FORMER NARCOTICS COP PROMOTES LEGALIZATION

Retired undercover narcotics officer, Jack A. Cole, the Executive
Director of LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, speaks
passionately Wednesday afternoon in the atrium of the Peter T. Flawn
Academic Center.

In 1970, narcotics officer Jack Cole went undercover to infiltrate the
seedy world of drug pushers, users and abusers. For 14 years, he was a
frontline soldier in the U.S. war on drugs.

Cole said he started having reservations about what he was doing three
years into the gig, after living and working with the people he was
trying to bust.

"I started to like the people I was working with more than the people
I was working for," Cole said. "They were people just like you and
me."

The retired officer denounced the war as racist and corrupt Wednesday
in front of a packed room in the Flawn Academic Center. The government
should legalize all drugs and distribute them for free in small
maintenance doses to adults who want them, said Cole, executive
director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

"If we start treating drug abuse as a health problem instead of a
crime problem, we can actually help these millions of people whose
lives have been crippled by 37 years of arresting them and imprisoning
them," Cole said.

There were no illegal drugs before 1914, Cole said. To illustrate the
point, he showed a flyer from the period advertising heroin as a cough
suppressant.

"We hadn't turned into a nation of drugged-out zombies then, and I
don't think we will if we legalize and regulate drugs today," Cole
said.

The decision to ban the domestic distribution of narcotics in 1914 was
done "for reasons steeped in racism," he said.

"To have laws more racist than drug laws, you have to go back to
slavery," Cole said.

Cole described the government's effort to eradicate drug abuse as "a
dismal failure." Prices have gone down and purity has gone up, while
the budget to fund the war increased from $100 million in 1970 to $69
billion in 2003, Cole said.

There are 1.9 million drug arrests in the United States every year,
Cole said. More than 1.7 million were arrested in 2004, according to
FBI statistics.

"That's like throwing a net over the Austin metropolitan area and
arresting everybody," he said.

Cole spoke at the Jack Otis Social Problem and Social Policy
Lecture.

"It is still a highly emotional issue," said Otis, professor emeritus
and former dean of the UT School of Social Work.

Otis said he hoped the people and students who attended the lecture
will become aware of the significance of the problem.

"They should figure out for themselves the right and wrongs of the
issue, and whatever they decide, they should go out and act on it,"
Otis said. "That's the important part."

"These are our children," Cole said. "We should be interested in
helping them, not warehousing them in prisons."