John Anderson, a professor of Criminology at VIU, was recently made the Nanaimo area speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). I got in touch with him in late Nov., and he told me all about it.

To start with, what exactly are a LEAP speaker's duties?

JA Well, I think you have to know a little bit about LEAP first. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are peace officers who are taking a stance that is contrary to most members of their organization--their whole legal and prosecutory community. Being a spokesperson for LEAP means that you have some affinity for their values for whatever reason, either as a former peace officer or as a currently active one. I fall into the former category--I was a peace officer at the Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre from '83 to '88. And even back then, I was aghast at what our drug policies were doing to people. That was something I would share with a few people I worked with, as well. I was rubbing shoulders with other graduates of SFU, and at that time it wasn't often that we found too many correctional officers with baccalaureate degrees in Corrections, and I think we tended to be a bit more critical than other members of the rank and file [that had been] in service for a de! cade or two before us.

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