Ex Police Chief Legalizing It In the LA Times

While anyone working under the title "former police chief" could reasonably be expected to endorce throwing the book at drug users, actual former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper wrote a book entitled, "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing."

Read an excerpt at AlterNet.com:

I say it’s time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement’s financial costs, take a look at DrugSense.org’s Drug War Clock. To the tune of $600 a second, taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure added up to over $20 billion, and that’s just for federal enforcement alone. You can add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement, and even more billions for U. S. drug interdiction work on the international scene. We’re talking well over $50 billion a year to finance America’s war on drugs.

The book was also excerpted in the Seattle Weekly over the summer.

That's just not the kind of thing ex police chiefs say. Ex police chiefs talk about "the #1 danger to our country's security" and let the word "perp" slip from time to time. They don't say, "it's time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs." This is the same guy who presided over WTO in Seattle, remember, and resigned shortly afterwards.

The book made a little splash, obviously. Recently he's followed up with an editorial in the LA Times headlined, "Let those dopers be." Before you wonder whether he spent all those years on the force dipping into the evidence bin, check him out:

As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?