Pubdate: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Copyright: 2007 Guardian Newspapers Limited Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175 Author: Alexandra Topping Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?227 (Cole, Jack) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?233 (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) BADGE OF HONOUR From undercover US drugs cop to anti-prohibitionist? More and more people are asking Jack Cole how that transformation came about Jack Cole: "When we legalised alcohol, we put Al Capone out of business overnight." Jack Cole's voice is calm. But when he starts talking about the damage wreaked by 30 years of the US "war on drugs" his eyes light up. "This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on people - our own people, our children, our parents, ourselves," he says. "The US is spending $69bn a year on a war that is a total and abject failure." If anyone is qualified to make that judgment, it is Cole. During the 26 years he worked for the New Jersey state police, 12 as an undercover narcotics officer, Cole sent down more than a thousand people - from small-time pushers to international billion-dollar drug trafficking organisers. From being one of the war's most loyal servants, he is now one of its fiercest critics and, since his retirement, has travelled around the word campaigning for the legalisation of drugs, as the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap). Cole has done more than 600 "gigs" in the past four years, and in Britain this week spoke at the HIT harm reduction agency in Liverpool, attempting to convince public health experts, police and drug and alcohol action teams that the majority of problems associated with drugs stem from prohibition, not use. Cole never meant to be a cop. At 26, he was married with two kids, employed as an iron worker. It was 1964, the height of the civil rights movement, and, confronted with images of officers beating black women and children, he thought that by joining the police he stood a chance of changing things from the inside. Born in the "Bible belt" in Wichita, Kansas, Cole was convinced that narcotics were "the worst scourge of the Earth". So when President Nixon's war on drugs started in the 1970s, he was happy to get involved. But some years into his time as an undercover "narc", he had an epiphany. He calls it the story of the good Samaritan. Late one night, after trawling a black ghetto posing as users needing a fix, Cole and his informer, Fast Eddie, got into trouble. Eddie found himself with a dealer's gun pressed against his head, and Cole with a butcher's knife across his throat. After a stand-off, the dealers fled, but not before slicing through Eddie's hand. A black youth, finding Eddie bleeding in the street, dressed his wound, and when Cole continued to feign his need for a fix, reluctantly took him to another dealer. He told Cole he hated drugs and would have nothing to do with them; he wanted to go to college. Cole, writing up the report, included the incident, and when police flushed out the neighbourhood, the good Samaritan was among those arrested. His crime? Conspiracy to distribute drugs. Cole's voice drops: "The undercover cop would stand watching the guys file past so they would know you had evidence against them, and wouldn't bother pleading not guilty." But when the good Samaritan walked by, he looked Cole in the eye and said: "Man, I was just trying to be your friend." Cole's voice falters. "I realised then that we were sending the wrong people to jail, and it had to stop. How many of those young folks would have gone on to have a perfectly productive life had I not intervened? "We have a saying at Leap: 'You can get over an addiction, but you never get over a conviction.' A conviction will stay with you for the rest of your life. Every time you try to get a job it hangs over your head like a big ugly cloud." Did he ever find out what happened to the aspiring college graduate? "I'm not that courageous," he says. "But I'd say there is about a 90% chance that he went down for seven years." Cole continued as an undercover narcotics officer until he reached retirement. If he was so against the system, why didn't he give it up? "I have no good answer to that," he says. "All I can say is that I had my own addictions. I was addicted to the adrenaline rush. To be pitting your wits against these people, particularly the big guns, was amazing." Obscene profits Since his retirement, Cole has been spreading the word that legalising all drugs would reduce death, crime, disease and addiction, and would help reduce what he sees as the institutionalised racism in law enforcement. "When we legalised alcohol, we put Al Capone out of business overnight," he says. "We can do the same to the drugs lords and terrorists who today make over $550bn dollars a year selling illegal drugs. If you arrest robbers or rapists, the number of robberies and rapes declines. If you arrest a drug dealer, you simply create a job opening for a long line of people more than willing to risk arrest for obscene profits." He cites the Netherlands and Switzerland as successfully addressing drug abuse as a health issue, not a crime one. He says: "No one need die of a drugs overdose, and we could stop turning users into criminals. We have to give people their lives back." Many of those campaigning for drugs reform in Britain welcome Cole's voice to the debate. Harry Shapiro, spokesman for the charity DrugScope, believes there is currently no serious alternative to prohibition, but it is "a powerful message when law enforcement officers like Jack Cole decide that something needs to change". Alan McGee, from HIT in Liverpool, is more forthright in his support. "We are sitting back and watching multibillion-dollar profits, brought about by prohibition, being handed to organised crime on a plate," he says. "It is time to build deconstruction of prohibition into our global drug strategy." Leap started with five founders; four years later, it has 8,500 members, more than 100 speakers, and an advisory board that includes four federal district court judges and a former head of drugs taskforces in England. Wherever Cole, now 69, travels he wears a prominent badge. On it are the words: "Cops say legalize drugs. Ask me why." People are doing just that. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom