Cops Say Legalize Drugs: Ask Me Why
Last month, after coming back from a prohibition law reform conference, Drug Reform Coordination Network director David Borden wrote:
The most visible grouping at last week's drug reform conference was the cops from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). There were about 50 of them, I heard, plus enthusiasts, sporting the provocative and eye-catching LEAP t-shirts reading "Cops Say Legalize Drugs: Ask Me Why." I wore a LEAP shirt one day of the conference myself.
Earlier this year, walking in my now former neighborhood, two women in a van pulled up at an intersection behind me and to my right. The driver stopped, rolled down her window, and called out to me a single word: "Why?"
After 12 years, I confess to still having difficulty crafting a sufficiently succinct answer. The problem is that the issue is a complicated one that doesn't lend itself well to sound bites. Indeed, there are so many reasons to oppose prohibition and the drug war that it's hard to remember them all, let alone decide which ones to talk about first with which people.
I’ve never worn that shirt, but when people ask me why I oppose the drug war they rarely want the long blogged-out version. I usually say something about how alcohol prohibition didn’t work, and how the current drug prohibition strongly resembles alcohol prohibition with its runaway violence and... and blah blah blah.
Borden received a good response from that editorial and summarized the responses in Now You Can Ask Me Why, which I recommend reading. Jay Fleming, of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, had some of the best. I’ve further shortened the last one in the list.
- “A 12-year-old can walk into a bar to try and buy alcohol and get thrown out. The same 12-year-old walks up to any drug dealer and get drugs.”
- “There are no gangs fighting over whiskey territories. Drug prohibition creates a black market with enormous profits that attracts criminals and gangs. With drugs literally worth their weight in gold, as long as people can grow gold in their basement this will not stop.”
Someone else wrote in with the even more succinct “It didn’t work for alcohol, and it’s not working for drugs.”
- Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
- “After making more than nine hundred presentations to ‘end prohibition and legalize all drugs so we can control and regulate them, and keep them out of the hands of our children,’ we have discovered that the majority agree with us. We are now attending law-enforcement conventions where we keep track of those we speak with at our exhibit booth; 6% want to continue the war on drugs, 14% are undecided, and 80% agree that we must end drug prohibition. Only a small number of that 80% realized any others in law enforcement felt the same.”
- Now You Can Ask Me Why
- “In my editorial titled ‘Tell Me Why,’ I confessed that after 12 years in the movement I am still uncertain as to how best to make the case for ending drug prohibition during the 10 or 15 seconds that sometimes is all that’s available, and I asked for readers suggestions for ‘sound bites’ we can use. Though not every response qualified as a 15-second sound bite, all of them had some use and intellectual value for thinking about the issue.”
- Tell Me Why
- “There are so many reasons to oppose prohibition and the drug war that it’s hard to remember them all, let alone decide which ones to talk about first with which people.”
- Drug Reform Coordination Network
- Over the years I’ve watched DRCNet grow into an incredibly useful resource in the field of drug law reform. “The world’s leading drug policy newsletter... raising awareness of the consequences of drug prohibition… DRCNet supports rational policies consistent with the principles of peace, justice, fr eedom, compassion and truth. Each of these has been compromised in the name of the Drug War.”
More prohibition
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
- If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Progressives ruin a different kind of race in New Jersey
- As a potential triple-crown winner prepares for the third race of the Triple Crown, it’s almost impossible to place a bet in Atlantic City, NJ.
- U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures
- Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- 26 more pages with the topic prohibition, and other related pages