Now, this is very long, so I'm going to post a portion, go to this website to read the entire thing. I'd like to hear some differing takes.

http://leap.cc/cms/index.php?name=Content&pid=26


End Prohibition Now!


By Retired Narcotics Undercover Officer, Jack A. Cole, September 21, 2005

I represent LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) an international nonprofit educational organization that was created to give voice to all the current and former members of law enforcement who believe the war on drugs is a failed policy and who wish to support alternative policies that will lower the incidence of death, disease, crime and addiction - four categories of harm that were supposed to be alleviated by the war on drugs but which in truth were made infinitely worse by that war. We went public with our speakers' bureau in January 2003 and have grown from our five founding members to over 3,500. LEAP has 95 speakers living in 39 of the United States and in seven other countries; a powerful and respected Advisory Board, made up of a U.S. Governor, four sitting Federal District Court judges, a sheriff, five former police chiefs, the Mayor of Vancouver, British Colombia who is retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the former Attorney General of Colombia, South America and from the United Kingdom, a former Chief Constable and a Detective Chief Investigator of Scotland Yard who was operational head of narcotic task forces for all of England.

The first thing I need to tell you good people is that the US policy of a "war on drugs" has been, is, and forever will be, a total and abject failure. This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on people - our own people - our children, our parents, ourselves.

I joined the New Jersey State Police in 1964 and six years later joined their narcotic bureau. I started working in narcotics at the beginning of the war on drugs. The term "war on drugs" was coined and created by Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968 when he was running for president. Mr. Nixon believed a "tough on crime" platform would garner a lot of votes but if he could be in charge of a war - wow! Of course as we all know, it worked. Mr. Nixon was elected President and by 1970 he had convinced Congress to pass legislation giving massive funding to any police department willing hire officers to fight his war on drugs. To give you an idea of how large those grants were, in the New Jersey state police during 1964 we had 1,700 officers and a seven man narcotics unit. That number had always seemed adequate for the job we needed to do. Six years later, when I was trying to join the narcotics unit we still had the same numbers. Then overnight in October 1970 we went from a seven man narcotics unit to a seventy-six person narcotics bureau. All paid for by federal tax dollars. And that program was replicated in police departments across the country. When an organization is increased by eleven times it sets up certain expectations. Since police are mainly judged by the number of arrests they make that meant we were expected to arrest at least eleven times as many people in the coming year for drug offenses as we did in 1969.

One-third of the seventy-six new detectives were designated "undercover agents." I happened to fall in that one-third and that is how I spent most of the next fourteen years of my life. After two-weeks training we hit the streets, where we were supposed to start arresting drug dealers. That was not an easy job in 1970 for a couple of reasons.

First, we really didn't have much of a problem with drugs in 1970 and what problem we did have was basically with soft drugs, marijuana, hashish, LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), etc. Hard drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin were almost unheard of back then - certainly unheard of compared to what they are today. Drugs were more a nuisance than a threat to our society. For instance, in 1970 people were less likely to die as a result of the drug culture than from falling down the stairs in their on homes or choking to death on food at their own dinner tables. Second, back then neither we nor our bosses had any idea of how to fight a war on drugs. Our bosses did know one thing though; they knew how to keep that federal cash-cow being milked in their personal barnyard. To accomplish that they had to make the drug war appear to be an absolute necessity. So early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our statistics and lie we did. Because dealers were not on most street corners or in all our schools - as they are now - we targeted our undercover officers on small friendship groups of kids in college, in high school or in-between who were "dipping and dabbing" in drugs - their term for experimentation.

So we arrested people who were basically drug-users and charged them as drug-dealers. We exaggerated the amount of drugs we seized by adding the weight of any cutting agents we found (lactose, mannitol, starch, or sucrose) to the weight of the illegal drug. So we might seize one ounce of cocaine and four pounds of lactose - but somewhere between the location where we seized it and the police laboratory it all magically became cocaine. We also the inflated the worth of the drugs we seized by releasing the "estimated street value" of those drugs to the media, which vastly elevated their importance. For instance in 1971 I was buying individual ounces of cocaine for fifteen hundred dollars each but when we released the estimated street value of one ounce of cocaine to the media it was closer to $20,000. Just ratchet it up a little and the drug war would appear absolutely essential. The federal dollars would keep flowing to our departments and our bosses would be happy. Who was to question our estimates and if they did who would they come to with their questions? Us. We could always justify them in some way.

However, as the war on drugs ground on we no longer had to lie about its getting worse. With each passing year of this continuing war, the "drug problem" has become exponentially more dreadful - an unintended effect caused by the war itself. The war publicized and aggrandized the use and sale of drugs and peaked the interest of a large portion of the youth of our country. In many cases, the drug culture portrayed in movies and on television seemed exciting and romantic to American teenagers. Many poor young people in the centers of our larger cities looked to the drug dealer as a role model - and the only way out of the poverty and misery of the ghetto. The dealer was the one person in their communities with the hot cars, hotter women, "money to burn," and leisure time in which to burn it.

In the first years the vast majority of arrests we made were for using or transporting marijuana, the drug that was easiest to interdict due to its sheer bulk and the fact that police officers could actually detect the odor of the drug if large amounts were being carried in the trunk of a vehicle they had stopped on the highway. At that time the media equated marijuana with heroin and cocaine; and the majority of the public hardly knew the difference between one drug and another. Marijuana seizures were the first drug interdictions that the police could count in the thousands of pounds but to the public drugs were drugs and a thousand pounds was an awful lot of drugs - this also made the drug problem appear much more important than it actually was at the time.

There have been many unintended consequences in the war on drugs. One of the unintended consequences of the successful interdiction of large amounts of marijuana was that it caused many marijuana dealers to switch to harder drugs that were less detectable and far more profitable, pound for pound. Among those drugs were heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. An even worse consequence was that in a few short years the price of marijuana increased by 2,500 percent, from $160 a pound to $4,000 a pound, causing many users to switch to harder drugs, which were less detectable, more plentiful and were becoming ever cheaper. The war on drugs actually increased drug usage and made it more likely that those using soft drugs would choose harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

Political motivation has always been evident in many of the drug arrests made by police. Holdovers from the "turn-on and drop-out" flower children of the late 1960s, most of whom also protested the United States' involvement in the war in Vietnam, were among the first groups we concentrated on but we quickly included activist groups from racial and ethnic minorities, such as the Black Panthers. After all, H.R. Haldemann, Richard M. Nixon's Chief of Staff, recorded in his 1969 diary entry that Nixon emphasized, "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to." The system they devised was the war on drugs and for Nixon's purposes he could have hardly hoped for more. (1) The war on drugs has spawned the most racist laws seen in the United States since slavery. Indeed, there are more black and brown men in prison in the United States today (1,300,020) (2) than the total number of male slaves populating this country in 1840 (1,244,384). (3)

By three years into the war, we were actually arresting some real mid-level dealers of other drugs, such as, the members of "The Breed" Motorcycle Gang who were selling methamphetamine out of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.

In 1977, seven years into the drug war, I kicked down a door in the Corona section of Queens, New York and seized around 350 thousand dollars and what was touted by the newspapers as "the largest shipment of Mexican brown heroin ever confiscated in the United States." We were in the newspapers over a week on that case - the heroin seizure, which is a little embarrassing to mention today, amounted to nineteen pounds. But the "drug problem" kept right on expanding, to the point that by 1978 I was working on Billion-Dollar, international, cocaine and heroin trafficking rings.