Opinion: Jack Cole checks in: War on drugs, take 2,374
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Malakkar Vohryzek’s recent Blowback on the L.A. Trade Tech raid inspired Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to sit right down and write the L.A. Times a letter. We spoke with Cole a few months ago, and he’s still fighting to bring the war on drugs to a peaceful conclusion:
As a retired police officer, I want to congratulate Malakkar Vohryzek on his superb analysis of the failed war on drugs (see ‘drug prohibition doesn’t work,’ Los Angeles times, January 11, 2008). For years our children have reported it is easier to buy illegal drugs than to buy beer and cigarettes because people selling illegal drugs don’t them ask for age identification.
DEA says there are 900,000 teenagers in the United States who have sold illegal drugs. DEA also asserts that nearly 900,000 teenagers in the United States have illegally carried a gun. People selling illegal commodities must protect themselves and their merchandise from robbery. They must discipline workers and customers to continue doing business. In an illegal market they can’t get that protection from the police or the courts so they get it at the point of a gun. Many of those teenagers have been shot and killed in the course of their drug distribution activities. Many others died from drug overdose because in an unregulated illegal market there is no way to tell how much of the purchased powder is really the drug at how much is cutting-agent; too much drug and you’re dead. Over the course of the war on drugs, the overdose rate has increased from 28 per hundred-thousand heroin users in 1979 to 141 per hundred-thousand users by 2003. This is the situation as it stands under prohibition. Legalized regulation of drugs would end the violence; reduce the incidence of death, disease, crime and addiction. Jack A. ColeRetired detective lieutenant with 26-year career in New Jersey State Police-14 years undercover narcotics.