WAR ON DRUGS 'A FAILURE'

Jack Cole speaks from 14 years of experience as an undercover
narcotics officer when he says of the United States drugs policy: "The
war on drugs is a dismal, abject failure."

Mr Cole, who retired from law enforcement after a 26-year career with
the New Jersey State Police in 1996, was in Dunedin last week to give
a talk at the Community Law Centre on drug policy in the US.

After 14 years spent befriending and infiltrating small groups, biker
gangs and international drug-smuggling rings, Mr Cole has watched
drug-use rates, availability and potency go up and prices go down.

At the same time, the price of fighting drugs had skyrocketed to $69
billion annually, and mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences
saw 1.5 million people in jail in 2002 - most for cannabis possession
or use, he said.

"Every one of those 1.5 million lives, if they are not destroyed they
are certainly crippled A conviction will track you every day for the
rest of your life . . . Every time you go for a job, it's over you
like a cloud.

"To me, that's a failed public policy," he said.

Mr Cole, who is executive director of the US-based group Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), stressed he did not want to
see "one additional drug user", but said the way to minimise the harm
drugs caused was to end prohibition.

Legalisation would freeze the income criminals could generate from
pushing drugs and end the punishment of people using soft drugs, he
said.

Leap, formed in 2002, has 1000 members and 61 speakers who are all
past or present law enforcement representatives, including judges,
barristers, police officers, former New York Police Department
commissioner Robert Owens and Warren Eginton, Mayor of Vancouver,
British Colombia (a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police).

Mr Cole warned law enforcement officials here against following the US
example of zero tolerance: "Think about what you are doing before you
follow us down this path of prohibition and zero tolerance, because it
is a path to destruction."

Dunedin police drug squad head Kevin Anderson, who attended the talk,
said he supported Mr Cole's call to target those making money from
drugs, but was against the use of mind-altering substances because "in
my years of policing I see the negative side of drug use."