Interview: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

The L.A. Times recently ran an interview with Jack Cole, the executive director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former police officers who are fed up with the drug war and are hoping to use the credibility of their positions to promote the notion of ending the drug war. The interview is about what you'd expect if you've spent any time thinking about legalization tactics and supporting data, nothing too surprising, although his personal tale of how he as a state trooper came to consider the drug war a futile and hypocritical waste of resources is worth a look. But one tidbit definitely stuck out. Near the end of the interview, Cole is discussing how drugs that are currently illegal would be heavily regulated and made available in a world of legalization, and he's asked about the public health risks of making certain hard drugs available. His reply:

The only drug we've had any success in lowering the rate of use of in this country is tobacco. In the last 22 years we've cut tobacco use in half in this country. We didn't do that by making tobacco illegal, by arresting executives at R.J. Reynolds. The most effective thing we did was a massive education program.

Cole says his group doesn't make any specific policy recommendations; they merely suggest that "the more dangerous a drug is, the more reason there would be to legalize it, because you cannot control or regulate anything that is illegal," and that each drug would have its own policy for access. It's an interesting thought problem. The nightmare of legalization opponents is a world where society has unfettered access to the tools of its own destruction, as our self-control evaporates in the face of rampant hard drug abuse. But the kind of regulation that Cole hints at doesn't inherently mean that you'd be buying heroin out of vending machines; it might instead mean that you'd be using it under supervision if you could convince your doctor you really needed it (not as far-fetched as it may seem, as our earlier story on heroin maintenance programs in the UK suggests).

The kernel of this line of thinking, though, goes back to the days of alcohol prohibition, when a huge swath of the American population became criminals essentially overnight, with no corresponding increase in public safety or welfare. Today we have a situation where millions of people are comfortable with some amount of marijuana use per month or year, and society is not collapsing as it is. If we legalized pot, would we see a dangerous, precipitous increase in berzerk stoners roaming the streets? Possibly in the short term, sure, but alcohol regulations already provide a model for what to do with people who can't control their behavior while altered. And there's something in the back of my mind that can't help but think that making cocaine, heroin, and speed available in some fashion has a Darwinian component; our society keeps tobacco and alcohol legal, despite the fact that they demonstrably annihilate a certain percentage of the population every single day. Maybe from the perspective of our current health care system, that's not so great; but from the perspective of a democracy that ought to know better than to punish victimless crimes, it seems to make sense.

At any rate, this is both a) preaching to the choir, and b) useless philosophizing, as the likelihood of that level of change to our country's drug laws is about the same as the likelihood that I will suddenly sprout wings this morning and fly to work. It remains just the slightest bit heartening, however, that a group like LEAP is out there, trying to instigate exactly these kinds of changes. It's always tempting to view law enforcement as the enemy in the war on drugs, especially given the egregious excesses of overzealous enforcement that the drug war has inspired. But that's of course an unhelpful generalization, and right now, we need all the allies we can find, especially those with true front line experience in the drug war, so to speak.