Well, I’ve been riding this hobbyhorse for a while now and it turns out I have an ally over at the Providence Journal — the much smarter and more articulate columnist Froma Harrop. In yesterday’s paper, she blasted the foolish and wasteful ‘War on Drugs’ and found quite a bit of support in a recent trip to Washington, where comparisons to the failed Prohibition experiment were made.
Former law-enforcement officers gathered here to draw the parallels. Their group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), has called for nothing less than the legalization of drugs.
And before you say, “We can’t do that,” hear the officers out. They have an answer for every objection.
These are enumerated in the article, with LEAP members concluding that they…
…want to legalize drugs because they’re tired of being shot at in a war they can’t win. They’re tired of making new business for dealers every time they arrest a competitor. They are tired of busting people in the streets of America’s cities over an ounce of cocaine, while the Andean region produces over 1,000 tons of it a year. They’re tired of enriching terrorists.
Also present was one, Eric Sterling, “head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which joined the call for legalization. As counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s, Sterling helped write the anti-drug laws he now opposes.” Okay? The guy who wrote the laws wants them repealed.