Buzzby

Arresting the Drug Laws
David Silverberg | The Progressive | 08/10/2005

In March, Howard Woolridge set out on horseback from Los Angeles to New York City wearing a T-shirt blaring the capitalized declaration: “COPS SAY LEGALIZE POT, ASK ME WHY.” The former Michigan police officer, who plans to reach New York in November, is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a group that wants to change our country’s drug laws.

Peter Christ and Jack Cole, both former cops, founded the three-year-old LEAP with the assistance of a $50,000 grant from the Marijuana Policy Project. More than 2,000 members, including prison wardens, judges, and mayors, have since joined the organization. Some believe in drug decriminalization, others in full-out legalization, but their collective mandate is to highlight the failure of the current drug policy.

Cole wants to remove the profit motive from the equation by legalizing drugs and having them supplied by the government. “Organized criminals and world terrorists would be monetarily crippled for many years to come,” Cole says.

Bob Owens, a former police chief in Oxnard, California, regards soft drugs such as marijuana “as too unimportant to use manpower” on. He calls the War on Drugs “a straw-man that can distract people and stir the hysteria that accompanies it.”

But Owens admits LEAP won’t move mountains. Yet. “The purpose of LEAP is to create more of an attitude change than to potentially change legislation,” he says.

California Superior Court Judge James Gray, author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, wants to decriminalize marijuana. That would generate $2 billion annually in tax revenues that could be spent on education and drug treatment, he says. The government should regulate the quality of marijuana, he says, so tokers would know their weed won’t be laced with poisons.

“Would it result in more marijuana usage?” Gray asks himself. “Yes, at least for six months, but then rates would be more like Holland’s.” That country’s reported lifetime cannabis use is at 17 percent, according to a 2001 survey from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. In the United States, the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 40 percent of respondents reported using marijuana once in their lifetimes.

Prison wardens are usually stereotyped as drawing the hardest line. But don’t say that to Richard Watkins, former warden of the Holliday Unit in Huntsville, Texas. “What’s happening now is not working,” says Watkins, who retired in February. “I think the war on drugs is responsible for the massive increase of prisoners in Texas.”

He goes on to wonder why so many one-time drug users are imprisoned for crimes that didn’t harm a third party. “What the public doesn’t realize is that when you take a breadwinner out of the family and incarcerate him, it has a ripple effect,” he says. “There is nothing but negative about jailing people.”

After his lone-ranger travels, Woolridge plans on heading to Washington, where he hopes to become a Congressional lobbyist for LEAP.

Marijuana will be the first issue he tackles. “Eighty percent of Americans say legalize and tax it today,” Woolridge says. “We’re losing focus on public safety as law enforcement chases Willie Nelson and Willie Nelson’s supplier.” When Woolridge discusses this issue with rational Americans in any state, he says he soon hears three satisfying words: “That makes sense.”
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David Silverberg is a freelance writer based in Toronto, Canada, who contributes to High Times, Seed Magazine, Digital Journal, Saturday Night, and Pound Magazine.

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Yana Usdi

Very cool

Since they mention Howard and the "Lone Ranger" ride he's doing here's a page with more info on it. He's been on horseback riding across country since March, started in Los Angeles and plans to end in New York early October. Good way to attract attention and end up in every local newspaper and many radio shows or local TV interviews along the way.

The Lone Ranger Rides Again

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Buzzby

If this is true, I'd love to see the evidence. It would make a great debating point. If it's not true, Woolridge is seriously impacting his credibility by making such a claim.

The closest thing I've seen is the AARP poll that showed almost 80% of Americans 45 and older are in favor of medical marijuana.

Cassius

Everyone knows this aspect of the prohibition/legalization argument, but his statement struck a nerve with me for some reason.

I wonder why this isn't emphasized as the BIGGEST reason for legalization by all the activist organizations. We all know the government (and big industry) are all about money. If the country really wants to hamper drug dealers, why not take away their best-selling product, marijuana, simply by cost-cutting them?

How many mom-and-pop businesses went bankrupt because of the likes of Wal-mart? I know all the money that is wasted on the drug war, and I know the possible revenues that could be generated from legalization, but I never truly thought about it from the aspect of cutting the feet out from under the black market.

Another great point. Even reefer madness will tell you that the poor are more likely to use marijuana. How many families become poor after their breadwinners are incarcerated for possession?

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Yana Usdi

That's one point I've hit here before I'm sure, that we've accomplished little but to imprison and kill our own people and support organized crime and terrorism in an industry that didn't even exist before the drug war.

This info is from a letter to the UN in '98 so is a little out of date, but consider the scale of it. This is a good part of why I say the drug war as a whole has failed and we need to do something about it. People just need to understand what's really at stake. While we destroy opium production in the name of the war on drugs people living in poverty in the same areas can't get legitimate pain treatment for injury. The damage is incredible and the cause pretty much insane.

U.N. agencies estimate the annual revenue generated by the illegal drug industry at $400 billion, or the equivalent of roughly eight per cent of total international trade. This industry has empowered organized criminals, corrupted governments at all levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence, and distorted both economic markets and moral values. These are the consequences not of drug use per se, but of decades of failed and futile drug war policies.

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