Pubdate: Wed, 01 Apr 2009
Source: Hartford Courant (CT)
Copyright: 2009 The Hartford Courant
Contact:
http://www.courant.com/about/custom/thc/thc-letters,0,86431.customform
Website: http://www.courant.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/183
Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?233 (Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?227 (Cole, Jack)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

MAYBE IT'S TIME TO END PROHIBITION

Maybe we should legalize drugs.

I come neither eagerly nor easily to that maybe. Rather, I come by way
of spiraling drug violence in Mexico that recently forced Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to acknowledge the role America's insatiable
appetite for illegal drugs plays in the carnage. I come by way of
watching Olympian Michael Phelps do the usual public relations song
and dance after being outed smoking weed, and knowing the whole thing
was a ritualized farce. Most of all, I come by way of personal
antipathy: I don't like and have never used illegal drugs.

But yeah, I'm thinking maybe we should legalize them. Or at the very
least, begin the discussion.

I find myself in august - and unexpected - company. Ronald Reagan's
secretary of state, George Schultz, former New Mexico Gov. Gary
Johnson, the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and
the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. have all said much
the same thing.

Leonard Pitts Jr. Leonard Pitts Jr. Bio | Recent columns

And then, there is Jack A. Cole, who spent 26 years with the New
Jersey State Police, 12 of them as an undercover drug officer. In
2002, he founded LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (
www.leap.cc), which now claims 12,000 members - FBI, DEA, cops,
prosecutors and judges united in the belief that the war on drugs has
failed and that the solution to the drug problem is legalization,
regulation and taxation.

"So we want to end drug prohibition just like we ended alcohol
prohibition in 1933," he says. "Because as law enforcers we understand
that the day after we ended that terrible law, Al Capone and all his
smuggling buddies were out of business. They were no longer killing
each other, they were no longer killing us cops fighting that useless
war, and they were no longer killing our children caught in the crossfire."

Then there's the collateral damage, because the conviction makes it
nearly impossible to get a job, go to college, even rent an apartment.

And for what? This "war" has been an exercise in futility. In 1970,
says Cole, about 2 percent of the population over the age of 12 had at
some point or another used an illegal drug. As of 2003, he says, that
number stood at 46, an increase of "2,300 percent" - yet we've spent
over a trillion dollars and imprisoned more people per capita than any
country in the world in order to "reduce" drug use?

So yeah, maybe we should legalize them.

By the way, I use that weasel word "maybe" only to cover myself in the
event somebody raises an objection I had not considered. But I doubt
anyone will: Cole makes a compelling case. In the meantime, I leave
you one last statistic. Cole says that in 1914, when the first federal
drug law was enacted, the government estimated 1.3 percent of us were
addicted to illegal drugs. In 1970, when the war on drugs began, the
government estimated 1.3 percent of us were addicted to illegal drugs.
Thirty-nine million arrests later, he says, the government says 1.3
percent of us are addicted to illegal drugs.

"That," says Cole, "is the only statistic that's never changed at
all."

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated writer in Washington.
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