ARRESTING THE DRUG LAWS

In March, Howard Woolridge set out on horseback from Los Angeles to New
York City wearing a T-shirt blaring the capitalized declaration: "COPS SAY
LEGALIZE POT, ASK ME WHY." The former Michigan police officer, who plans to
reach New York in November, is a member of Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition (LEAP), a group that wants to change our country's drug laws.

Peter Christ and Jack Cole, both former cops, founded the three-year-old
LEAP with the assistance of a $50,000 grant from the Marijuana Policy
Project. More than 2,000 members, including prison wardens, judges, and
mayors, have since joined the organization. Some believe in drug
decriminalization, others in full-out legalization, but their collective
mandate is to highlight the failure of the current drug policy.

Cole wants to remove the profit motive from the equation by legalizing
drugs and having them supplied by the government. "Organized criminals and
world terrorists would be monetarily crippled for many years to come," Cole
says.

Bob Owens, a former police chief in Oxnard, California, regards soft drugs
such as marijuana "as too unimportant to use manpower" on. He calls the war
on drugs "a straw-man that can distract people and stir the hysteria that
accompanies it."

But Owens admits LEAP won't move mountains. Yet. "The purpose of LEAP is to
create more of an attitude change than to potentially change legislation,"
he says.

California Superior Court Judge James Gray, author of Why Our Drug Laws
Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War
on Drugs, wants to decriminalize marijuana. That would generate $2 billion
annually in tax revenues that could be spent on education and drug
treatment, he says. The government should regulate the quality of
marijuana, he says, so tokers would know their weed won't be laced with
poisons.

"Would it result in more marijuana usage?" Gray asks himself. "Yes, at
least for six months, but then rates would be more like Holland's." That
country's reported lifetime cannabis use is at 17 percent, according to a
2001 survey from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction. In the United States, the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and
Health found that 40 percent of respondents reported using marijuana once
in their lifetimes.

Prison wardens are usually stereotyped as drawing the hardest line. But
don't say that to Richard Watkins, former warden of the Holliday Unit in
Huntsville, Texas. "What's happening now is not working," says Watkins, who
retired in February. "I think the war on drugs is responsible for the
massive increase of prisoners in Texas."

He goes on to wonder why so many one-time drug users are imprisoned for
crimes that didn't harm a third party. "What the public doesn't realize is
that when you take a breadwinner out of the family and incarcerate him, it
has a ripple effect," he says. "There is nothing but negative about jailing
people."

After his lone-ranger travels, Woolridge plans on heading to Washington,
where he hopes to become a Congressional lobbyist for LEAP.

Marijuana will be the first issue he tackles. "Eighty percent of Americans
say legalize and tax it today," Woolridge says. "We're losing focus on
public safety as law enforcement chases Willie Nelson and Willie Nelson's
supplier." When Woolridge discusses this issue with rational Americans in
any state, he says he soon hears three satisfying words: "That makes sense."