf
deutsch, and the French-speaking parts en francais, and they love the
program because they've seen a consistent, 60 percent -- six zero --
60 percent reduction in felony crime for those heroin addicts inside
the program. And we're all about reducing crime and crime victims. So
this has been an overwhelming success now, 13 years running in
Switzerland and has been adopted by six countries.

That has shown me that when you put things in a legal regulated
framework you reduce crime, death -- no one has died of an overdose in
13 years (of those in the program) -- about a 70 percent reduction in
new cases of HIV and hepatitis because you get a clean needle or an
oral pill, and because they're doing a better job of education. Their
new users of heroin have dropped dramatically in the past five years.

Kids are going, 'you know what, heroin sounds like a disease, you see
a doctor, clinics you know. I don't want any part of a disease' --
they've taken the glamour away.

It's important to understand that America has been given
misinformation, propaganda if you will, that all illegal drug use is
problematic use. Cocaine one time, you're an abuser. Everybody in the
scientific community knows it's not true -- It's not just the opinion
of the cowboy in Texas..."