Retired police captain speaks out about America’s cruel, senseless, and failed War on Drugs

Post by economist Mark Perry of the Carpe Diem blog.  He has a link to a news video with

"retired police captain Peter Christ on WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, NY. Captain Christ is co-founder and vice-chair of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a nonprofit organization made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of America’s War on Drugs."

Here is the excerpt Mark gave:

"When you institute a prohibition like we have with drugs in this country, what you are doing is not protecting people from other people, you are attempting to use law enforcement to protect people from themselves. Protecting you from yourself is a function of family, church, education, and the health care system. It never is, and never should have been intended to be, a law enforcement function. We are out there enforcing morality when we enforce drug laws, and that is not our job. We were not trained to do it, we are not capable of doing it, and if anything else you see the failure of it.

We’ve been doing this for over 40 years since Nixon kicked it off, and the drugs are more available, of purer quality and cheaper than they’ve ever been before on the streets of America. And we’ve had 40,000 deaths in Mexico over the last five years fighting over this drug trade. Plus we’ve destroyed more lives than the drugs have by incarcerating people and hanging felony convictions on them and denying them college educations, denying them jobs, for no good reason.

And one other thing I want to point out in case people think that if we do it hard enough that this will actually be doable to make drugs go away. We have the largest prison system on the planet, and the most efficient prison systems on the planet. And in that huge efficient prison system, we do not have one drug-free prison in America. And if you cannot keep drugs out of prisons, who is going to be delusional enough to think you can keep them out of a free society?"