BADGE OF HONOUR

From undercover US drugs cop to anti-prohibitionist? More and more
people are asking Jack Cole how that transformation came about

Jack Cole: "When we legalised alcohol, we put Al Capone out of
business overnight." Jack Cole's voice is calm. But when he starts
talking about the damage wreaked by 30 years of the US "war on drugs"
his eyes light up. "This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on
people - our own people, our children, our parents, ourselves," he
says. "The US is spending $69bn a year on a war that is a total and
abject failure."

If anyone is qualified to make that judgment, it is Cole. During the
26 years he worked for the New Jersey state police, 12 as an
undercover narcotics officer, Cole sent down more than a thousand
people - from small-time pushers to international billion-dollar drug
trafficking organisers. From being one of the war's most loyal
servants, he is now one of its fiercest critics and, since his
retirement, has travelled around the word campaigning for the
legalisation of drugs, as the executive director of Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition (Leap).

Cole has done more than 600 "gigs" in the past four years, and in
Britain this week spoke at the HIT harm reduction agency in
Liverpool, attempting to convince public health experts, police and
drug and alcohol action teams that the majority of problems
associated with drugs stem from prohibition, not use.

Cole never meant to be a cop. At 26, he was married with two kids,
employed as an iron worker. It was 1964, the height of the civil
rights movement, and, confronted with images of officers beating
black women and children, he thought that by joining the police he
stood a chance of changing things from the inside. Born in the "Bible
belt" in Wichita, Kansas, Cole was convinced that narcotics were "the
worst scourge of the Earth". So when President Nixon's war on drugs
started in the 1970s, he was happy to get involved.

But some years into his time as an undercover "narc", he had an
epiphany. He calls it the story of the good Samaritan. Late one
night, after trawling a black ghetto posing as users needing a fix,
Cole and his informer, Fast Eddie, got into trouble. Eddie found
himself with a dealer's gun pressed against his head, and Cole with a
butcher's knife across his throat. After a stand-off, the dealers
fled, but not before slicing through Eddie's hand.

A black youth, finding Eddie bleeding in the street, dressed his
wound, and when Cole continued to feign his need for a fix,
reluctantly took him to another dealer. He told Cole he hated drugs
and would have nothing to do with them; he wanted to go to college.
Cole, writing up the report, included the incident, and when police
flushed out the neighbourhood, the good Samaritan was among those
arrested. His crime? Conspiracy to distribute drugs.

Cole's voice drops: "The undercover cop would stand watching the guys
file past so they would know you had evidence against them, and
wouldn't bother pleading not guilty." But when the good Samaritan
walked by, he looked Cole in the eye and said: "Man, I was just
trying to be your friend." Cole's voice falters. "I realised then
that we were sending the wrong people to jail, and it had to stop.
How many of those young folks would have gone on to have a perfectly
productive life had I not intervened?

"We have a saying at Leap: 'You can get over an addiction, but you
never get over a conviction.' A conviction will stay with you for the
rest of your life. Every time you try to get a job it hangs over your
head like a big ugly cloud." Did he ever find out what happened to
the aspiring college graduate? "I'm not that courageous," he says.
"But I'd say there is about a 90% chance that he went down for seven years."

Cole continued as an undercover narcotics officer until he reached
retirement. If he was so against the system, why didn't he give it
up? "I have no good answer to that," he says. "All I can say is that
I had my own addictions. I was addicted to the adrenaline rush. To be
pitting your wits against these people, particularly the big guns,
was amazing."

Obscene profits

Since his retirement, Cole has been spreading the word that
legalising all drugs would reduce death, crime, disease and
addiction, and would help reduce what he sees as the
institutionalised racism in law enforcement. "When we legalised
alcohol, we put Al Capone out of business overnight," he says. "We
can do the same to the drugs lords and terrorists who today make over
$550bn dollars a year selling illegal drugs. If you arrest robbers or
rapists, the number of robberies and rapes declines. If you arrest a
drug dealer, you simply create a job opening for a long line of
people more than willing to risk arrest for obscene profits."

He cites the Netherlands and Switzerland as successfully addressing
drug abuse as a health issue, not a crime one. He says: "No one need
die of a drugs overdose, and we could stop turning users into
criminals. We have to give people their lives back."

Many of those campaigning for drugs reform in Britain welcome Cole's
voice to the debate. Harry Shapiro, spokesman for the charity
DrugScope, believes there is currently no serious alternative to
prohibition, but it is "a powerful message when law enforcement
officers like Jack Cole decide that something needs to change".

Alan McGee, from HIT in Liverpool, is more forthright in his support.
"We are sitting back and watching multibillion-dollar profits,
brought about by prohibition, being handed to organised crime on a
plate," he says. "It is time to build deconstruction of prohibition
into our global drug strategy."

Leap started with five founders; four years later, it has 8,500
members, more than 100 speakers, and an advisory board that includes
four federal district court judges and a former head of drugs
taskforces in England. Wherever Cole, now 69, travels he wears a
prominent badge. On it are the words: "Cops say legalize drugs. Ask
me why." People are doing just that.