Pubdate: Mon, 18 May 2015
Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Copyright: 2015 Orlando Sentinel
Contact:  http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/325
Author: Jack A. Cole
Cited: http://leap.cc/

CLOCK'S TICKING: 46 YEARS AND COUNTING IN FAILED DRUG WAR

War on Drugs needs a new strategy after 46 failed years, columnist
says On Wednesday, March 4, Derek Cruice became the latest unarmed
person to be shot to death in a U.S. drug raid staged to seize
marijuana. This Volusia County Sheriff's raid succeeding in saving 217
grams (about half-a-pound) of that drug from being loosed on our
streets and it only cost one human life.

Apparently, law enforcement doesn't think statistics on incidents such
as these are worth keeping, so it is very hard to tell how many folks
have been killed in the manner of Cruice. However, the CATO Institute
a=C2=80" one of the only entities that does keep any such statistics
a=C2=80"shows that between 1985 and 2010, SWAT team raids in the U.S.
accounted for the deaths of 46 innocent people, 25 nonviolent
offenders, and 30 law enforcers.

I participated in countless similar raids during my 26-year career as
a state police officer, 14 of which I worked undercover in narcotics
on investigations that included billion-dollar international heroin
and cocaine trafficking organizations.

Thankfully, no one ended up dead as a result of my activities. But
back then, we were not using SWAT teams to execute search warrants.

I eventually came to believe that what I was doing was completely
wrong. If our goal was really to reduce drug abuse in this country,
increasingly harsh punishment and enforcement tactics seemed a strange
way to accomplish that goal. The Drug Enforcement Administration has
told us that before we started the war on drugs in 1970, they
estimated that around 4 million people above the age of 12 had used an
illicit drug (2 percent of that population).

Today the DEA tells us we have 121 million people above the age of 12
who have used an illicit drug (46 percent of today's population). When
we started the drug war in 1970, we measured our largest individual
seizures in pounds. Today we measure them in tons.

Nearly 1,000 people, mainly young, went to jail as a direct result of
my work as an undercover officer. The majority of them had never
committed a crime besides using, possessing, or selling an illicit
drug. But their lives were much more negatively impacted by their
arrest than by the drugs themselves. When they came out of
incarceration years later and had few educational and job
opportunities, they turned back to the drug culture a=C2=80" the very thi
ng
we claim to be saving them from.

Whether the killing of Derek Cruice is judged as justified or not, yet
another human life was taken because our government chooses to
criminalize people because they want to put something in their bodies
that I don't want to put in my body. Our federal drug policy is
especially hard to defend when you realize that 19 states have already
decriminalized small amounts of marijuana for personal use, 23 states
have legalized medical marijuana, and four states plus the District of
Colombia have legalized, regulated, and taxed marijuana for adult use,
even for recreational purposes.

Prohibition of drugs, just like prohibition of alcohol, is a
destructive policy that simply exacerbates the problem of drug abuse.

In a hundred years of trying, there is only one social drug on which
we have had any effect in lowering the rate of use. And that happens
to be the most addictive drug, and far-and-away the worst killer we
know of a=C2=80" cigarettes. By 1985, 42 percent of our population smoked

cigarettes, which killed about 480,000 people a year.

We had to do something, but we didn't start a war on cigarette
smokers; we started a very strong education policy, then we pretty
much regulated their use out of existence. We told smokers they could
smoke at home or in their cars but they couldn't smoke in any public
buildings. In 30 years, by using those policies, we reduced the rate
of smokers from 42 percent to 17 percent. That is a tremendous success
story, and to achieve that wonderful success we didn't have to arrest
and imprison one person. We didn't have to destroy one human life.

There are better ways to spend our money. Treating drug use as a
health problem instead of a crime problem and instituting policies of
education and regulation will greatly reduce death, disease, crime and
drug abuse in America.

Jack A. Cole, a retired state police lieutenant, is also co-founder of
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which represents over 150,000
police, judges, prosecutors and supporters in 120 countries.
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