If Cops Were Smoking Legal Marijuana

To begin with, it is important to explain the background of LEAP and of the members whom comprise its speaker’s bureau, for LEAP’s cachet is in who is now speaking out against drug prohibition.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a drug-policy reform group created by current and former members of law enforcement who believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction, as well as to conserve tax dollars, drug prohibition must end. The present drug policy laudable goals of lessening the incidents of crime, drug addiction, juvenile drug use and stemming the flow of illegal drugs into this country have not only failed but have, in fact, only magnified our problems as society continues its “war on drugs”. LEAP believes a system of regulation and control is more effective than one of prohibition.

LEAP went public in July of 2002 and has grown from the five founding members to over 1,000 participants. We have 55 speakers living in 30 of the United States and in 5 other countries. All LEAP speakers are current or former drug-warriors. We also have a powerful and respected Advisory Board, made up of a former U.S. Governor, four sitting Federal District Court judges, a county sheriff, four former police chiefs (including a former commissioner of New York City Police Department), the Mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia who is retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the former Attorney General of Colombia, South America and from the United Kingdom, a former Chief Constable of Police.[i]

The mission of LEAP is (1) To educate the public, the media, and policy makers, to the failure of current drug policy by presenting a true picture of the history, causes and effects of drug abuse and the crimes related to drug prohibition; (2) To create a speakers bureau staffed with knowledgeable and articulate former drug-warriors who describe the impact of current drug policies on: police/community relations; the safety of law enforcement officers and suspects; police corruption and misconduct; and the financial and human costs associated with current drug policies; (3) To restore the public’s respect for law enforcement, which has been greatly diminished by its involvement in imposing drug prohibition; (4) To reduce the multitude of harms resulting from fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition.

So, if drug prohibition was repealed what would law enforcement and the judicial system look like after three decades of fueling the war on drugs with over half a trillion tax dollars (in Canada and the United States) and the court system choked with ever-increasing prosecutions of nonviolent drug violations? This is an important question to consider since, in the US, with the war on drugs, their prison population has quadrupled and has made building prisons their fastest growing industry. They have imprisoned more than 2.2 million of their citizens and every year arrest an additional 1.6 million for nonviolent drug offenses—more per capita than any country in the world. The United States has 5% of the population of the world but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Despite all that, illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and easier to get than they were 30 years ago.

Why, despite this justice system work ethic, are people are still dying in the streets and drug barons continue to grow richer than ever before? The answer is easy: the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually according to the United Nations International Drug Control Program. That amounts to 8% of all international trade and is comparable to the annual turnover in textiles (Source: United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, Economic and Social Consequences of Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (New York, NY: UNODCCP, 1998), p. 3).

But the profits of the drug dealers themselves is not the only drain on the economy consider the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the US which has expanded its personnel to three times the amount it had in 1973 and its budget has gone from $75 million in 1973 to one billion 550 million dollars in 2001—an increase of more than 20 times the original amount. And, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, from 1980 to 2000 arrests for all drug violations tripled and arrests for marijuana drug violations nearly doubled. In 2000 marijuana arrests still amounted to nearly half of all arrests for drug violations and 84% of the marijuana arrests were for possession.

(Source: US Drug Enforcement Administration Table for 2001).

The numbers in Canada show a similar tale where, in 2002, three in four drug crimes involved marijuana – and approximately 72 % of those were for possession, more than half of all drug-related offences are possession of pot (Statistics Canada). Across Canada drug related crime was up just over 42%, the highest in 20 years with about 93,000 drug offences in 2002; again, with possession of marijuana charges increasing by 80 per cent between 1992 and 2002. Statistics Canada also revealed that in 2002, drug offences accounted for 9% of adult court cases, and 7% of all youth court cases.

And those are not the only direct costs, for an idea of how current drug prohibition translates into prison costs let us look at the US where The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1999, the nation spent $146,556,000,000 on the Federal, State and Local justice systems. In that year, the United States had 1,875,199 adult jail and prison inmates. Based on this information the cost per inmate year was:
-- Corrections spending alone: $26,134 per inmate
-- Corrections, judicial and legal costs: $43,297 per inmate
-- Corrections, judicial, legal and police costs: $78,154 per inmate

(Source: Gifford, Sidra Lea, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Justice Expenditure and Employment in the United States, 1999 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, February 2002)).

Further, it was found that "prisoners sentenced for drug offenses constitute the largest group of Federal inmates (61%) in 1999, up from 53% in 1990. On September 30, 1999, the date of the latest available data in the Federal Justice Statistics Program, Federal prisons held 63,360 sentenced drug offenders, compared to 30,470 at yearend 1990." (Source: Beck, Allen J., PhD, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 1999 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, August 2000)).

And, more importantly, repealing drug prohibition would also address the intangible cost of institutionalized racism that plagues the justice systems of both Canada and the United States. According to a Statistic Canada 2001 Federal Census, in British Columbia, 17 % of adult prisoners and 29% of incarcerated youths are aboriginal (this is shocking considering that the aboriginal population of Canada is approximately 2%). For the US, a Federal Household Survey revealed that although Caucasians constitute 72% of all drug users in the US while African-Americans constitute 15% of all drug users, over 37% of those arrested for drug violations are African Americans and over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations are black. Further, African-Americans comprise almost 60% of those in state prisons for drug felonies (Sources: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Summary Report 1998 (Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1999); US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1998 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 1999)). Thus, these overarching monetary costs and the cost to our collective humanity need to be addressed and we need to start thinking outside the box (or more correctly the “prison mentality”).

This brings us to the question of what legalized marijuana would look like to law enforcement. We can skip past the obvious cost-savings to the government once the failed enforcement attempts are abandoned, money which could then be applied to drug education and addiction issues. Simply, marijuana, legal and regulated would be more effectively controlled such that it is not so readily available to our youth. Regulation can follow different venues, one of which is that provided for the distribution and sale of alcohol or cigarettes. Drug dealers do not worry about underage customers or product purity as (bar owners or store owners must) since they have no “license” to pull or a chance of losing business (business is so good that as one drug dealer is arrested another immediately steps in to take his place). Further, with legalization comes self-regulation and government standards which would be more readily enforced and therefore complied with by the vendors who do not want to risk losing their licenses. This regulatory process already exists in regards to cigarettes and alcohol and could be easily incorporated to include the sale of marijuana, thus freeing up policing resources.

We have tried the facile “Just Say No” campaign and kids are still smoking marijuana; we have tried as hard as we could to arrest our way out of the problem but it is here to stay we must now change tactics. Society has yet to be successful in preventing its citizens from obtaining in-demand products (ever since Eve bit the apple), so the strategy must turn to regulation and education. From a law enforcement perspective, once the burden of the social issue of drug use is lifted from policing shoulders, the time, effort, money and human resources can be utilized to true policing concerns. The very title, “war on drugs” illustrates what is problematic with the law enforcement philosophy i.e. as a military role rather than what it should be, an agency of the community for the community, a large part of which freely chooses to smoke marijuana. From the recent scandals that have occurred and are still occurring in large cities and small, we can see that with this failed war on drugs comes the corruption and police abuses that drug enforcement agents and their agencies must constantly be vigilant against. The removal of the war on drugs will assist in furthering the police officer’s role as a community leader and problem-solver as opposed to a “warrior” against drugs. With drug enforcement removed as a concern, the majority of the efforts of police officers can turn to problem solving for those in need and who have nowhere else to turn as well as ensuring the smooth operation of the community.