Tag: LEAP

LEAP says:

A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.

“In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,’” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”

Last December, LEAP commissioned a report by a Harvard University economist which found that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject $77 billion a year into the struggling U.S. economy.

Today’s FBI report, which can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html, shows that 82.3 percent of all drug arrests in 2008 were for possession only, and 44.3 percent of drug arrests were for possession of marijuana.

Pointing to the collateral consequences that often follow drug arrests, LEAP’s Cole continued, “You can get get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction.”

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a 13,000-member organization representing cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who now want to legalize and regulate all drugs after witnessing horrors and injustices fighting on the front lines of the “war on drugs.”

Kristina Goetz of the Memphis Commercial Appealhas this story about an officer doing “deep undercover.”

She also had to restrain her police instincts to break up a fight at a convenience store or call social services if she saw a dealer hit his child because being caught would compromise the larger goal.

And what larger goal was more important than preventing physical child abuse? I would sue the police department if I were an assault victim and a police officer present did nothing.

But such is the nature of the war on drugs. Locking up a drug dealer (not preventing drug use) is more important than preventing injury or the beating of a child.

All the evils she saw? Those weren’t caused by drugs. They were caused by bad people in bad conditions. And people who commit bad crimes should get locked up.

So let me get this right. All the crimes you saw, the poverty, the desperation, the tricks, the violence, the child abuse? You saw people in f*cked up situations doing bad sh*t. And you were a police officer and you let it happen? You let all that slide because you were fighting some bigger fight? You rationalized that you needed to let some crimes slide so that you could go “up the ladder” and maybe even lock up some “kingpins” and win the war on drugs?

Did you?

In a year’s time, this officer’s work “resulted in more that 280 arrests — from low-level drug peddlers to big-name dealers.” And is Memphis safer? Have murders gone down? Has drug use gone down? By being “deep undercover,” you ignored your oath as a police officer to defend the laws and the Constitution of our land.

Look, it’s not like this officer didn’t give her all. So did LEAP founder Jack Cole. They just gave it for the wrong reasons. Like Jack Cole, perhaps she too will speak out against the war on drugs. Maybe she’ll wonder if some of the people she locked up weren’t really that bad. Maybe she’ll feel bad that some people are in prison because they were in bad situations and they trusted her. They thought she was their friend. And for all I know, she might have been their friend. And then she ratted them out.

That would be a heavy weight on my shoulders.

The Washington Post has an op-ed written by me, Peter Moskos, and Stanford “Neill” Franklin.

It’s Time to Legalize Drug

Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.

We simply urge the federal government to retreat. Let cities and states (and, while we’re at it, other countries) decide their own drug policies. Many would continue prohibition, but some would try something new. California and its medical marijuana dispensaries provide a good working example, warts and all, that legalized drug distribution does not cause the sky to fall.

Eight-term Iowa Republican Congressman Tom Latham is asked about LEAP, a group of former law enforcement agents who support drug legalization. He responds, “They’re probably a bunch of old potheads.”

Don’t like the message? Disparage the messenger. That’s what they call an ad hominem attack. Maybe he should get to know us.

Of well, you know what they say: any publicity is good publicity.

Jack Cole, the founder of LEAP, has an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe.

WAR AND RACE dominate the presidential campaign, but one nation-shaping war with profound racial consequences eludes the political radar: the drug war.

I was a frontline soldier in this self-perpetuating, ineffectual effort that has swallowed more than a trillion tax dollars and currently yields nearly 2 million arrests every year for nonviolent offenses. I helped incarcerate some 1,000 young people as part of this irredeemably wrongheaded attempt to arrest our way out of our drug problems. Those arrests will follow them to their graves.

I know they follow me.

Read the whole article here.