Pubdate: Wed, 10 Jan 2007
Source: Northern Daily News (CN ON)
Copyright: 2007, Osprey Media Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.northernnews.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2315
Author: Gwynne Dyer

WAR ON DRUGS IS SELF-DEFEATING

Barry Cooper's new DVD, Never Get Busted Again, which went on sale 
over the internet late last month, will probably not sell very well 
outside the United States, because in most other countries the 
possession of marijuana for personal use is treated as a misdemeanour 
or simply ignored by the police.

But it will sell very well in the US, where many thousands of casual 
marijuana users are hit with savage jail terms every year in a 
nationwide game of Russian roulette in which most people indulge 
their habit unharmed while a few unfortunates have their lives ruined.

Barry Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made over 800 drug 
arrests as an anti-narcotics officer, but he has now repented: "When 
I was raiding homes and destroying families, my conscience was 
telling me it was wrong, but my need for power, fame and peer 
acceptance overshadowed my good conscience." Of course, Cooper's DVD, 
which teaches people how to avoid arrest for marijuana possession, 
will also bring him fame, plus a lot of money, but at least it won't 
hurt people.

However, Cooper lacks the courage of his own convictions.

He argues that the war on drugs is futile and counter-productive so 
far as marijuana is concerned, but nervously insists that he is 
offering no tips that would help dealers of cocaine or 
methamphetamines to escape "justice".

It's as if reformers fighting against America's alcohol prohibition 
laws in the 1920s had advocated re-legalising beer but wanted to 
continue locking up drinkers of wine or spirits. But there are bolder 
policemen around, who are willing to say flatly and publicly that all 
drug prohibition is wrong.

One is Jack Cole, 26 years with the New Jersey police, whose 
organisation, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), is 
supported by growing numbers of serving policemen who have lost faith 
in the "War on Drugs" and want to make peace.

"Leap wants to end drug prohibition just as we ended alcohol 
prohibition in 1933," says Cole, who argues that neither kind of 
prohibition has ever had any success in curbing consumption of the 
banned substances, but that each has fuelled the growth of a vast 
criminal empire.

It is policemen who take the lead in these issues because they are 
the ones who must deal with the calamitous consequences of the "War on Drugs."

No doubt the use of "recreational" drugs does a lot of harm, as does 
the use of alcohol or tobacco, but that harm is dwarfed by the amount 
of crime and human devastation caused by forty years of "war" on drug-users.

Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of the Nottinghamshire 
police, was the latest senior policeman to make the case for ending 
the war, pointing out last November that heroin addicts in Britain 
each commit, on average, 432 robberies, assaults and burglaries a 
year to raise the money for their illegal habit.

Each addict steals about $90,000 of property a year, whereas the cost 
of providing them with heroin on prescription from the National 
Health Service in closely supervised treatment programmes would be 
only $24,000 a year.

So the NHS should provide heroin to addicts on prescription, said 
Roberts, like it used to in the 1950s and 1960s, before Britain was 
pressured into adopting the "war on drugs" model by the US.

(Since then, the number of heroin addicts in Britain has risen 
several hundredfold.)

Days later, it emerged that the NHS is actually experimenting with a 
return to that policy at three places in Britain -- and Switzerland 
has actually been prescribing heroin to addicts on a nationwide basis 
for some years now, with very encouraging results: crime rate down, 
addict death rate sharply down.

If every country adopted such a policy, legalising all drugs and 
making the so-called "hard" ones available to addicts free, but only 
on prescription, the result would not just be improved health for 
drug-users and a lower rate of petty crime, but the collapse of the 
criminal empires that have been built on the international trade in 
illegal drugs, which is now estimated to be worth $500 billion a year.

That is exactly what happened to the criminal empires that were 
founded on bootlegging when alcohol prohibition was ended in the 
United States in 1933.

But what about the innocent children who will be exposed to these 
drugs if they become freely available throughout the society? The 
answer is: nothing that doesn't happen to them now.

There is no city and few rural areas in the developed world where you 
cannot buy any illegal drug known to man within half a hour, for an 
amount of money that can be raised by any enterprising fourteen-year-old.

Indeed, the supply of really nasty drugs would probably diminish if 
prohibition ended, because they are mainly a response to the level of 
risk the dealers must face. (Economist Milton Friedman called it the 
Iron Law of Prohibition: the harder the police crack down on a 
substance, the more concentrated that substance becomes -- so cocaine 
gives way to crack cocaine, as beer gave way to moonshine under 
alcohol prohibition.)

This is probably yet another false dawn, for even the politicians who 
know what needs to be done are too afraid of the gutter media to act 
on their convictions.

But sometime in the next fifty years, after only few more tens of 
millions of needless deaths, drug prohibition will end.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine