Pubdate: Thu, 15 Nov 2012
Source: Massachusetts Daily Collegian (U of MA, Edu)
Copyright: 2012 Daily Collegian
Contact:  http://www.dailycollegian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1401
Author: Chelsie Field

FORMER POLICE OFFICER: WAR ON DRUGS FAILED

Jack Cole spends his days speaking out against current American drug 
policy, traveling around and talking to any group interested in 
hearing what he has to say about what he calls drug policy "failure" 
in the United States. Cole - who spoke at the University of 
Massachusetts Wednesday night as part of a Cannabis Colloquium put on 
by the UMass Cannabis Reform Coalition - worked in the New Jersey 
state police department for 26 years, 14 of which were spent as an 
undercover narcotics officer investigating cases ranging from small 
street dealers to large-scale drug trafficking organizations.

With this background behind him, Cole speaks out against the very 
measures he once directly engaged in as a police officer through an 
international organization he co-founded in 2002 called Law 
Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which consists of members of 
law enforcement who advocate legalization and regulation of all drugs.

"Nothing I did in 26 years reduced the number of people using drugs 
in this country by a single person.

The War on Drugs is not only a fatal policy, it's self-perpetuating. 
Every year, it's worse than the year before," Cole said during the 
presentation to about 30 people. Cole called his presentation "a 
history lesson," weaving in personal law enforcement experience and 
historical facts into a slideshow mainly comprised of statistics 
ranging from incarceration rates to drug-induced deaths in the United 
States. He began by describing what he said were outrageous 
incarceration rates in America. According to Cole's data from 2008, 
one in every 100 Americans will serve time behind bars during their 
lifetime, a number backed by same-year results done by Pew Center on 
the States. Cole also claimed that there had been a 2,558 percent 
increase in incarceration of non-violent crimes in the United States 
since 1970, around the time President Richard Nixon declared a "War 
on Drugs." "The United States is a very impunitive country.

We seem to think the only answer to everything is to lock someone up 
and throw the key away," Cole said. He also discussed how he believes 
racism is embedded within the current system, citing that more blacks 
than whites are incarcerated each year for the same crimes, and that 
though blacks represent only 13.5 percent of all drug users in the 
United States, 37 percent of all drug violators are black and 81 
percent of all federal drug-related offenders are black, Cole said.

"This is warehousing people, that's all it is," he said of the 
increased incarceration rates. "The drug war has been the single most 
devastating dysfunctional social policy since slavery ... the ones 
that are really being hit are people of color."

Cole said that three years into working undercover as a narcotics 
officer he realized he liked the people he was hanging out with more 
than the people he was working for, saying that many police 
departments were motivated to make arrests due to increased federal 
money given when a certain quota of drug-related arrests were made.

"This is a numbers game. It has nothing to do with the drug problem 
in this country," Cole said of these motivations, adding that the job 
of police should not be one of "protecting every adult from him or 
herself" but "to protect everyone" from more violent crimes such as 
murder, giving Switzerland as an ideal example of how treating drug 
abuse as a health issue rather than a crime decreases deaths and 
general crime, he said.

Cole was interactive with audience both during the discussion period 
and throughout his lecture.

He spent the remainder of his time answering questions and getting to 
know the reason why people had come. Many students cited a variety of 
reasons for attending, including to learn more about as well as to 
gain a different perspective of the topic.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom