“End Prohibition Now!”
by Retired Narcotics Undercover Agent, Jack A. Cole
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.
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 with the beginning of the “war on drugs,” a term first coined by Richard Millhouse Nixon when he was running for president in 1968 on a platform of getting tough on crime. After elected to office he got Congress to pass a bill giving massive federal funding to any police department willing to fight his war on drugs. To give you an idea of how large those grants were, the New Jersey State Police, like police departments across the nation, went from a seven-man narcotic unit to a seventy-six-person narcotic bureau. All paid for by our federal tax dollars. One-third of us were designated “undercover agents” and after two-weeks training we hit the streets and started arresting people.
In 1970 we really didn’t have much of a problem with drugs. They were more a nuisance than anything else. People were far more likely to die from falling down the stairs in their on homes or choking on food than they were to die as a result of the drug culture. We had had no idea how to fight a war on drugs but our bosses knew how to keep that federal cashcow being milked in our barnyard. We had to make drug sales and use appear to be very bad. Early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our statistics; we upgraded arrested drug-users to drug-dealers; inflated the weights of drugs by adding in any cutting agents we found (so we might seize ½ ounce of cocaine and four pounds of lactose or milk sugar but when it was reported it was all listed as cocaine). We also vastly inflated the price of the drugs we seized by releasing to the media the estimated street values of the seized drugs.
However, as the war on drugs ground on we no longer had to lie about its getting worse. It became exponentially more dreadful with each passing year. By three years into the war, we were actually arresting some real mid-level drug dealers, such as, the members of “The Breed” Motorcycle Gang who were selling methamphetamine out of the Philadelphia area.
In 1977, seven years into the drug war, I kicked a door down 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 seized in the United States,” up to that point in time—nineteen pounds—we were in the newspapers over a week on that case (more about this later). By 1979, the “drug problem” had expanded to the point that I was working on international Billion-Dollar cocaine and heroin trafficking rings.
On the screen you see a chart created by the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The chart depicts the cost and purity of heroin by year, from 1980 to 1999. The cost they are talking about is the cost one heroin user must pay to “get high” one time and the purity the talk of is the purity of one dose of street level drugs they purchase. DEA starts their chart in 1980 but as I told you I started buying heroin in 1970 so I can back this chart up ten years.
In 1970, we purchased “tre-bags” so called because they cost three dollars per bag. We bought them in multiples of two, because an addicted person needed two of those bags to get high. At that time the purity of the product was only about 1.5 percent (purity means how much of the white or brown powder contained in the small glassine envelopes was actually heroin). After ten years of “drug war,” the purity had more than doubled and the cost to get high had dipped to $3.90. And after thirty years of “drug war” the price to “get off” on heroin had plummeted to 80 cents because the quality of heroin had increased by 20 times its original level—now registering over 38 percent pure in street buys.[1] And we wonder why so many people are overdosing on drugs today? Addicts don’t consume more and more drugs until their bodies can no longer take the poison so they die. They overdose because they get what is, in the trade, called a “Hot-Shot.” One day the drug dealer, for whatever reason, doesn’t correctly mix the nearly pure heroin he bought with the powder he is using to dilute the drug before reselling it. On that day some of his clients are going to be really angry because they get the part that contains mostly cutting agent and they think the dealer tried to beat them out of their money. Another unlucky group of his clients will get the part of the mix that contains mostly pure heroin—when they cook up the powder they think is 10 percent pure and it is really 60 or 70 percent pure they don’t get angry they get dead—there is no second chance for them, it is all over. That is why we are hearing of more and more cases where 5, 10, even 20 people overdose in the same suburban town on the same day. That is due to a bad mix.
The worse the problem gets the more police and money we throw into the mix. The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), created in 1973, had tripled its staff by 2001 but its budget had increased by 20 times, from $75 million the first year to $1.55 Billion in 2001. Politicians tell us, “Lock them up and throw away the key and our problem will be solved.” Well, lock them up we did—tripling our yearly arrest figures over the last twenty years to where we are now arresting 1.6 million nonviolent drug violators each year—with fully half of those arrests for marijuana violations. I throw around a lot of numbers in this talk and numbers out of context are meaningless. How many are 1.6 million people? It is the population of New Mexico, so just imagine that we arrest all of New Mexico each year.
And what have we accomplished with all our hard work and monetary investment. On the screen you see a photograph I cut out of the New York Times Newspaper in 1994. There was no accompanying article, just the picture. The caption relates, “police and federal authorities recovered 4,800 pounds of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $350 million…in the Corona section of Queens, New York.” The same place I had made the largest seizure ever of heroin 17 years earlier. Nearly two and a half tons of cocaine and it didn’t even rate an article. How could that be? It is because by 1994 police were doing a great job for you; regularly seizing tons of not just cocaine but heroin. So much so, that the New York Times took to just summarizing the multi-ton shipments in single articles. Like this one from July 15, 1994: “Three tons of cocaine hidden in cargo at the Port of Newark; Five tons of Cocaine in Houston; Three tons in San Francisco; Five more tons in El Paso—and all in a two month period. [2]
And how has the war on drugs aided our school children? Drug Czar John Walters would have you believe we are winning this war. He points to a 2002 study, “Monitoring the Future,”[3] and says, “This survey confirms that our drug-prevention efforts are working….”[4] The truth is that study shows that between 1991 and 2002 marijuana use among students in all school grades increased—30 percent increase for twelfth graders; 65 percent increase for tenth graders; and 88—did he say, “88” percent increase for eighth graders. How can John Walters say this study shows our drug prevention efforts are working? Could the drug-warriors be lying to us?
According to another 2002 national government study, school children report it is easier to buy illegal drugs than it is to buy beer and cigarettes.[5] How can that be? The answer is really not very complicated; no drug dealer is going to worry about checking your child’s birth certificate to see if he or she is old enough to buy drugs. When I first worked undercover I was hanging out with about 20 kids in front of a bowling alley at a strip-mall. These kids, none of whom were 21 years old could, and did, sell me any kind of illegal drugs you can name but they used to come up to me and say, “Hey, Jack, we’re thirsty—will you go into the liquor store and buy us some beer? They could get all the illegal drugs they wanted but couldn’t buy beer.
So, how much money are we talking about here? Enough money to bribe a cop, to bribe a judge, to bribe a politician, to bribe a banker—ladies and gentlemen we are talking about enough money to buy whole countries—over 400 billion dollars each year is spent on drugs—eight percent of the world’s gross product, about the same size as the international textile industry.[6] And most of that money is profit. After all, what we are talking about here is simply weeds. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about marijuana from the hemp plant, cocaine from the coca bush, or heroin from the poppy flower—it is all just weeds. It has zero worth—until we make it illegal—then the profits are nearly beyond one’s imagination. Up to 17,000 percent increase in the worth of the product between where it is grown in third-world counties and where it gets sold in New York or Los Angeles. I would suggest to you that armies of police cannot stop drug trafficking when the profits are that huge. I realized long ago that when police arrest a robber or rapist they make the community safer for everyone but when I arrest a drug pusher, I simply create a job opening for someone in a long line of people willing to take that individual’s place.
Let me summarize what I have said. After three decades of fueling the war with over half a trillion of our tax dollars and increasingly punitive policies, our court system is choked with ever-increasing drug prosecutions and our quadrupled prison population has made building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry; with 2.2 million incarcerated today and another 1.6 million arrested every year—more per capita than any country in the world. The population of the United States amounts to five percent of the world’s population but the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Meanwhile, drug barons continue to grow richer than ever before, our citizens continue dying on our streets, and illicit drugs are easier to get, cheaper, and more potent than they were 30 years ago when I first started buying heroin.
So what do we do to stop the death, disease, crime and addiction wrought by drug use? The current policies are obviously failing because as I said at the start of this talk, drugs are cheaper, more potent and easier to get now than they were thirty years ago, when I started buying heroin on the street.
Is there anything that can be done to stop this scourge on our nation and the world? I think so. I believe we can change the direction of these horrible circumstances and began to rollback the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction. The first thing we must do is admit that most of the death, disease, crime, and addiction, is not caused by drug use but by drug prohibition. Then we can stop the horrors associated with the prohibition of drugs by removing the profit motive from the drug culture.
How do we do that—simple—we end drug prohibition! We legalize drugs! “Ah…but won’t legalization cause everyone to use drugs?” I hear you saying. The answer is NO! If we just look around the world, we have many fine examples of policies we could try that show us drug use will not increase. In Holland where drugs are virtually legal because the police look the other way unless the user is causing some other kind of trouble; where you can go in a coffee shop if you are an adult and order from a menu that offers a choice of six brands of marijuana and six brands of hashish—you can purchase five grams and smoke it there or put in a doggy-bag and carry it out. There a survey of tenth graders shows that 28 percent have tried marijuana. In the United States, we will not only arrest and try to incarcerate your children for using marijuana but we will take away their driver’s licenses hampering their ability to get to school and causing them to lose their jobs. If they live in government subsidized housing, we will throw their whole family out of their home. And when the child finally gets free from the lockup or probation or parole and wants to go back to school to better him or herself we tell them they can never in their lifetime get a federal educational grant or loan. In this country 41 percent of tenth graders have used marijuana.[7] Again, I hear you saying, “How can that be? Twenty-eight percent where marijuana is virtually legal and 41 percent where marijuana is treated like the devil’s own weed. Well, when asked about it, a chief constable in Amsterdam said, “We have just managed to make pot boring.”
So what are the outcomes of drug legalization?
· 1.6 million people would not have to be arrested each year;
· 69 Billion dollars would not have to be spent each year on interdicting drugs, arresting, prosecuting, and warehousing violators;
· and we could alleviate some of the more egregious forms of institutionalized racism within our legal system.
According to the 1998 Federal Household Survey:
· Whites constitute 72% of all drug users in the U.S.