Feb 26, 2011
We had a member of Law Enforcement against Prohibition (LEAP) speak to our Rotary Club this week. It takes a brave police officer to advocate change to drug policy—joining LEAP brings scrutiny from the police department and can hurt an officer’s career. David talked about how current drug laws put him and his fellow cops at risk. He tied our drug policy to happenings in other parts of the world. He was very persuasive.
Over 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico; Columbia was virtually ungovernable because of its drug cartels; Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan by an insurgency funded in part by the opium and heroin trade. At the same time people in Africa are suffering for want of medicinal opiates for pain.
We need to put two and two together. Our forty-year commitment to a failed “war on drugs” leads to violence and disease on our streets. It condemns people elsewhere in the world to lives of utter misery.
Mexico’s war on drugs has pushed the problems further south. One of our Rotary Club members, recently back from Honduras, was shocked at how illegal drugs have imprisoned the country’s people. Children cannot play outside—even under parents’ supervision—without risking being recruited into the drug war. She could not go anywhere alone, ever. The country is unsafe for everyone, particularly its own citizens.
A member in his nineties reflected on how the mafia had almost been wiped out until the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition revitalized that organization. Today it “invests” in the world’s largest communities.
A parallel can be made to the international drug cartels, and the involvement of the Hell’s Angels in the drug trade. In BC, the war on drugs has cultivated the emergence of gangs in all our communities.
Joining LEAP was not an easy decision for David to make. Most members of LEAP are retired. As a serving police officer and early in his career, he may already have compromised his opportunities for advancement. He has two brothers in the police force, one of whom is opposed to changing drug policy. The other is ambivalent. Both were concerned about his future in policing.
Early in his career, David watched the Willie Pickton trial. All of the women Pickton killed were drug addicted prostitutes. David realized that if Canada had a sensible drug policy, all or some of those women would be alive today. Keeping drugs illegal condemned them to their fate.
LEAP was formed in 2002 by a group of retired cops, most having spent 25 to 30 years in law enforcement. All left feeling that their participation in the war on drugs was wrong. Many had lost colleagues to the violence. Some greatly regretted having arrested many young people for minor drug offences, especially those imprisoned.
LEAP now has 30,000 members (they accept civilian members), over 3,000 in law enforcement and over 100 speakers in more than 70 countries. Those in law enforcement see every day the results of current drug policies. All are working to change those policies. David believes that changing drug policy is the single most important thing we could do to make our communities safer and criminal justice fairer.
A change to drug policy would necessitate new regulations for managing production, distribution and taxation of the substances. There are many drugs—cannabis (marijuana), heroin, cocaine, etc.—and strategies would need to be different for each.
More difficult yet would be overcoming the resistance of police departments. Much of the expansion of policing and police budgets is based on the perpetuation of the war on drugs. Will boards and senior constables meekly accept reduction in the costs of policing? Not likely.
And then we have the War on Crime governments and political parties that are invested in diverting ever more tax dollars to prisons and imprisoning. By cultivating the myth of increasing crime, they ensure their voters live in fear and feel unsafe in their communities. Cynical, despicable, but a long-proven way of gaining political support.
It is time for change. Questions on decriminalizing or legalizing cannabis are becoming more frequent. Some countries have decided to extricate themselves from the global war on drugs with very positive results.
I asked David how soon he thought we would reform our drug policy. He thinks it will happen before the end of his career. That’s twenty to twenty-five years away. I predict that cannabis laws will be reformed in the US within ten years; twenty years seems too long. But if we can change policy related to all currently illegal drugs within twenty years, that’s pretty good.
I applaud David and other members of LEAP. Hearing people on the front line demanding change is very compelling. That they agree with Green Party of BC policy is icing on the cake.
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