COPS AGAINST THE DRUG WAR

They were two white guys cruising through the black part of Patterson, N.J.,
back in the 1970s. One was an undercover police officer named Jack Cole, the
other an informant known as Fast Eddy. Posing as heroin buyers, they ran
into trouble with three thugs who tried to rip them off and who slashed Fast
Eddy's hand with a knife before being chased off. Luckily, Cole recalls, a
Good Samaritan came out into the road. He was a young black man who was
going to college to get out of the ghetto.

He said he didn't approve of drugs but felt bad about the white guys getting
roughed up in the neighborhood. He went into his house to get bandages for
Fast Eddy and then, since Cole continued to pretend like he needed a fix,
brought them to a supplier who wouldn't take advantage of them.

Back at the precinct, Cole felt he had no choice but to include the Good
Samaritan's name in his report.

The Good Samaritan was duly charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin, a
charge that carried the same penalty as distribution: up to seven years in
jail. Cole was at the station when the Good Samaritan was brought in. He
looked Cole in the eye and said, "Man, I was trying to be your friend."

"So yeah, that got to me," Cole says now, his voice seeming to break and
going quiet. Speaking by phone from his current home of Boston, the
64-year-old Cole is explaining why he ultimately turned against the war on
drugs.

He says he came to realize that he liked many of the people he was turning
in - liked them better than some of the people he was working for - and that
his betrayal of them, rather than drugs, was what destroyed their lives.
"You can get over an addiction, but you can never get over a conviction," he
likes to say.

Now retired after a 26-year career with the New Jersey State Police, Cole is
leading a new group of current and former law-enforcement officials who are
similarly disillusioned with the war on drugs.

Called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, this nationwide
organization takes as its premise that the war on drugs is, as Cole puts it,
"a total and abject failure."

"After three decades of fueling the U.S. war on drugs with half a trillion
tax dollars and increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are easier to
get, cheaper, and more potent than they were 30 years ago," reads a LEAP
statement (see www.leap.cc/about/index.htm). More heretical still,
considering the source, the group advocates legalization of all drugs.

That, it says, is the only way drugs can really become "controlled
substances," subject to the kind of age and safety regulations that are
imposed on alcohol and tobacco.

Cole, its executive director, is in Seattle this week to speak at Hempfest
and to various service clubs, his typical audience.

He says the year-old LEAP has between 400 and 500 members, including several
based in the Seattle area. Modeled on Vietnam Veterans Against the War, with
what it hopes is the same kind of credibility, the group includes not just
police officers but judges, federal agents, and prosecutors and parole,
probation, and corrections officers. Because of the possible professional
sanctions posed by coming out against the drug war, LEAP takes care to say
that membership can be kept confidential.

THE EMERGENCE OF LEAP seems like confirmation of a profound cultural shift
away from the zero-tolerance, throw-the-book-at-them drug policy that has
long been at the center of our criminal justice system.

Roger Goodman, director of a long-running project studying drug policy
spearheaded by the King County Bar Association, puts it this way: "The news
story is not that the war on drugs has failed, it's who's saying it now."
When cops are joining in, you know that the movement for drug-law reform is
becoming mainstream. Says Goodman, "It's not like it's a front for fringy,
pony-tailed pot smokers."

That mainstreaming has been particularly evident in Washington. The bar
association's project, done in conjunction with other professional
organizations including the state medical and pharmaceutical associations,
has generated a huge amount of involvement and served as a model for similar
studies around the country.

It issued a report in 2001 that portrayed the war on drugs as misguided -
saying we need to shift from a focus on criminal justice to one on public
health - and is now discussing how to do that. With the bar behind it, the
state Legislature last year shortened prison terms for drug users and
low-level dealers and prescribed mandatory treatment for them. Testifying in
favor of the reform was King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng, a Republican.

Cole is a particularly persuasive spokesperson. He worked in narcotics
enforcement for 14 of his 26 years on the force.

While he rose to a level that enabled him to direct a three-year
investigation of a Colombia cocaine-trafficking ring, his revelations about
his work on the street are the most damning. Joining the drug war at its
inception in the early '70s, Cole says his bosses were clear about how they
wanted cops to generate the arrests that would justify massive new funding
in law enforcement: "lie a lot."

DRUGS ACTUALLY weren't much of a problem in the early days, Cole says, but
he and his colleagues made it look like they were by claiming that users
were dealers, a label applied, say, to a young person collecting drugs for a
group of friends.

Cole and other cops also lied about the quantity of drugs they found in
someone's house. "What we did is we looked around for what we could call a
cutting agent - lactose, quinine, baby powder, almost anything," Cole says.
Then the cops mixed together the drugs and the "cutting agent" and turned
the mixture into state labs, which called a substance a drug no matter the
proportion of that drug that was in it. Voila: One ounce of cocaine became 4
pounds.

Eventually, Cole says, cops didn't have to exaggerate the drug problem
anymore; it was bad enough on its own. Yet he and others in LEAP argue that
the prohibition on drugs, like the one on alcohol decades ago, has made
matters worse by creating an underground industry ruled by organized
criminals. "Eighty-five percent of the crime associated with drugs is not
associated with people using drugs.

It has to do with the marketplace," says Peter Christ, a former police
officer in New York state who originated the idea of LEAP. Turf wars,
smuggling, violent bill collection - all are typical drug-related crimes
that are not the result of being high. Moreover, LEAP argues, the illegality
of drugs has inflated their value to a point where addicts have to steal to
get their fix. "If we put 50-gallon drums out on every street corner in
America filled with drugs, we wouldn't have the problems we have today,"
Christ says.

At the same time, LEAP argues that the prohibition has kept society from
regulating drugs in a way that keeps them out of the hands of children, for
whom it's easier to buy cocaine than it is to buy beer. As in the alcohol
industry, LEAP says, legalization would also allow the government to license
and monitor businesses that sell drugs and to set product standards that
would prevent most overdoses.

Says Christ, "When you go to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels, you don't have to
wonder if there's a quart of antifreeze in it or rat poison." Legalization
would further allow the government to tax this billion- dollar industry and
use the proceeds for drug treatment programs.

Cole, the executive director, goes one step further and suggests that the
government ought to distribute free maintenance doses of drugs to those who
want them, thereby taking the profit motive out of the business.

"Would greater availability lead to more addiction?" wonders state Sen. Adam
Kline, a sponsor of the drug-law reform bill that reduced local sentences.
That's the big question around LEAP's proposals.

LEAP and others point to Switzerland, where government-run clinics
distribute free heroin to addicts while offering treatment - and addiction
appears to have gone down.

But whatever the alternative to the current system, it's noteworthy enough
that many of those who are supposed to be upholding it have had enough.

Says LEAP member Jonathan Wender, a Mountlake Terrace police officer, "I'm
tired of putting myself in harm's way for a losing cause."