MAKE DRUGS LEGAL, SAYS FORMER US POLICE CHIEF

A RETIRED American police chief will tell a Sydney audience tomorrow
that the war on drugs has been a failure, and a disaster for police forces.

Norm Stamper retired as chief of police in Seattle in 2000, and is a
spokesman for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a fast-growing US
organisation of 13,000 current and former police officers, prison
warders, prosecutors and judges.

He says that since Richard Nixon began the drug war in 1971, the most
common reason for arresting young Americans has been for non-violent
drug offences. Millions have been jailed, with often devastating
effects on themselves and their families. Mr Stamper said this had
driven a wedge between police and many otherwise law-abiding Americans.

"Police need a partnership with the community," he said. "If they're
to get the information they need to fight crime, there needs to be a
strong sense of trust. But with tens of millions of young Americans
having been arrested for non-violent drug offences, there's a
widespread sense the police are there to do things to people rather
than for people.

"You may be working a non-drug-related murder and hoping that
citizens will come forward with information about the shooter. But
you can have doors slammed in your face because of an unhappy
experience with the police over a drug arrest."

He said the war had encouraged bad behaviour by police, ranging from
illegal searches to involvement in the drug trade, further
undermining public trust in law enforcement.

America's conduct of the war overseas had harmed police there too. In
Mexico it had led to massive corruption and thousands of killings by
drug cartels. "Many of the victims are police officers, who are often
tortured and beheaded," Mr Stamper said. "Essentially, honest police
in Mexico have a choice: they can co-operate with the cartels or they
can die. This is a direct result of the prohibition model and the
American drug war."

Mr Stamper said he had an "epiphany" when he was a rookie cop in the
late 1960s.

"I arrested a 19-year-old at his own home for possession of
marijuana," he recalled, "and as I was taking him to jail in the back
seat of my caged police car, it dawned on me that I could be doing
real police work [instead of this]. I wasn't sure what harm this
young man had caused anyone, including himself. I know that I had
done him a good deal of harm, in arresting him and giving him a
criminal record."

Mr Stamper, who thinks drugs should be decriminalised and regulated
in the same way as alcohol, has written a book about his career
called Breaking Rank. He believes that at no stage since 1971 has it
even looked as if the war on drugs was being won.

"Every once in a while, someone in government has claimed progress,"
he said, "but they've been wrong. The immutable law of supply and
demand will continue to work its magic for ever. Purity and prices
will fluctuate, people's behaviour will fluctuate, but there has
never been any point in the drug war where we've come close to
winning. It is unwinnable, and it's immoral."

Norm Stamper will be speaking with Alex Wodak and Greg Barnes at the
Festival of Dangerous Ideas tomorrow. The session "Make All Drug Use
Legal" is at the Opera House Studio at 4pm. The Herald is the
festival's media partner.