Pubdate: Mon, 31 Mar 2014
Source: Record, The (Hackensack, NJ)
Copyright: 2014 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.northjersey.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/44
Author: Jack A. Cole
Cited: http://leap.cc/

SAVE LIVES: LEGALIZE, REGULATE AND TAX MARIJUANA

FOR 44 YEARS the United States has fought the war on drugs, wasting
1.5 trillion of our tax dollars on ever-harsher policies that have
been complete failures. During that time, we made more than 48 million
arrests for nonviolent drug violations, nearly half of which were for
marijuana offenses.

And yet today, drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier for our
children to access than they were when I started buying them in 1970
at the start of my 14-year assignment as an undercover detective in
the New Jersey State Police.

That is the very essence of a failed public policy.

After 26 years, I retired and co-founded Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition, a nonprofit educational organization that represents more
than 100,000 police, judges, prosecutors, prison officials and
supporters in 120 countries. LEAP members do not condone drug use, but
we know that such use is not dependent on whether the drug is
considered legal or illicit.

We cannot arrest our way out of these problems. Drug use in the United
States is not unusual. More than 112 million Americans, including
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, admit to
having tried marijuana.

The goal then should be to create a system acknowledging those facts,
while reducing the deleterious aspects of drug use as much as possible.

Prohibition has never worked. It is time for alternate solutions. The
bill Sen. Nicholas P. Scutari introduced to legalize, regulate and tax
adult marijuana use will correct the portions of our failed drug
policy that concern marijuana laws.

Before we had a war on drugs, police were credited with solving 91
percent of all murders, but by 2010, New Jersey law enforcers were
solving only 61 percent of those homicides. They currently fail to
solve 39 percent of murders, 64 percent of rapes and arsons, 75
percent of robberies, and 87 percent of home burglaries.

Wasted time

It is not their fault. Police are required to expend so much time
chasing around nonviolent drug offenders that they no longer have the
staff or energy to protect citizens from violent criminals. Legalizing
marijuana will effectively end the arrests of those individuals
involved in the marijuana culture and allow the police a vast amount
of additional time to work on far more important issues.

When passed throughout the United States, bills such as Scutari's will
effectively remove 60 percent of the profits from Mexican drug
cartels, striking a blow against them that law enforcement has been
unable to match during the course of the drug war.

The role of police should be to protect each of us from violent
predators, not to protect every adult from himself or herself by
saying what substances we can ingest.

Impact on children

Current policy also creates two very injurious systems impacting our
children: High School students tell us it is easier to buy marijuana
than it is to buy beer and cigarettes because drug dealers don't check
IDs, and, according to the DEA, 900,000 teenagers have decided to risk
severe punishment in order to participate in the very lucrative
business of selling marijuana.

Neither of those things will occur in a legal, regulated and
controlled marijuana market. When you legalize drugs, you remove them
from the hands of our youth and place them in the hands of responsible
adults over whom we have some control.

Legalizing marijuana will actually reduce teenage drug use in New
Jersey just as similar reforms in other states' laws that have
legalized and regulated or decriminalized marijuana have reduced teen
drug use in those states. Other countries, such as Portugal, that have
decriminalized all drugs for adults have also reduced drug use by
juveniles. After Portugal decriminalized those drugs, use among 13- to
15-year-olds decreased by 25 percent and use among 16- to 18-year-olds
decreased by 22 percent.

Studies by the Universities of Colorado, Utah and Washington, reveal
that in states that have passed medical marijuana bills, the rates of
fatal motor-vehicle accidents have declined by 9 percent and the rates
of suicides among 20- to 29-year-old males have declined by 11
percent. A decline was not seen in surrounding states where such
reforms were not passed. All that was accomplished while there was no
increase in marijuana use by juveniles.

Jack A. Cole, a retired New Jersey State Police detective lieutenant,
is chairman of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.