Vétérans contre la guerre (antidrogue)
Posté: 07 Oct 2005, 06:45A quand la même chose en France avec des anciens de la BAC ?
Vétérans contre la guerre (antidrogue)
Article paru dans le Fort Worth Weekly (Texas) du 28/9/05
(Résumé-traduction Raph)
Richard Watkins, gardien de prison au Texas : "Si vous pouvez pas exclure
les drogues d'une prison de haute-sécurité, vous ne pouvez pas les exclure
d'une école".
Les policiers de la LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Appliquer
une loi contre la prohibition) organisent des conférences dans tout le pays
(1500 depuis 2003). Ils vont de ville en ville, portant un T-shirt avec le
slogan "Cops Say Legalize Drugs. Ask Me Why."(Des flics disent de légaliser
les drogues. Demandez-moi pourquoi"). Créée en mars 2002 par 5 officiers de
police, la LEAP compte désormais 3000 membres, issus des rangs des
policiers, gardiens de prison, agents de la DEA, juges et même procureurs,
de 48 Etats et 45 pays étrangers.
L'idée à la base de la LEAP est que, comme dans le cas de l'association
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (vétérans du Vietnam contre la guerre),
l'appel à en finir avec la guerre antidrogue prend plus de poids lorsqu'il
provient de gens qui ont été dans les tranchées.
"Nous sommes ceux qui ont mené cette bataille", déclare Jack Cole,
directeur exécutif de LEAP, ex-lieutenant détective de la police du
New-Jersey pendant 26 ans, dont 14 dans leur bureau des stupéfiants. "Et je
me porte témoin de l'échec abject de la guerre antidrogue américaine et des
horreurs que ces politiques prohibitionnistes ont causées."
Howard Woolridge, officier de la lutte antidrogue pendant 18 ans,
aujourd'hui en retraite, a finalement réalisé que la guerre antidrogue
était plus un problème que les drogues illicites qu'il s'agissait de
combattre.
"Quand j'ai commencé à porter ce T-shirt", déclare-t-il, les gens au Texas
pensaient que j'étais fou. Ils croyaient que j'avais dans l'idée de
détruire le Texas et l'Amérique. Ils croyaient en la propagande
gouvernementale qui prétend que des millions de gens allaient prendre de
l'héro ou des méthamphétamines et deviendraient junkies du jour au
lendemain si on légalisait ces drogues." Mais pendant les deux ou trois
dernières années, il a constaté un changement dans
l'attitude du public américain au sujet de la guerre antidrogue. "Dans
n'importe quelle réunion Arby, McDonald, Rotary Club, ou de vétérans, les
gens sont immensément en faveur d'un appel à stopper la prohibition des
drogues. Immensément."
Pubdate: Wed, 28 Sep 2005
Source: Fort Worth Weekly (TX)
Contact: <mailto:feedback@fwweekly.comfeedback@fwweekly.com
Website: <http://www.fwweekly.com/http://www.fwweekly.com/
Feedback: <http://www.fwweekly.com/letters/http://www.fwweekly.com/letters/
Forum:
<http://www.fwweekly.com/discussions/http://www.fwweekly.com/discussions/W
Address: 1204-B W. 7th St. Suite 201, Fort Worth, TX 76102
Copyright: 2005 New Times, Inc.
Author: Peter Gorman
VETS AGAINST THE (DRUG) WAR
This Is Your Society. This Is Your Society On An Endless, Losing
Campaign Against Drugs. NOW DO YOU GET IT?
As a Texas prison warden, Richard Watkins saw the drug war's effects
every day. 'If you can't keep drugs out of a maximum-security prison,
you can't keep them out of schools'
White: 'I got fed up with the corruption.'
Jack Cole, LEAP's founding director, today and (at right) during his
days as an undercover narc. He believes the drug war has increased
police corruption and institutional racism.
Woolridge, left, in his suit, after giving a speech on drug
legalization, and right, back on the road riding Sam. He's been
wearing various versions of the t-shirt for six years.
Howard Woolridge is outside of Utica, N.Y., heading east on horseback
on a beautiful late summer day. He's wearing a t-shirt with the
slogan "Cops Say Legalize Drugs. Ask Me Why." For the last 3,000
miles, he's been switching off between his two horses, Misty and Sam.
But the t-shirt slogan has stayed the same.
The rangy, good-looking guy is also talking on the cell phone to a
reporter back in North Texas. But he interrupts that conversation to
speak to someone who pulls up next to him in a car. "That's right --
cops say legalize," he tells the newcomer in a deep voice. "Why?
Because if we do, we just might be able to keep drugs out of the
hands of your 14-year old."
"Right on!" the motorist shouts, and drives off.
Woolridge is not a lunatic, and he hasn't been out in the sun too
long, even if he did cross the United States on horseback in the
summer heat. He's a retired law enforcement officer with 18 years on
the job who finally decided that the war on drugs was more of a
problem than the illicit drugs it was purporting to fight.
He's also a serious long-distance horseman, on the road this time
since March 4, when he left Los Angeles on the 3,400-mile ride to the
New York City harbor. It's the second time Woolridge has crossed the
United States to publicize the campaign to repeal most of the drug
laws in this country. In 2003 he rode from Georgia to Oregon. When he
finishes this trip on Oct. 5, looking out at the Statue of Liberty,
he will be honored by the Long Riders' Guild as only the second
person known to have ridden horseback all the way across the country
in both directions. And he'll still be wearing one of the "Ask Me
Why" t-shirts he's been wearing for six years.
"When I first started wearing it," he says, "people in Texas thought
I was crazy. They thought my idea would destroy Texas and America.
They believed the government propaganda that millions of people would
pick up heroin or methamphetamines and become junkies overnight if
you legalized it." But in the last two to three years, he's seen a
sea change in the attitude of the American public regarding the War
on Drugs. "At any given Arby's, McDonald's, Rotary Club, or veterans
hall, people are overwhelmingly in favor of calling a halt to drug
prohibition. Overwhelmingly."
Many of the houses Woolridge is riding past carry plaques attesting
to the Utica area's involvement in the Underground Railroad that once
funneled runaway slaves from the south up to Canada. It makes him
think about Bernie Ellis, a fellow soldier in the war against the
drug war, who has lost his own freedom.
"For 10 years he provided free medical marijuana to three oncologists
in the Nashville, Tenn., area for their patients undergoing
chemotherapy. He never once met the doctors, of course; it was all
cloak and dagger. He'd bring the marijuana to an office worker who'd
get it to the patient.
"Well, he finally got busted last year. Now he's looking at five
years mandatory federal prison time, though that might go up to 10
because he had a shotgun on his farm when he got busted. And of
course his million-dollar farm has been forfeited because he grew the
medical marijuana there."
The phone goes quiet for a minute, and there's the sound of a
strangled sob. "Sorry. Got a little choked up for a second," he says.
He pauses to explain his t-shirt to a motorist, then he's back on the
phone talking about Bernie. "This is a guy who broke the law to help
people and is now facing the consequences of that. Poor son of a
bitch. Next time I see him he'll be in prison."
Woolridge is not a lone ranger in the fight to legalize drugs. He's a
founding member of an organization called Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition or LEAP, an organization made up entirely of current and
former members of law enforcement who feel the drug war's a failure
and believe legalization and regulation are preferable to the
incarceration of drug users and control of the drug market by organized crime.
Started in March 2002 by five police officers, LEAP now counts about
3,000 members, from the ranks of policemen, prison guards, DEA
agents, judges, and even prosecutors in 48 states and 45 foreign
countries. The idea behind LEAP is that, as with the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, the call for an end to the drug war carries more
weight when it comes from folks who have been in the trenches.
"We're the ones who fought the war," said Jack Cole, LEAP's executive
director, who retired from the New Jersey state police as a detective
lieutenant after 26 years, including 14 in their narcotics bureau,
mostly undercover. "And I bear witness to the abject failure of the
U.S. war on drugs and to the horrors these prohibitionist policies
have produced."
The LEAP web site provides the statistical backup for that argument.
"After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on
drugs with over half a trillion tax dollars and increasingly punitive
policies, our confined population has quadrupled," it says. "More
than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated, and
every year we arrest an additional 1.6 million for nonviolent drug
offenses -- more per capita than any country in the world. ...
Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and
terrorists continue to grow richer."
To get that message out, LEAP members have given nearly 1,500
speeches since 2003. And they don't preach to the choir. "We don't do
hemp rallies or Million Man Marijuana Marches," said Woolridge. "We
do Kiwanis Clubs and PTA meetings and cop conventions. That's where
the people we've got to reach go."
To parents and teachers and Rotarians and other cops, LEAP members
tell their own stories, about their work and about how they came to
feel the drug war was not the answer.
Woolridge, for instance, was a street cop in Michigan for 15 of his
18 years of service, before moving up to the rank of detective. "I
didn't work directly with the drug war, in that I wasn't in
narcotics," he said. "Still, as a detective I was constantly working
with felonies that touched on the drug war. Eight of 10 burglary
suspects I dealt with were on crack at the time. They were stealing
for drug money."
The burglary victims "were all in real pain," he said. "And I got so
fed up with it I began saying 'Why not let these guys have all the
crack they want until they dieUKP' Now I'd say 'Have all you want for
a dollar.' That makes it their choice to live or die. Either way you
don't have people breaking into houses for drug money anymore."
To Cole, who did work directly in narcotics, the whole concept of the
war on drugs is wrong. "You declare war, you need soldiers. You have
soldiers, they need an enemy. So we've effectively taken a
peacekeeping force -- the police -- and turned them into soldiers
whose enemies are the 110 million people who have tried illegal
substances in the U.S."
To be an effective soldier, you've got to dehumanize your enemy.
"When I started out in narcotics I believed everything they told me,"
said Cole, a no-BS kind of guy. "Drugs were bad. The people who did
them were less than human. I was all for locking them up."
Worse, he said, he and others often applied what they called a little
"street justice" to the people they were arresting. "In our training
we were taught to believe that drug users were the worst people in
the world and whatever we did to them to try to stop their drug use
was justified."
What they did was kick in home or apartment doors and have every man,
woman, and child inside lie on the floor. If people didn't cooperate
immediately, they were thrown to the floor. Then the place was
ransacked. "When we searched for drugs, we pretty much did as much
damage as possible. We'd break bureaus, turn over beds, smash
mirrors, throw things on the floor. Didn't matter because the people
there weren't humans, right? And then if we did find any drugs we'd
arrest everyone in the house: parents, sisters, brothers. And since
we'd already kicked the door down when we came in, it would be left
open, and anyone who wanted to enter could steal what they wanted. We
never cared about that."
Street justice didn't stop there, said Cole. In court, he said,
officers routinely changed testimony to ensure convictions -- times,
locations, amounts of drugs -- "anything that couldn't be checked to
catch the officer in a lie."
It didn't take long for Cole to reach the conclusion that the drug
war and its street justice weren't for him. He was mostly going after
small-timers, and his job, he came to feel, was to insert himself
into voluntary, private business transactions. "To do that I had to
become someone's confidant, their best friend. And once I was, I
would bust them."
But he too got hooked -- on the adrenaline high of the game. "By the
time I came to my senses, I was working on big-timers, and pitting
your mind against theirs was a great rush," he said. "Also it was
hard to quit because we were considered by the public and our peers
as heroes. And then, given that I'd worked with a lot of cops who
applied bad street justice, I let myself believe that at least if I
was the one catching [the dopers], they'd be legally caught, and I'd
tell the truth, and justice would prevail."
He laughed. "Know what was the worst? When I realized that I liked
and respected a lot of the bad guys much more than I liked or
respected the guys I was working with."
The stated goals of the war on drugs are to lower drug consumption,
reduce addiction and dependence, and decrease the quality and
quantity of illegal drugs available on American streets. Those have
been the goals since Richard Nixon first declared the war as part of
his attempt to look tough on crime during the presidential election in 1968.
Since then, the strategy of prohibition has been ramped up by every
succeeding administration. Few people in this country -- or anywhere
--have escaped the effects of the U.S. drug war, from the toll of
burglaries and car thefts committed to pay for drugs, to the tax
bills for prisons to hold the increasing numbers of citizens locked
up for non-violent drug-related crimes, to the millions of kids
who've grown up without one or both parents as a result of drug
convictions and drug addictions. Drug-related murders reach into the
tens of thousands in this country, and the toll is much higher in
drug-producing and shipping nations from Colombia to Afghanistan to
Jamaica. Thousands of peace officers have died fighting the drug war.
Whole countries have found themselves under the boot of the illegal
drug industry, their leaders controlled or intimidated by drug
cartels, their governments and police forces infiltrated, and honest
public servants assassinated.
The assumption in American drug policy has always been that those are
the impacts of illegal drugs themselves. But LEAP members have come
to believe those are the wages not of drugs but of the War on Drugs.
And they want the rest of the country to look closely at the costs of
that strategy and what they see as its failures.
Despite the billions of dollars spent on the fight in nearly 40
years, LEAP members point out, the drug war has failed on every one
of its stated goals.
Drug consumption, for instance, shows little sign of dropping.
Whereas in 1965, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration,
fewer than 4 million Americans had ever tried an illegal drug, the
figure is now more than 110 million. In 2000, the federal government
estimated that there were about 33 million people in this country who
had used cocaine at least once -- an 800 percent increase over the
total number of people 37 years ago who had used any illegal drug.
Dependence and addiction? According to the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP), the federal agency that sets and administers
U.S. drug policy, in 2002 more than 7 million Americans were either
dependent on or abusing illegal substances -- nearly double the
number of people who had even tried such drugs when Nixon declared
his war. The ranks of heroin addicts have jumped from a few hundred
thousand in the 1960s to between 750,000 and one million today,
according to the ONDCP.
Attempts to decrease the quality of available drugs also have failed.
In 1970, average street heroin in this country had a potency of 1 to
2 percent. In 2000, according to the DEA, that purity figure was 36.8
percent -- although U.S. drug czar John Walters did praise anti-drug
forces recently for reducing the strength of street heroin coming
from South America to 32.1 percent. Similarly, street cocaine was
roughly 2 to 4 percent pure in 1968 -- and a whopping 56 percent pure
in 2001, according to the ONDCP. The average strength of the active
ingredient THC in marijuana sold in this country more than doubled
between the late 1970s and 2001.
Nor is there much good news on drug quantities and availability, at
least not judging by the numbers of users and the prices on the
street. The ONDCP estimates that Americans' use of cocaine and crack
has dropped from 447 tons in 1990 to 259 tons in 2000. But the price
of cocaine dropped from $100 per gram in 1970 to $25 to $50 per gram
in 2002 -- for cocaine that was many times stronger. At the wholesale
level, a kilogram of cocaine (2.2 pounds at roughly 25 percent
purity) cost $45,000 in New York City in 1970. Today, in any large
city in the US it costs less than $15,000, and it's about 65 percent pure.
Only marijuana showed a price increase. In 1970, a bag of Mexican
ditchweed (roughly an ounce) cost $20. In 2005, that same bag costs
nearly $50. But most Americans who can afford it don't smoke Mexican
ditchweed. They smoke US-grown sinsemilla, which runs up to $400 per ounce.
With availability, price, and quality making drugs as attractive as
ever, the only other barometer of the success of the drug war might
be whether it has stopped anyone from trying drugs -- an area where
programs like DARE, a huge effort targeted at school kids, have had a
noted lack of success. "It didn't stop George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al
Gore, or me from smoking pot," said Woolridge. "I don't think it
probably ever stopped anyone."
The cops and prosecutors and judges who belong to LEAP think the bad
results of the drug war go beyond its policy failures, even beyond
the lives lost to drug violence and incarceration.
"Let's be honest," Cole said. "The war on drugs has taken an
incredible toll in terms of the loss of our civil liberties,
particularly in terms of the Fourth Amendment, from property
forfeiture laws that fund law enforcement agencies to warrantless
searches. It's promoted institutionalized racism, and it's created a
systemic level of corruption among law enforcement unheard of prior
to its initiation."
Law enforcement veterans like Cole and Woolridge believe the increase
in institutional racism is one of the deepest wounds. They point out,
for instance, that crack users -- generally inner-city blacks -- are
subject to mandatory minimum sentences of five years for possession
of five grams of crack, while powder cocaine users -- generally
middle-class whites -- have to be caught with 500 grams to get the
same mandatory sentence.
While ONDCP statistics show that whites use more than 70 percent of
all illegal drugs, blacks are sentenced to prison for drug crimes
seven times more often than whites.
"Imagine," said Cole, "one of the most racist places in the world:
South Africa, 1993. At that time the South African government was
incarcerating black males at the rate of 859 per 100,000 population."
And yet in 2004 in the United States -- with a higher percent of its
population in prison than any country in the world -- the
incarceration rate for black males was 4,919 per 100,000 (compared to
726 overall).
He pointed to an FBI estimate that one in three black male babies
born in the U.S. in 2004 has an expectation of going to prison during
his lifetime. "That just blows my mind," he said.
LEAP members believe that a large percentage of the corruption found
in U.S. police agencies is tied to drugs. Recent local drug-related
scandals include the Dallas fake-drugs operation, in which a snitch
was paid more than $200,000 over a two-year period to identify drug
dealers. The "dealers" turned out to be nearly all illegal
immigrants; their "drugs" turned out to be crushed sheetrock and pool
chalk. And then there was Tulia, in the Texas Panhandle, in which a
multi-county drug task force hired a corrupt deputy sheriff to rid
the town of its drug problem; when it turned out there wasn't one,
the deputy created one, and more than 40 people wound up arrested.
LEAP spokesmen see both those high-profile Texas drug corruption
cases as indicative of a much wider problem: officers cutting corners
to get the arrest numbers that will keep federal and state anti-drug
funds flowing. And those scandals don't begin to touch on the border
patrol agents, police, and other law enforcement officials who have
been corrupted because the drug money is so readily available.
Rusty White, another LEAP member, is a self-described redneck who
grew up hard in East Texas and Arizona. Now, after many stops in
other states and countries, he lives just north of Fort Worth. At 13
he saw a friend shoot up black tar heroin and decided he didn't like
hard drugs. But by 16, he was running with a badass crowd. He got
into trouble with the law, punched a teacher, and was kicked out of school.
In quick succession, he married, became a father, joined the army,
and got divorced. After a second tour with the army, he ended up in
Florence, Ariz., where he went to work at the state pen, which was,
he said, "one of the most violent prisons in the United States at that time."
From 1973 to 1978, he worked as a guard on maximum security, death
row, and administrative segregation cellblocks, dealing with horrors
daily. "Life meant very little to those inside the walls," he said,
noting that two prison guards were killed and mutilated by inmates in
1973. "Drugs were one of the biggest problems we had. They were the
cause of most of the deaths and power struggles." And most of the
drugs were brought in by prison workers. "I got fed up with the
corruption and left to go into the oil drilling business in 1979," he said.
After working overseas for several years, White moved to Oklahoma.
And there, he said, he got to see the war on drugs from a very
different vantage point. "The county I lived in had a sheriff who
controlled the drug market. And he did so with force. It was common
knowledge that if you crossed him he could be -- and had been -- deadly."
But the same sheriff regularly flew around the county in National
Guard helicopters, providing photo ops for news crews to show how
tough he was on drugs. "The only thing he was getting rid of was the
competition," said White, disgustedly.
His only personal encounter with the sheriff and his machine occurred
when White's brother-in-law, a small-time pot dealer, was busted. "He
was poor, didn't have a car that ran, and was living off [government]
commodities. Yet he was going to be played by the sheriff as a
drug-dealing kingpin," the former prison guard said.
"He's the father of three little ones, all younger than six, and when
the police arrived, he offered to go with them willingly. But he
asked that his kids be allowed to stay with an uncle who was there
rather than dragging them down to the station. Well, you know how
people feel about 'drug dealers'; the police said no, the kids were
coming to the station to watch their father get busted, and then
they'd be released to the uncle."
When the man's trial came up, White said, it turned out the district
attorney didn't have any evidence against him as a big-time dealer.
Nonetheless, he was offered a plea deal: Admit to being a big dealer
and get a one-to three-year sentence. If he insisted on a trial,
however, the prosecutor promised to ask for a full 10 years.
"He copped to the plea. But to see him struggle with having to lie in
front of his kids and admit to something he hadn't done -- well, I
sort of snapped and screamed at the prosecutor and asked him if he
thought he'd earned his money that day and why was he playing God.
And he looked at me and answered, 'Because in this county, I am God.'"
A couple of years later, White said, the DA went back into private
practice and shortly thereafter was arrested and convicted for
dealing methamphetamines. "How the sheriff escaped that net I don't
know," White said. "But the thing to remember is that ... this sort
of thing is happening every day in the war on drugs, all over the
country. And that abuse of trust and power is far more harmful to
Americans than drugs could ever be."
Shortly after his brother-in-law's conviction, White went back to
work in the prison system and became a drug-dog trainer and handler.
It was the sort of work White said he was meant to do. "I tracked
several escapees from the prison and even some cop killers using my
track K-9s. We helped departments all over the state. I'd be sent to
prisons to look for drugs -- I had no problem with that. But the more
we were used with other police organizations the more my conscience
started to become a problem."
Two incidents stick in White's mind. Once while his partner was
helping another officer, part of a joint was discovered in the
ashtray of an old pickup belonging to an elderly man. The dogs were
brought in, and in the camper shell on the back of the truck in which
the old man lived, the dogs sniffed out a briefcase with more than
$9,000 in it. Because it was a drug dog that had alerted on it, the
money was confiscated. "And they just stood around laughing as the
old man begged them not to take his life savings. It just made me
sick and ashamed. Heck, it's common knowledge that over 90 percent of
the paper money in this country is tainted with a drug scent a dog
can find. But using that to rob our people disgusts me. Heck, if you
walk any K-9 into a bank vault the dog will mark on that money too.
How come that money isn't confiscated?"
The second incident occurred one night when White and his drug dog
were called to help a local police department search a house for
drugs. When he pulled up to the house, he asked to see the warrant.
The officer told him it wasn't there yet but to go ahead and start
the search, and it would be there shortly. "I told him that's just
not how it works. I needed the warrant for the search to be legal. So
I put my K-9 back into the truck and brought him back to the kennel.
And then I got called on the carpet for refusing to assist."
White thought getting into trouble for following the law he'd sworn
to uphold was just too much, so he quit. "Heck, there was so much
corruption, even among K-9 handlers. If they didn't want someone with
drugs caught they'd say the dog didn't mark. If they did, well, we
heard of cases where guys went so far as to 'salt' the areas their
dogs were searching to make sure someone got busted. It was so bad
that, being honest, you couldn't do it. .. I don't think anyone with
a conscience can be part of law enforcement anymore."
Richard Watkins saw the same corruption inside prison that White did,
but from a unique perspective. A decorated Vietnam veteran with a
Ph.D. in education, Watkins worked at Texas' Huntsville prison for 20
years, the last several as warden of Holiday Unit, a 2,100-bed
facility housing a range of criminals from non-violent to
violent/maximum security.
He was originally hired to revamp and professionalize the
correctional officers training program -- something the prison system
was forced to do by federal mandate and that Watkins said was badly
needed. "It was just horrible. Corrupt, bad, just plain horrible," he said.
Watkins had always had reservations about the war on drugs. He
figured the drug dealers wouldn't go away as long as there was a
market. And looking at this country's experience with Prohibition,
"and how that created mobsters and criminal gangs," he figured that
legalizing drugs made more sense. When selling and drinking booze
became legal in this country again, he said, "you had so much more
control of it. You had supporting laws that managed the use of alcohol."
Watkins was first exposed to drugs in Vietnam. He didn't use them --
he preferred alcohol -- but he saw a lot of other guys getting high
on marijuana and other drugs. Many of those men wound up in prison
when they came home with addiction problems. "And in prison, you
could always get whatever drugs you wanted. Heck, we arrested a mom
one time who was putting a lip-lock on her son to pass him a balloon
full of heroin. But most of the drugs came in through the guards.
Drugs are packaged so small, it's almost impossible to keep them out.
Think about that: If you can't keep drugs out of a maximum security
prison, you can't keep them out of schools or anywhere else."
Once drugs land someone in prison in Texas, he said, life's prospects
get a lot dimmer. "We've got these minor players put in with
professional criminals. If they weren't criminals going in, they damn
sure are when they get out. Imagine a system where we put people into
a society that's really a training ground for criminals, then don't
provide them with either schooling or treatment, then put them back
on the streets where they came from. Do you really expect them to be
reformed? Life doesn't work that way."
He wishes people wouldn't make the decision to use drugs. "But if
they did use them, I wouldn't put them in prison. I'd rather see the
money we spend on prisons going to give these kids the tools they
need to make better choices."
You might imagine that it would be easy to find law enforcement
agencies and personnel who oppose LEAP's call for legalization and
regulation as an alternative to the war on drugs. But neither the FBI
nor the DEA would discuss the subject.
"Our job is to stop the flow of illegal drugs both at home and
abroad, as well as to stop our citizens from wanting to use them
through education and prevention methods," said an ONDCP
representative. "We will not discuss legalization or any organization
which thinks that would be a solution."
Jack Cole wasn't surprised. "They're good soldiers," he said.
"They're not allowed to question their commands. Our job is to simply
have their commanders change their marching orders."
Mike Smithson, the Fort Worth native who runs LEAP's speakers bureau,
said he's made more than 100 attempts to get law enforcement and drug
policy officials to come out and debate LEAP, "and we've only been
taken up on it five times. Policymakers generally say that debating
us will lend us credence. We think they're just afraid. How can they
defend a policy that is already being defended by every major drug
dealer, cartel, and drug-producing government worldwide?"
Woolridge says that on his entire ride from Los Angeles he's talked
to only two officers who disagreed with LEAP's point of view. "One
guy thought we'd destroy America if we legalized drugs. He was so
angry when he couldn't find anything to write me a ticket for that he
gave me the finger as he drove away. And there was a state trooper
with 22 years on the job who told me to take off my shirt because it
said "Cops say legalize drugs," and he didn't agree with that. I told
him go make up his own shirt."
One person who did agree to discuss his opposition to LEAP's stand
was Sheriff John Cooke of Wells County in Colorado. Cooke is a member
of a Rotary Club at which Howard Woolridge spoke. He was so taken
aback by the idea of legalizing drugs that he demanded equal time and
recently spoke to the Rotary Club himself.
"In my opinion, there are several reasons not to legalize drugs,"
Cooke told Fort Worth Weekly. "First of all, when people say you're
going to eliminate the black market, does that mean you're going to
sell drugs to 12- and 15-year-olds? Because if you don't, someone
will. Law enforcement surely hasn't done a good job at keeping
alcohol and cigarettes out of the hands of kids, so what makes them
think they'll do any better with drugs? And if you don't sell drugs
to them, there will be a black market created to sell to them. So I
don't buy the end-of-the-black-market theory.
"Secondly, we already have social ills from the legal use of alcohol
and tobacco. Why on earth would we want to turn other addictive
substances loose on the public?
"Thirdly, these LEAP folks want to throw in the towel, say we've lost
the drug war. But the thing is that I think we're winning the war on
drugs. I think drug use is down. I think if we keep at it, we will win.
"Then there's the question of use. Right now, I believe that the
threat of the hammer of law enforcement is keeping a great many
people from doing drugs. The threat of prison time is a big hammer. I
think if we legalized you'd see the number of people doing drugs in
this country skyrocket. I believe we'd have a drug-dependent
society... and I don't want to see America as a drug-dependent country."
Michael Gilbert, chairman of the criminal justice department in the
College of Public Policy at the University of Texas in San Antonio,
said he doubts that there would be any sizable black market aimed at
teens if drugs were legalized. Gilbert is a LEAP member who worked in
prisons -- including Leavenworth -- and with Justice Department
agencies for more than 20 years.
"The reason there's so much money in the black market is not because
of the small portion of destabilized street addicts we have, or even
kids experimenting with drugs. It's because you have long-time
productive millions [of people] who regularly purchase small
quantities of the drugs of their choice, but they don't use them in a
way that becomes destructive to their lives," he said. "They're
working, paying their taxes, and so forth. The real money is from the
enormous number of middle-class people who use drugs. So while you
might still have a small market of teens purchasing drugs, it
wouldn't be large enough to fund criminal enterprises as it does today."
While few current policy-makers will discuss the benefits of drug
prohibition, several well-known former policy-makers have come out
against it. Among them are Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman, a former member of President Reagan's Economic Advisory
Board; former Secretary of State (under Ronald Reagan) George P.
Shultz; former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson; former Baltimore Mayor
Kurt Schmoke; and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, a former
presidential candidate.
None of the LEAP members interviewed for this story believes abusing
drugs is a good choice. But that's different, they say, from the
legal system further ruining people's lives because of that bad choice.
They also figure that, like yard care, hair color decisions, and bad
marriages, drug use is a choice that society should only care about
when it hurts other people. In town, running around in your yard
naked and screaming at 4 a.m. breaks the social contract. On a ranch
where no one else can see or hear, few people would care. Likewise,
LEAP members figure, if you can do drugs and not break the social
contract, go ahead. And in fact, the federal government figures that
72 percent of chronic drug users continue to function well in society
without harming others.
Even considering the harm that drugs can cause, however, LEAP members
believe that the war on drugs is even more harmful. Legalizing drugs,
on the other hand, would take profits out of the hands of criminals
and hugely reduce the need for people to commit crime to pay for
drugs, they say. Regulation would take drug manufacture out of the
hands of bathtub chemists and put it into the hands of real chemists,
eliminating many of the deaths from bad drugs -- much like the end of
Prohibition did for deaths from homemade booze. HIV and hepatitis C,
rampant among needle-sharing junkies, could be significantly reduced
with the availability of clean needles, reducing a major health care
burden for the country.
"Don't forget my favorite," Woolridge said. "If, as Bush said, drug
money funds terrorists, [then] legalizing drugs would take half a
billion dollars a day out of Afghanistan alone, much of which is
going to al Qaeda to buy weapons to be used to kill our boys. We
could eliminate that overnight."
Legalization, in fact, would probably not increase drug use
long-term, many believe -- especially since nearly half the
population has already tried it. "In all likelihood," Watkins said,
"you would see a spike in use as we did with the end of alcohol
prohibition. But that normalized pretty quickly, and it would
probably be the same with drugs. There would be a period of
experimentation that would level out, and we'd be left with all the
benefits and none of the negatives."
It was Sunday afternoon and Howard Woolridge and Misty were still in
upstate New York, having made it from Utica to a ghetto in
Schenectady. Woolridge was back on the phone again, when a woman
approached him.
"What do you mean cops say legalize drugs?" she could be heard asking.
"Just that. Let's legalize drugs, take them off the street corner."
"What kind of drugs?"
"Heroin, crack, methamphetamine, anything you can think of."
"Are you crazy? I don't want my kids doing those drugs!"
"Neither do I," he told her. "They're no good. But that doesn't keep
them from being sold on the corner in this very neighborhood, does
it? I'd legalize them and get them into pharmacies. Keep your kids
from being shot while walking down the street."
There was a pause and then she laughed. "I never thought of it that
way before. You're making me think now."
__________________________________________________________________________
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
---
MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman
Vétérans contre la guerre (antidrogue)
Article paru dans le Fort Worth Weekly (Texas) du 28/9/05
(Résumé-traduction Raph)
Richard Watkins, gardien de prison au Texas : "Si vous pouvez pas exclure
les drogues d'une prison de haute-sécurité, vous ne pouvez pas les exclure
d'une école".
Les policiers de la LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Appliquer
une loi contre la prohibition) organisent des conférences dans tout le pays
(1500 depuis 2003). Ils vont de ville en ville, portant un T-shirt avec le
slogan "Cops Say Legalize Drugs. Ask Me Why."(Des flics disent de légaliser
les drogues. Demandez-moi pourquoi"). Créée en mars 2002 par 5 officiers de
police, la LEAP compte désormais 3000 membres, issus des rangs des
policiers, gardiens de prison, agents de la DEA, juges et même procureurs,
de 48 Etats et 45 pays étrangers.
L'idée à la base de la LEAP est que, comme dans le cas de l'association
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (vétérans du Vietnam contre la guerre),
l'appel à en finir avec la guerre antidrogue prend plus de poids lorsqu'il
provient de gens qui ont été dans les tranchées.
"Nous sommes ceux qui ont mené cette bataille", déclare Jack Cole,
directeur exécutif de LEAP, ex-lieutenant détective de la police du
New-Jersey pendant 26 ans, dont 14 dans leur bureau des stupéfiants. "Et je
me porte témoin de l'échec abject de la guerre antidrogue américaine et des
horreurs que ces politiques prohibitionnistes ont causées."
Howard Woolridge, officier de la lutte antidrogue pendant 18 ans,
aujourd'hui en retraite, a finalement réalisé que la guerre antidrogue
était plus un problème que les drogues illicites qu'il s'agissait de
combattre.
"Quand j'ai commencé à porter ce T-shirt", déclare-t-il, les gens au Texas
pensaient que j'étais fou. Ils croyaient que j'avais dans l'idée de
détruire le Texas et l'Amérique. Ils croyaient en la propagande
gouvernementale qui prétend que des millions de gens allaient prendre de
l'héro ou des méthamphétamines et deviendraient junkies du jour au
lendemain si on légalisait ces drogues." Mais pendant les deux ou trois
dernières années, il a constaté un changement dans
l'attitude du public américain au sujet de la guerre antidrogue. "Dans
n'importe quelle réunion Arby, McDonald, Rotary Club, ou de vétérans, les
gens sont immensément en faveur d'un appel à stopper la prohibition des
drogues. Immensément."
Pubdate: Wed, 28 Sep 2005
Source: Fort Worth Weekly (TX)
Contact: <mailto:feedback@fwweekly.comfeedback@fwweekly.com
Website: <http://www.fwweekly.com/http://www.fwweekly.com/
Feedback: <http://www.fwweekly.com/letters/http://www.fwweekly.com/letters/
Forum:
<http://www.fwweekly.com/discussions/http://www.fwweekly.com/discussions/W
Address: 1204-B W. 7th St. Suite 201, Fort Worth, TX 76102
Copyright: 2005 New Times, Inc.
Author: Peter Gorman
VETS AGAINST THE (DRUG) WAR
This Is Your Society. This Is Your Society On An Endless, Losing
Campaign Against Drugs. NOW DO YOU GET IT?
As a Texas prison warden, Richard Watkins saw the drug war's effects
every day. 'If you can't keep drugs out of a maximum-security prison,
you can't keep them out of schools'
White: 'I got fed up with the corruption.'
Jack Cole, LEAP's founding director, today and (at right) during his
days as an undercover narc. He believes the drug war has increased
police corruption and institutional racism.
Woolridge, left, in his suit, after giving a speech on drug
legalization, and right, back on the road riding Sam. He's been
wearing various versions of the t-shirt for six years.
Howard Woolridge is outside of Utica, N.Y., heading east on horseback
on a beautiful late summer day. He's wearing a t-shirt with the
slogan "Cops Say Legalize Drugs. Ask Me Why." For the last 3,000
miles, he's been switching off between his two horses, Misty and Sam.
But the t-shirt slogan has stayed the same.
The rangy, good-looking guy is also talking on the cell phone to a
reporter back in North Texas. But he interrupts that conversation to
speak to someone who pulls up next to him in a car. "That's right --
cops say legalize," he tells the newcomer in a deep voice. "Why?
Because if we do, we just might be able to keep drugs out of the
hands of your 14-year old."
"Right on!" the motorist shouts, and drives off.
Woolridge is not a lunatic, and he hasn't been out in the sun too
long, even if he did cross the United States on horseback in the
summer heat. He's a retired law enforcement officer with 18 years on
the job who finally decided that the war on drugs was more of a
problem than the illicit drugs it was purporting to fight.
He's also a serious long-distance horseman, on the road this time
since March 4, when he left Los Angeles on the 3,400-mile ride to the
New York City harbor. It's the second time Woolridge has crossed the
United States to publicize the campaign to repeal most of the drug
laws in this country. In 2003 he rode from Georgia to Oregon. When he
finishes this trip on Oct. 5, looking out at the Statue of Liberty,
he will be honored by the Long Riders' Guild as only the second
person known to have ridden horseback all the way across the country
in both directions. And he'll still be wearing one of the "Ask Me
Why" t-shirts he's been wearing for six years.
"When I first started wearing it," he says, "people in Texas thought
I was crazy. They thought my idea would destroy Texas and America.
They believed the government propaganda that millions of people would
pick up heroin or methamphetamines and become junkies overnight if
you legalized it." But in the last two to three years, he's seen a
sea change in the attitude of the American public regarding the War
on Drugs. "At any given Arby's, McDonald's, Rotary Club, or veterans
hall, people are overwhelmingly in favor of calling a halt to drug
prohibition. Overwhelmingly."
Many of the houses Woolridge is riding past carry plaques attesting
to the Utica area's involvement in the Underground Railroad that once
funneled runaway slaves from the south up to Canada. It makes him
think about Bernie Ellis, a fellow soldier in the war against the
drug war, who has lost his own freedom.
"For 10 years he provided free medical marijuana to three oncologists
in the Nashville, Tenn., area for their patients undergoing
chemotherapy. He never once met the doctors, of course; it was all
cloak and dagger. He'd bring the marijuana to an office worker who'd
get it to the patient.
"Well, he finally got busted last year. Now he's looking at five
years mandatory federal prison time, though that might go up to 10
because he had a shotgun on his farm when he got busted. And of
course his million-dollar farm has been forfeited because he grew the
medical marijuana there."
The phone goes quiet for a minute, and there's the sound of a
strangled sob. "Sorry. Got a little choked up for a second," he says.
He pauses to explain his t-shirt to a motorist, then he's back on the
phone talking about Bernie. "This is a guy who broke the law to help
people and is now facing the consequences of that. Poor son of a
bitch. Next time I see him he'll be in prison."
Woolridge is not a lone ranger in the fight to legalize drugs. He's a
founding member of an organization called Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition or LEAP, an organization made up entirely of current and
former members of law enforcement who feel the drug war's a failure
and believe legalization and regulation are preferable to the
incarceration of drug users and control of the drug market by organized crime.
Started in March 2002 by five police officers, LEAP now counts about
3,000 members, from the ranks of policemen, prison guards, DEA
agents, judges, and even prosecutors in 48 states and 45 foreign
countries. The idea behind LEAP is that, as with the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, the call for an end to the drug war carries more
weight when it comes from folks who have been in the trenches.
"We're the ones who fought the war," said Jack Cole, LEAP's executive
director, who retired from the New Jersey state police as a detective
lieutenant after 26 years, including 14 in their narcotics bureau,
mostly undercover. "And I bear witness to the abject failure of the
U.S. war on drugs and to the horrors these prohibitionist policies
have produced."
The LEAP web site provides the statistical backup for that argument.
"After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on
drugs with over half a trillion tax dollars and increasingly punitive
policies, our confined population has quadrupled," it says. "More
than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated, and
every year we arrest an additional 1.6 million for nonviolent drug
offenses -- more per capita than any country in the world. ...
Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and
terrorists continue to grow richer."
To get that message out, LEAP members have given nearly 1,500
speeches since 2003. And they don't preach to the choir. "We don't do
hemp rallies or Million Man Marijuana Marches," said Woolridge. "We
do Kiwanis Clubs and PTA meetings and cop conventions. That's where
the people we've got to reach go."
To parents and teachers and Rotarians and other cops, LEAP members
tell their own stories, about their work and about how they came to
feel the drug war was not the answer.
Woolridge, for instance, was a street cop in Michigan for 15 of his
18 years of service, before moving up to the rank of detective. "I
didn't work directly with the drug war, in that I wasn't in
narcotics," he said. "Still, as a detective I was constantly working
with felonies that touched on the drug war. Eight of 10 burglary
suspects I dealt with were on crack at the time. They were stealing
for drug money."
The burglary victims "were all in real pain," he said. "And I got so
fed up with it I began saying 'Why not let these guys have all the
crack they want until they dieUKP' Now I'd say 'Have all you want for
a dollar.' That makes it their choice to live or die. Either way you
don't have people breaking into houses for drug money anymore."
To Cole, who did work directly in narcotics, the whole concept of the
war on drugs is wrong. "You declare war, you need soldiers. You have
soldiers, they need an enemy. So we've effectively taken a
peacekeeping force -- the police -- and turned them into soldiers
whose enemies are the 110 million people who have tried illegal
substances in the U.S."
To be an effective soldier, you've got to dehumanize your enemy.
"When I started out in narcotics I believed everything they told me,"
said Cole, a no-BS kind of guy. "Drugs were bad. The people who did
them were less than human. I was all for locking them up."
Worse, he said, he and others often applied what they called a little
"street justice" to the people they were arresting. "In our training
we were taught to believe that drug users were the worst people in
the world and whatever we did to them to try to stop their drug use
was justified."
What they did was kick in home or apartment doors and have every man,
woman, and child inside lie on the floor. If people didn't cooperate
immediately, they were thrown to the floor. Then the place was
ransacked. "When we searched for drugs, we pretty much did as much
damage as possible. We'd break bureaus, turn over beds, smash
mirrors, throw things on the floor. Didn't matter because the people
there weren't humans, right? And then if we did find any drugs we'd
arrest everyone in the house: parents, sisters, brothers. And since
we'd already kicked the door down when we came in, it would be left
open, and anyone who wanted to enter could steal what they wanted. We
never cared about that."
Street justice didn't stop there, said Cole. In court, he said,
officers routinely changed testimony to ensure convictions -- times,
locations, amounts of drugs -- "anything that couldn't be checked to
catch the officer in a lie."
It didn't take long for Cole to reach the conclusion that the drug
war and its street justice weren't for him. He was mostly going after
small-timers, and his job, he came to feel, was to insert himself
into voluntary, private business transactions. "To do that I had to
become someone's confidant, their best friend. And once I was, I
would bust them."
But he too got hooked -- on the adrenaline high of the game. "By the
time I came to my senses, I was working on big-timers, and pitting
your mind against theirs was a great rush," he said. "Also it was
hard to quit because we were considered by the public and our peers
as heroes. And then, given that I'd worked with a lot of cops who
applied bad street justice, I let myself believe that at least if I
was the one catching [the dopers], they'd be legally caught, and I'd
tell the truth, and justice would prevail."
He laughed. "Know what was the worst? When I realized that I liked
and respected a lot of the bad guys much more than I liked or
respected the guys I was working with."
The stated goals of the war on drugs are to lower drug consumption,
reduce addiction and dependence, and decrease the quality and
quantity of illegal drugs available on American streets. Those have
been the goals since Richard Nixon first declared the war as part of
his attempt to look tough on crime during the presidential election in 1968.
Since then, the strategy of prohibition has been ramped up by every
succeeding administration. Few people in this country -- or anywhere
--have escaped the effects of the U.S. drug war, from the toll of
burglaries and car thefts committed to pay for drugs, to the tax
bills for prisons to hold the increasing numbers of citizens locked
up for non-violent drug-related crimes, to the millions of kids
who've grown up without one or both parents as a result of drug
convictions and drug addictions. Drug-related murders reach into the
tens of thousands in this country, and the toll is much higher in
drug-producing and shipping nations from Colombia to Afghanistan to
Jamaica. Thousands of peace officers have died fighting the drug war.
Whole countries have found themselves under the boot of the illegal
drug industry, their leaders controlled or intimidated by drug
cartels, their governments and police forces infiltrated, and honest
public servants assassinated.
The assumption in American drug policy has always been that those are
the impacts of illegal drugs themselves. But LEAP members have come
to believe those are the wages not of drugs but of the War on Drugs.
And they want the rest of the country to look closely at the costs of
that strategy and what they see as its failures.
Despite the billions of dollars spent on the fight in nearly 40
years, LEAP members point out, the drug war has failed on every one
of its stated goals.
Drug consumption, for instance, shows little sign of dropping.
Whereas in 1965, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration,
fewer than 4 million Americans had ever tried an illegal drug, the
figure is now more than 110 million. In 2000, the federal government
estimated that there were about 33 million people in this country who
had used cocaine at least once -- an 800 percent increase over the
total number of people 37 years ago who had used any illegal drug.
Dependence and addiction? According to the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP), the federal agency that sets and administers
U.S. drug policy, in 2002 more than 7 million Americans were either
dependent on or abusing illegal substances -- nearly double the
number of people who had even tried such drugs when Nixon declared
his war. The ranks of heroin addicts have jumped from a few hundred
thousand in the 1960s to between 750,000 and one million today,
according to the ONDCP.
Attempts to decrease the quality of available drugs also have failed.
In 1970, average street heroin in this country had a potency of 1 to
2 percent. In 2000, according to the DEA, that purity figure was 36.8
percent -- although U.S. drug czar John Walters did praise anti-drug
forces recently for reducing the strength of street heroin coming
from South America to 32.1 percent. Similarly, street cocaine was
roughly 2 to 4 percent pure in 1968 -- and a whopping 56 percent pure
in 2001, according to the ONDCP. The average strength of the active
ingredient THC in marijuana sold in this country more than doubled
between the late 1970s and 2001.
Nor is there much good news on drug quantities and availability, at
least not judging by the numbers of users and the prices on the
street. The ONDCP estimates that Americans' use of cocaine and crack
has dropped from 447 tons in 1990 to 259 tons in 2000. But the price
of cocaine dropped from $100 per gram in 1970 to $25 to $50 per gram
in 2002 -- for cocaine that was many times stronger. At the wholesale
level, a kilogram of cocaine (2.2 pounds at roughly 25 percent
purity) cost $45,000 in New York City in 1970. Today, in any large
city in the US it costs less than $15,000, and it's about 65 percent pure.
Only marijuana showed a price increase. In 1970, a bag of Mexican
ditchweed (roughly an ounce) cost $20. In 2005, that same bag costs
nearly $50. But most Americans who can afford it don't smoke Mexican
ditchweed. They smoke US-grown sinsemilla, which runs up to $400 per ounce.
With availability, price, and quality making drugs as attractive as
ever, the only other barometer of the success of the drug war might
be whether it has stopped anyone from trying drugs -- an area where
programs like DARE, a huge effort targeted at school kids, have had a
noted lack of success. "It didn't stop George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al
Gore, or me from smoking pot," said Woolridge. "I don't think it
probably ever stopped anyone."
The cops and prosecutors and judges who belong to LEAP think the bad
results of the drug war go beyond its policy failures, even beyond
the lives lost to drug violence and incarceration.
"Let's be honest," Cole said. "The war on drugs has taken an
incredible toll in terms of the loss of our civil liberties,
particularly in terms of the Fourth Amendment, from property
forfeiture laws that fund law enforcement agencies to warrantless
searches. It's promoted institutionalized racism, and it's created a
systemic level of corruption among law enforcement unheard of prior
to its initiation."
Law enforcement veterans like Cole and Woolridge believe the increase
in institutional racism is one of the deepest wounds. They point out,
for instance, that crack users -- generally inner-city blacks -- are
subject to mandatory minimum sentences of five years for possession
of five grams of crack, while powder cocaine users -- generally
middle-class whites -- have to be caught with 500 grams to get the
same mandatory sentence.
While ONDCP statistics show that whites use more than 70 percent of
all illegal drugs, blacks are sentenced to prison for drug crimes
seven times more often than whites.
"Imagine," said Cole, "one of the most racist places in the world:
South Africa, 1993. At that time the South African government was
incarcerating black males at the rate of 859 per 100,000 population."
And yet in 2004 in the United States -- with a higher percent of its
population in prison than any country in the world -- the
incarceration rate for black males was 4,919 per 100,000 (compared to
726 overall).
He pointed to an FBI estimate that one in three black male babies
born in the U.S. in 2004 has an expectation of going to prison during
his lifetime. "That just blows my mind," he said.
LEAP members believe that a large percentage of the corruption found
in U.S. police agencies is tied to drugs. Recent local drug-related
scandals include the Dallas fake-drugs operation, in which a snitch
was paid more than $200,000 over a two-year period to identify drug
dealers. The "dealers" turned out to be nearly all illegal
immigrants; their "drugs" turned out to be crushed sheetrock and pool
chalk. And then there was Tulia, in the Texas Panhandle, in which a
multi-county drug task force hired a corrupt deputy sheriff to rid
the town of its drug problem; when it turned out there wasn't one,
the deputy created one, and more than 40 people wound up arrested.
LEAP spokesmen see both those high-profile Texas drug corruption
cases as indicative of a much wider problem: officers cutting corners
to get the arrest numbers that will keep federal and state anti-drug
funds flowing. And those scandals don't begin to touch on the border
patrol agents, police, and other law enforcement officials who have
been corrupted because the drug money is so readily available.
Rusty White, another LEAP member, is a self-described redneck who
grew up hard in East Texas and Arizona. Now, after many stops in
other states and countries, he lives just north of Fort Worth. At 13
he saw a friend shoot up black tar heroin and decided he didn't like
hard drugs. But by 16, he was running with a badass crowd. He got
into trouble with the law, punched a teacher, and was kicked out of school.
In quick succession, he married, became a father, joined the army,
and got divorced. After a second tour with the army, he ended up in
Florence, Ariz., where he went to work at the state pen, which was,
he said, "one of the most violent prisons in the United States at that time."
From 1973 to 1978, he worked as a guard on maximum security, death
row, and administrative segregation cellblocks, dealing with horrors
daily. "Life meant very little to those inside the walls," he said,
noting that two prison guards were killed and mutilated by inmates in
1973. "Drugs were one of the biggest problems we had. They were the
cause of most of the deaths and power struggles." And most of the
drugs were brought in by prison workers. "I got fed up with the
corruption and left to go into the oil drilling business in 1979," he said.
After working overseas for several years, White moved to Oklahoma.
And there, he said, he got to see the war on drugs from a very
different vantage point. "The county I lived in had a sheriff who
controlled the drug market. And he did so with force. It was common
knowledge that if you crossed him he could be -- and had been -- deadly."
But the same sheriff regularly flew around the county in National
Guard helicopters, providing photo ops for news crews to show how
tough he was on drugs. "The only thing he was getting rid of was the
competition," said White, disgustedly.
His only personal encounter with the sheriff and his machine occurred
when White's brother-in-law, a small-time pot dealer, was busted. "He
was poor, didn't have a car that ran, and was living off [government]
commodities. Yet he was going to be played by the sheriff as a
drug-dealing kingpin," the former prison guard said.
"He's the father of three little ones, all younger than six, and when
the police arrived, he offered to go with them willingly. But he
asked that his kids be allowed to stay with an uncle who was there
rather than dragging them down to the station. Well, you know how
people feel about 'drug dealers'; the police said no, the kids were
coming to the station to watch their father get busted, and then
they'd be released to the uncle."
When the man's trial came up, White said, it turned out the district
attorney didn't have any evidence against him as a big-time dealer.
Nonetheless, he was offered a plea deal: Admit to being a big dealer
and get a one-to three-year sentence. If he insisted on a trial,
however, the prosecutor promised to ask for a full 10 years.
"He copped to the plea. But to see him struggle with having to lie in
front of his kids and admit to something he hadn't done -- well, I
sort of snapped and screamed at the prosecutor and asked him if he
thought he'd earned his money that day and why was he playing God.
And he looked at me and answered, 'Because in this county, I am God.'"
A couple of years later, White said, the DA went back into private
practice and shortly thereafter was arrested and convicted for
dealing methamphetamines. "How the sheriff escaped that net I don't
know," White said. "But the thing to remember is that ... this sort
of thing is happening every day in the war on drugs, all over the
country. And that abuse of trust and power is far more harmful to
Americans than drugs could ever be."
Shortly after his brother-in-law's conviction, White went back to
work in the prison system and became a drug-dog trainer and handler.
It was the sort of work White said he was meant to do. "I tracked
several escapees from the prison and even some cop killers using my
track K-9s. We helped departments all over the state. I'd be sent to
prisons to look for drugs -- I had no problem with that. But the more
we were used with other police organizations the more my conscience
started to become a problem."
Two incidents stick in White's mind. Once while his partner was
helping another officer, part of a joint was discovered in the
ashtray of an old pickup belonging to an elderly man. The dogs were
brought in, and in the camper shell on the back of the truck in which
the old man lived, the dogs sniffed out a briefcase with more than
$9,000 in it. Because it was a drug dog that had alerted on it, the
money was confiscated. "And they just stood around laughing as the
old man begged them not to take his life savings. It just made me
sick and ashamed. Heck, it's common knowledge that over 90 percent of
the paper money in this country is tainted with a drug scent a dog
can find. But using that to rob our people disgusts me. Heck, if you
walk any K-9 into a bank vault the dog will mark on that money too.
How come that money isn't confiscated?"
The second incident occurred one night when White and his drug dog
were called to help a local police department search a house for
drugs. When he pulled up to the house, he asked to see the warrant.
The officer told him it wasn't there yet but to go ahead and start
the search, and it would be there shortly. "I told him that's just
not how it works. I needed the warrant for the search to be legal. So
I put my K-9 back into the truck and brought him back to the kennel.
And then I got called on the carpet for refusing to assist."
White thought getting into trouble for following the law he'd sworn
to uphold was just too much, so he quit. "Heck, there was so much
corruption, even among K-9 handlers. If they didn't want someone with
drugs caught they'd say the dog didn't mark. If they did, well, we
heard of cases where guys went so far as to 'salt' the areas their
dogs were searching to make sure someone got busted. It was so bad
that, being honest, you couldn't do it. .. I don't think anyone with
a conscience can be part of law enforcement anymore."
Richard Watkins saw the same corruption inside prison that White did,
but from a unique perspective. A decorated Vietnam veteran with a
Ph.D. in education, Watkins worked at Texas' Huntsville prison for 20
years, the last several as warden of Holiday Unit, a 2,100-bed
facility housing a range of criminals from non-violent to
violent/maximum security.
He was originally hired to revamp and professionalize the
correctional officers training program -- something the prison system
was forced to do by federal mandate and that Watkins said was badly
needed. "It was just horrible. Corrupt, bad, just plain horrible," he said.
Watkins had always had reservations about the war on drugs. He
figured the drug dealers wouldn't go away as long as there was a
market. And looking at this country's experience with Prohibition,
"and how that created mobsters and criminal gangs," he figured that
legalizing drugs made more sense. When selling and drinking booze
became legal in this country again, he said, "you had so much more
control of it. You had supporting laws that managed the use of alcohol."
Watkins was first exposed to drugs in Vietnam. He didn't use them --
he preferred alcohol -- but he saw a lot of other guys getting high
on marijuana and other drugs. Many of those men wound up in prison
when they came home with addiction problems. "And in prison, you
could always get whatever drugs you wanted. Heck, we arrested a mom
one time who was putting a lip-lock on her son to pass him a balloon
full of heroin. But most of the drugs came in through the guards.
Drugs are packaged so small, it's almost impossible to keep them out.
Think about that: If you can't keep drugs out of a maximum security
prison, you can't keep them out of schools or anywhere else."
Once drugs land someone in prison in Texas, he said, life's prospects
get a lot dimmer. "We've got these minor players put in with
professional criminals. If they weren't criminals going in, they damn
sure are when they get out. Imagine a system where we put people into
a society that's really a training ground for criminals, then don't
provide them with either schooling or treatment, then put them back
on the streets where they came from. Do you really expect them to be
reformed? Life doesn't work that way."
He wishes people wouldn't make the decision to use drugs. "But if
they did use them, I wouldn't put them in prison. I'd rather see the
money we spend on prisons going to give these kids the tools they
need to make better choices."
You might imagine that it would be easy to find law enforcement
agencies and personnel who oppose LEAP's call for legalization and
regulation as an alternative to the war on drugs. But neither the FBI
nor the DEA would discuss the subject.
"Our job is to stop the flow of illegal drugs both at home and
abroad, as well as to stop our citizens from wanting to use them
through education and prevention methods," said an ONDCP
representative. "We will not discuss legalization or any organization
which thinks that would be a solution."
Jack Cole wasn't surprised. "They're good soldiers," he said.
"They're not allowed to question their commands. Our job is to simply
have their commanders change their marching orders."
Mike Smithson, the Fort Worth native who runs LEAP's speakers bureau,
said he's made more than 100 attempts to get law enforcement and drug
policy officials to come out and debate LEAP, "and we've only been
taken up on it five times. Policymakers generally say that debating
us will lend us credence. We think they're just afraid. How can they
defend a policy that is already being defended by every major drug
dealer, cartel, and drug-producing government worldwide?"
Woolridge says that on his entire ride from Los Angeles he's talked
to only two officers who disagreed with LEAP's point of view. "One
guy thought we'd destroy America if we legalized drugs. He was so
angry when he couldn't find anything to write me a ticket for that he
gave me the finger as he drove away. And there was a state trooper
with 22 years on the job who told me to take off my shirt because it
said "Cops say legalize drugs," and he didn't agree with that. I told
him go make up his own shirt."
One person who did agree to discuss his opposition to LEAP's stand
was Sheriff John Cooke of Wells County in Colorado. Cooke is a member
of a Rotary Club at which Howard Woolridge spoke. He was so taken
aback by the idea of legalizing drugs that he demanded equal time and
recently spoke to the Rotary Club himself.
"In my opinion, there are several reasons not to legalize drugs,"
Cooke told Fort Worth Weekly. "First of all, when people say you're
going to eliminate the black market, does that mean you're going to
sell drugs to 12- and 15-year-olds? Because if you don't, someone
will. Law enforcement surely hasn't done a good job at keeping
alcohol and cigarettes out of the hands of kids, so what makes them
think they'll do any better with drugs? And if you don't sell drugs
to them, there will be a black market created to sell to them. So I
don't buy the end-of-the-black-market theory.
"Secondly, we already have social ills from the legal use of alcohol
and tobacco. Why on earth would we want to turn other addictive
substances loose on the public?
"Thirdly, these LEAP folks want to throw in the towel, say we've lost
the drug war. But the thing is that I think we're winning the war on
drugs. I think drug use is down. I think if we keep at it, we will win.
"Then there's the question of use. Right now, I believe that the
threat of the hammer of law enforcement is keeping a great many
people from doing drugs. The threat of prison time is a big hammer. I
think if we legalized you'd see the number of people doing drugs in
this country skyrocket. I believe we'd have a drug-dependent
society... and I don't want to see America as a drug-dependent country."
Michael Gilbert, chairman of the criminal justice department in the
College of Public Policy at the University of Texas in San Antonio,
said he doubts that there would be any sizable black market aimed at
teens if drugs were legalized. Gilbert is a LEAP member who worked in
prisons -- including Leavenworth -- and with Justice Department
agencies for more than 20 years.
"The reason there's so much money in the black market is not because
of the small portion of destabilized street addicts we have, or even
kids experimenting with drugs. It's because you have long-time
productive millions [of people] who regularly purchase small
quantities of the drugs of their choice, but they don't use them in a
way that becomes destructive to their lives," he said. "They're
working, paying their taxes, and so forth. The real money is from the
enormous number of middle-class people who use drugs. So while you
might still have a small market of teens purchasing drugs, it
wouldn't be large enough to fund criminal enterprises as it does today."
While few current policy-makers will discuss the benefits of drug
prohibition, several well-known former policy-makers have come out
against it. Among them are Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman, a former member of President Reagan's Economic Advisory
Board; former Secretary of State (under Ronald Reagan) George P.
Shultz; former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson; former Baltimore Mayor
Kurt Schmoke; and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, a former
presidential candidate.
None of the LEAP members interviewed for this story believes abusing
drugs is a good choice. But that's different, they say, from the
legal system further ruining people's lives because of that bad choice.
They also figure that, like yard care, hair color decisions, and bad
marriages, drug use is a choice that society should only care about
when it hurts other people. In town, running around in your yard
naked and screaming at 4 a.m. breaks the social contract. On a ranch
where no one else can see or hear, few people would care. Likewise,
LEAP members figure, if you can do drugs and not break the social
contract, go ahead. And in fact, the federal government figures that
72 percent of chronic drug users continue to function well in society
without harming others.
Even considering the harm that drugs can cause, however, LEAP members
believe that the war on drugs is even more harmful. Legalizing drugs,
on the other hand, would take profits out of the hands of criminals
and hugely reduce the need for people to commit crime to pay for
drugs, they say. Regulation would take drug manufacture out of the
hands of bathtub chemists and put it into the hands of real chemists,
eliminating many of the deaths from bad drugs -- much like the end of
Prohibition did for deaths from homemade booze. HIV and hepatitis C,
rampant among needle-sharing junkies, could be significantly reduced
with the availability of clean needles, reducing a major health care
burden for the country.
"Don't forget my favorite," Woolridge said. "If, as Bush said, drug
money funds terrorists, [then] legalizing drugs would take half a
billion dollars a day out of Afghanistan alone, much of which is
going to al Qaeda to buy weapons to be used to kill our boys. We
could eliminate that overnight."
Legalization, in fact, would probably not increase drug use
long-term, many believe -- especially since nearly half the
population has already tried it. "In all likelihood," Watkins said,
"you would see a spike in use as we did with the end of alcohol
prohibition. But that normalized pretty quickly, and it would
probably be the same with drugs. There would be a period of
experimentation that would level out, and we'd be left with all the
benefits and none of the negatives."
It was Sunday afternoon and Howard Woolridge and Misty were still in
upstate New York, having made it from Utica to a ghetto in
Schenectady. Woolridge was back on the phone again, when a woman
approached him.
"What do you mean cops say legalize drugs?" she could be heard asking.
"Just that. Let's legalize drugs, take them off the street corner."
"What kind of drugs?"
"Heroin, crack, methamphetamine, anything you can think of."
"Are you crazy? I don't want my kids doing those drugs!"
"Neither do I," he told her. "They're no good. But that doesn't keep
them from being sold on the corner in this very neighborhood, does
it? I'd legalize them and get them into pharmacies. Keep your kids
from being shot while walking down the street."
There was a pause and then she laughed. "I never thought of it that
way before. You're making me think now."
__________________________________________________________________________
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
---
MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman
