Police officers who would stop the war on drugs

Jack Cole has it down pat. His 26 years in the NJ state police force perhaps plays a role, (half of it undercover) but the fact is he can tell how long the conversation will last, he can even calibrate it to the duration of elevator chit chat. “If it’s more than eight floors up, I know I can hook someone, over 12 floors and I can guarantee you I’ve got it made.” This is a man who is looking for people to flip, and they do, remarkably quickly, remarkably easily for what he expected when co-founded this organization, LEAP, Law Enforcement against Prohibition, 7 years ago.

"Less than 1% of the law enforcement officers we approach refuse to talk to us LEAP members. After a 3 to 5 minute conversation, 80% come out agreeing with us, less than 6% of them want to go on with the war on drugs.” When asked why such a quick conversion, his answer is simple: officers keep their opinions to themselves. “Only a tiny handful of those people we approach had ever realized there was another human being in law enforcement who feels like they do, we are all so concerned with being labeled as soft on drugs or soft on crime that we don’t even tell our peers."

Mr. Cole was engaged in a war he would like to see ended, “The war on drugs is a failed policy, a self perpetuating, constantly expanding disaster; and it will end, I give it another ten years.” Cole was a rookie cop when it broke out over his New Jersey police department, and sent him into undercover work to root out drug traffickers “practically before people were seriously into drugs”.

When the war on drugs started, police departments swelled, “my own department swelled 11 times literally overnight,” said Cole, “from 7 men to a 76 person Narcotics Bureau”, naturally, Mr. Cole said, results were expected keep the funding renewed yearly, and “you were judged by the number of arrests that were made”.

Bogging down policework

What happened over the next years drove him to a personal conversion that led him to found LEAP when he retired. LEAP is a vocal organization against the war on drugs that has evolved into a growing group of dissenters in the ranks of law enforcement, it includes police officers of all stripes, federal, state, local, DEA and FBI agents, Judges, Prosecutors. In 7 years they grew to 15 thousand members, all for the legalization of drugs, with 85 speakers who’ve visited every state but Alaska, and members in 76 countries. “You have to be a current or former member of law enforcement or the judiciary to speak, but anyone can join.

He is convinced that the war on drugs is not only hugely mistaken, but that it has done law enforcement a disservice: “We know that in 1968 the police solved 91 % of the murders. Today we have far more police than at that time per capita, they are better trained, educated and better paid, they have more technology at their disposal, how could they be solving one third less murders?” Pointing out that 60% of rapes and arson, 75% of robberies, and 83% of property crime remain unsolved today, Mr. Cole adds “we believe that police are spending so much time chasing non-violent drug offenders that they don’t have time to protect citizens from violent criminals and child molesters, from things that really count.”

War conspires for more war

One of the more nefarious aspects of the war on drugs has been to create catch 22 situations that lead to the perversion of justice. Pressured into producing results to keep the funding going for giant narcotics teams, cops would not all be above inflating the size of drugs seizures and the value of the drugs intercepted. “If we found an ounce of cocaine and 4 pounds of cutting agent – we could transform it into 4 pounds of cocaine on the way to the station”. Results broadcast by the media as a measure of success quickly turned into reverse propaganda luring more and more people in ghettos into the drug business in search of high profits. That would in turn boost the illegal drug industry, generate more arrests, and thus more ex-convicts with no alternative but to go right back into the illegal drugs market.

But more than that, Cole believes it is a perversion of justice to have people locked up in jails for drug use, “the possession of a couple of joints of marijuana can send you to jail for 7 years,” from which it is unlikely they will ever resume their futures, hold jobs. “We fixed it so that the only way people could make money was to sell drugs.” He should know, he’s counted 1000 he was responsible for sending to jail.

And yet for all this repression that has coincided with an explosion in the prison population in the United States, numbers speak of an adverse effect: “In 1970”, said Mr. Cole, “a good seizure might be 28 grams of cocaine or 7 grams of heroine. A good seizure today would be 20 tons of cocaine or 20 tons of heroine.” And all the while, drugs got cheaper and more potent, easier for kids to access. “The wholesale price of cocaine is down 60%, heroine 70%, in 1970, 2% of youths used drugs, while today, its 46%. If the war on drugs were effective, prices would be going up, and usage down”, said Cole.

900,000 teen drug traffickers, or entrepreneurs

But most importantly, nothing is being done to stop the violence, to prevent the deaths of innocent people and children. Nothing but legalization in his view would change this dismal scenario. “People do not die of drug overdose because they want to do more drugs, they die because there is no way for them to know what it is precisely they are putting into their bodies.” Nor is Decriminalization is a solution, in his view: “Criminals would still find it worthwhile to engage in violence to sell drugs.”

Drug traffickers are, in Mr. Cole’s view, essentially entrepreneurs. “Today we have 900,000 teenagers selling drugs to other teenagers – none are selling beer or cigarettes. Why is that? Because the drugs are illegal, we have control over them, none over criminals.” Mr. Cole points out that when the alcohol prohibition ended in 1933, Al Capone and his goons went out of business, overnight. “No longer were they out there killing each other over that very lucrative business,” said Cole, “they were no longer killing us cops trying to fight in this useless war and then they are no longer killing our children, who then, as now, are caught in the crossfire, in drive by shootings… so we know that if we legalize drugs we can completely end the violence.”

Mr. Cole believes that the war on drugs is not a war to prevent addiction. “The data for addiction in drug use is clear, about 1.3% of drug users are addicted, that is as true today as it was 40 years ago when the war on drugs started, as it was in 1914 before the prohibition.” Cole believes that the anti-drug laws in the United States were spurred by a combination of competitive market capitalism, racial prejudice and government intervention.

Race based laws used to suppress drug use and free up markets

Opium is one such case. “When Chinese immigrants who’d been brought to the US to build railroads were no longer needed, the prohibition against opium became a great way to make sure they would not threaten to take away local jobs…” said Cole, who notes that the first law to prohibit opium use in San Francisco has explicit references do “Chinamen”.  The prohibition against cannabis or marijuana, continues Mr. Cole, is another such combination: Pressures to replace hemp with woodpulp in the newspaper paper business by the Hearst industry and to replace hemp ropes with nylon products by Dupont made the drug used by Mexicans an equally easy target for legislating away the competition.

So the question remains, what spurs this change in attitudes on drug policy, as illustrated by recent statements from Mayor Booker of Newark that “the war on drugs is destroying my city causing, not solving, crime”, and Mayor Gavin of San Francisco that “If you want to end 70% of crime in America, you end the war on drugs, and treat drug abuse as a health problem”. Is this part of a new political climate brought about by the Obama administration?

No, says Mr. Cole, the federal government has always been out of touch, this change has to do with a change of conscience, "and it is coming out in the open because of the work of people like us, LEAP members, who have the legitimacy to discuss it from inside". He compares it to when Vietnam War veterans began speaking out against the Vietnam War, Mr. Cole said: "It just stopped making sense".

Photo by Walter Mesquita/ Viva Rio