The War on the War on Drugs | Jack Cole L.E.A.P.
Retired State Police Lieutenant and Co-founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) Jack Cole talks about his 26-year career with the New Jersey State Police and 14 years spent as an undercover officer in narcotics, leading him to witness the devastating effects of the drug war and become an advocate to end drug prohibition.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:04] Thank you it was a surprise I'm glad to be here and I've been asked to say a little something about how the war on drugs started which I know a lot about you see in the my 26 years in the New Jersey State Police I did 14 years undercover in narcotics I started my undercover work at the beginning of the war on drugs that was 1970 and I can tell you the war on drugs has nothing to do with drugs it was started by Richard Nixon and it had everything to do with the fact that he was running for the Presidency for the second time and this time he thought he had really be nice to win now he knew if he was a strong anti-crime guy it'd give him a lot of votes but boy if he could just talk about drugs and crime how those votes had pour in so he started the war on drugs and he was right he was elected his first year in office he got the US Congress to pass massive funding bills give tremendous
[01:05] Amounts of money to any Police Department willing to hire officers to fight his war on drugs give you an idea how huge these were in my organization we went from a seven man narcotic unit to a 76 person narcotic bureau overnight all paid for by the federal government we increase the number of cops doing this one job by 11 times its size and this was replicated across the United States now any of you that know about administration know that you increase the size of a group doing one job by 11 times its size in the coming year we were expected to make at least 11 times more arrests than we did the year before and we were literally off to the races I was one of those 76 troopers who came in to be a narc after two weeks training they lined us up and said count off one two three every third person became an undercover agent I happened to be a three and that's where I spent most of
[02:07] The next fourteen years of my life we really didn't have much of a drug problem at all in the United States in 1970 what little drug problem we did have was mainly soft drugs like marijuana hashish some LSD psilocybin the mushrooms the mind-bending drugs the hard drugs like heroin cocaine methamphetamine were practically unheard of in 1970 certainly unheard of compared to what they are today to find a real drug dealer you had to go to the biggest cities back then we didn't have drug dealers in every city or in every town or suburb and if you go back and look at the statistics from 1970 you'll find that the likelihood of anybody dying that year as a result of the drug culture was less than the likelihood of them dying from falling down the steps in their own house it was less than the likelihood of them choking
[03:07] To death on their own food at dinner but we started a war on drugs we had 25 undercover agents as I said you had to go to the biggest cities to find a drug dealer and since we were working the suburbs I was about 20 miles out of New York City they didn't targeted us on drug dealers there weren't any out there they targeted us on small friendship groups of young people in college people in high school people in between and when we became their friends come Friday night they're out of school they're off work somebody might say hey you want to get high tonight and nobody said that that was my job if anybody took me up on that offer then one of the friends who happen to have access to the family car or some other way to get to the city
[04:08] We'd go around other friends and say hey you want to get high tonight some would say I'm studying for a test I'll catch you next time others would say yeah while you're in the city pick me up a couple joints somebody else might say hey I hear there's some good really good blotter acid out there if you run across any of water acid while you're in the city give me a hit one dose of blotter acid we're talking maybe five bucks worth of drugs when they'd come to me I put my order in for this same tiny little bit of drugs off they go to the city they buy this stuff they come back and then hand it out to their friends and when they handed it to me they became a big-time drug dealer because that's what we labeled them and that is what stocked folks and I would stay in that group until I had every single person in the friendship group it was really easy cuz these people weren't drug dealers they weren't making any money on this they weren't even getting their gas money back so the person that made the run the
[05:10] First night didn't want to go the next time its person bathe and person C person D and I might be working ten of those friendship groups simultaneously in different suburbs so every two months roughly I would come in with cases on a hundred people like this we'd have a big raid would swoop into their neighborhood at five o'clock in the morning kick down their doors and drag him out in Chains and when we got him down to the police station we would have already alerted the media who would be there with their cameras to take pictures of them in that perp walk and splash them all over there they're home newspapers destroying any credibility any respectability these four people had in their own neighborhoods and when we got them all lined up against that back wall my boss would come out and say to those reporters you see this there's a hundred major drug dealers we took out of your neighborhoods major
[06:12] Drug dealers this is the worst thing that's ever happened to America they would say this is going to destroy society as we know it they would say and the only thing between you and that destruction is that thin blue line of police we need more money so we can hire more police we need bulletproof vests we need guns with more we need faster cars and radios we need harsher laws we need mandatory minimum sentences we need three-strikes-you're-out we need the reporters would go away and they would write horror stories scaring the public to death and the public could read it and they'd say give it to him give it to him then we'd go out and do even worse let me tell you what would happen to those
[07:13] Young people every single one of them this was considered a sale of drugs every single one of them was sentenced to seven years in prison now it was two and a half years then before they would come out of prison on parole so two and a half years after every month that every couple of months I come in with a hundred people another hundred people is coming out of prison what are they gonna do for a living we snatched him off the streets in the prime of their life when they're trying to get their education they don't have any education and even if they did who was going to hire them we said they were drug dealers so you know what they did they turned right back to the drug culture the very group we said we were trying to save them from only this time they became honest-to-goodness drug
[08:13] Dealers and for every new real drug dealer you've got to have a whole bunch of new real drug users so every one of those young people was out there on the streets every day recruiting younger folks to pick up those needles and become the next statistic and that is how this thing became a self-perpetuating constantly enlarging policy disaster and that is why there's no way to fix this the only way we can do anything about this his end drug prohibition we have to legalize these drugs legalize them so we can take them out of the hands of the criminals and end this terrible prohibition gun violence once we legalize them and only after we've legalized them we can control and regulate them today the control and regulation of these drugs is in the
[09:13] Hands of the criminals they haven't done to go to job four is right once we regulate them we can do wonderful things we can end overdose deaths nobody has to die of an overdose of drugs in the 14 years I lived on the streets there I learned one thing nobody died because they shot more and more dope they died because they simply didn't know how much that tiny package of powder they were buying was really the drug and how much was the cutting agent in an unregulated market they will never know but we can take this and we can and rugged overdoses another wonderful thing we can do is we can prevent half of all potential cases of these terrible blood-borne diseases AIDS and hepatitis C from ever occurring because according to the Center for Disease Control 50% of all new cases of AIDS and hepatitis C in this country can be traced directly back to intravenous drug users sharing needles we can keep this a lot of this out of the hands of
[10:14] Our children who have told us for the last 30 years it's easier to buy illegal drugs and is to buy beer and cigarettes of course that's because they get carded let's legalize this and let it get carded for heroin cocaine and methamphetamine make it a little harder for him to get and lastly if we legalize these drugs we won't have to go out as cops and arrest 1.7 million people every year for nonviolent drug offenses we're destroying America we've done this for 44 years we've spent over a trillion and a half of your tax dollars to do it and all we have to show for it is this amazing cumulative arrest record by the end of this year we will pass 50 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses think of it 50 million arrests we go to end this Thanks
