Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Gwynne Dyer
Barry Cooper's new DVD, Never Get Busted Again, which went on sale
over the internet late last month, will probably not sell very well outside
the United States, because in most other countries the possession of
marijuana for personal use is treated as a misdemeanour or simply ignored
by the police. But it will sell very well in the US, where many thousands
of casual marijuana users are hit with savage jail terms every year in a
nationwide game of Russian roulette in which most people indulge their
habit unharmed while a few unfortunates have their lives ruined.
Barry Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made over 800 drug
arrests as an anti-narcotics officer, but he has now repented: "When I was
raiding homes and destroying families, my conscience was telling me it was
wrong, but my need for power, fame and peer acceptance overshadowed my good
conscience." Of course, Cooper's DVD, which teaches people how to avoid
arrest for marijuana possession, will also bring him fame, plus a lot of
money, but at least it won't hurt people.
One is Jack Cole, 26 years with the New Jersey police, whose
organisation, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), is supported by
growing numbers of serving policemen who have lost faith in the "War on
Drugs" and want to make peace. "Leap wants to end drug prohibition just as
we ended alcohol prohibition in 1933," says Cole, who argues that neither
kind of prohibition has ever had any success in curbing consumption of the
banned substances, but that each has fuelled the growth of a vast criminal
empire.
It is policemen who take the lead in these issues because they are
the ones who must deal with the calamitous consequences of the "War on
Drugs." No doubt the use of "recreational" drugs does a lot of harm, as
does the use of alcohol or tobacco, but that harm is dwarfed by the amount
of crime and human devastation caused by forty years of "war" on
drug-users.
But what about the innocent children who will be exposed to these
drugs if they become freely available throughout the society? The answer
is: nothing that doesn't happen to them now. There is no city and few
rural areas in the developed world where you cannot buy any illegal drug
known to man within half a hour, for an amount of money that can be raised
by any enterprising fourteen-year-old.
This is probably yet another false dawn, for even the politicians
who know what needs to be done are too afraid of the gutter media to act on
their convictions. But sometime in the next fifty years, after only few
more tens of millions of needless deaths, drug prohibition will end.