DRUG WAR HAS BEEN A FAILURE, SO IT'S TIME TO LEGALIZE THE STUFF

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. war on drugs with over
a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug
offenses, our confined population has quadrupled, making prison
building the fastest growing industry in the United States.

More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated, and
every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more, guaranteeing
those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose
to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another $69 billion.
Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill
spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent and far easier to
get than they were 35 years ago, at the beginning of the war on drugs.

Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and
terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest
that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public
policy. This madness must cease!

We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime
and addiction, as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug
prohibition. LEAP [Law Enforcement Against Prohibition] believes that
a system of regulation, and control of production and distribution,
will be far more effective and ethical than one of
prohibition.

We do this in hopes that we in law enforcement can regain the
public's respect and trust, which have been greatly diminished by our
involvement in imposing drug prohibition.

Michelle Cohen

Schenectady

The writer is a LEAP volunteer and criminal justice student at SCCC.