Q & A: Cops Against the Drug War

A week ago at Netroots Nation, I sat down with two members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to discuss the group’s efforts to support drug legalization. Jack Cole (right), the organization's Executive Director, spoke about the group’s work advocating against drug prohibition and David Bratzer (left), an active police officer in Victoria, British Columbia, talked about the challenges of advocating against the drug war while serving as an officer.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Q: Can you tell me about your path that brought you to work with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition?

Jack Cole: I was in the New Jersey State Police for 26 years, and I was undercover in narcotics. When I went into narcotics, I thought drugs were the scourge of the earth and I was going to save the world. But after about three years of living on the street with those folks, I came to the realization that the only thing different between them and me is that they wanted to put something in their bodies that I didn’t want to put in mine.

Everything else was the same, they had the same wishes, they wanted to make a living, raise a family, get respect from other people in the world. And it made me think that all these things I’d been learning in my whole my life were lies about, about this stuff.

…If there was an epiphany, I think, one of the biggest shocks was about three years into the undercover work. I realized that I liked some of the people that I worked on, better than some of the people I worked for. Something’s wrong with this picture. But I stayed in law enforcement for another 11 years,  after I had decided that the war on drugs was wrong and the only way to reduce drug abuse would be to legalize drugs, I  decided that in 1973, but I stayed in narcotics for another 11 years.

Q: David, is it rare for a serving officer like yourself to speak out publicly on this issue?

David Bratzer: Yes, it’s rare. Gradually it’s changing, though. The difficulty is, as a serving officer, it brings up some issues that a retired officer might not have. People ask: ‘Are you still going to enforce drug laws while on duty?’ My answer to that is: ‘Of course I will.’ I took an oath to uphold all laws, not to just pick and choose…But, when I first came out with this position, a lot of people at my department were concerned about that.

Q: Are there officers and departments that choose not to enforce drug laws in order to focus on other crime?

DB: Certainly in Canada, and I would expect in the U.S. as well. There are officers who make broad use of their discretion, and also as you go up the chain throughout senior management, and that’s a good thing. And the trick is, how do you find those officers and speak with them and convince them to speak out publicly about it.

JC: There is discretion. Some officers will stop somebody with suspected marijuana on them and subject this vegetation to the wind test. If it passes the wind test, they get arrested. Of course, most things fail the wind test. The wind test is that if it blows away when you shake it out, it’s not marijuana.

Q: What is LEAP’s position on the spectrum of different policy reform options on the table? Does LEAP support decriminalization? Is it an all-or-nothing proposition?

JC: We support any policy about drugs that will reduce death, disease, crime or addiction. We support it. We don’t think it’s good. We’re against decriminalization, we don’t want that, we want legalized regulation of drugs. And the reason is that when you decriminalize, you only decriminalize for the user, everyone else in that chain is still a criminal.

Q: Do you see more traction on limited reforms or do you see progress in the direction of the legalization of all drugs?

JC: I see that our arguments are much more cogent and logical than the arguments of the incrementalists. And I see that far more people agree with us (that all drugs should be legalized and regulated) than even legalizing marijuana.

Visit LEAP's website to learn more about their work.