LEAP jumps into the legalization fray every day

Peter Christ of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition was in Vermont on a lecture tour when he ran into a state cop convention at his hotel. Witnesses report he had something of a heated debate in the parking lot of the establishment with one of those cops. He won.

Christ understands and even respects the young trooper's anger, and doesn't take it personally. Typically, he says, a cop is retired for a year or more before he or she starts to see "the forest for the trees." And Christ knows that his incendiary message -- that the United States should legalize all Schedule I drugs and regulate their sale and distribution -- flies in the face of law-enforcement training. Nevertheless, Christ believes that, just as alcohol prohibition was repealed in the United States, drug prohibition should be, too.

He and the rest of the LEAP members make compelling arguments.

Legalization of drugs is not intended to be an approach to our drug problem in America," Christ explains during an interview in his hotel room. "Legalization is an approach to our crime and violence problem in America. Once we legalize drugs, then we have to start the really hard work of dealing with our drug problem."

The biggest societal costs associated with illegal drug use are not addiction or even crimes committed while people are using drugs, Christ argues. In fact, 90 percent of illicit drug users in this country are not addicts. They hold down jobs, go to school and do not create a public nuisance. The greatest harm associated with narcotics, he contends, is drug prohibition, a domestic and foreign policy that funnels billions of dollars into an underground economy where deals are brokered and scores are settled through terrorism, extortion and gun violence. But just as the bootleggers and crime-ridden numbers rackets were replaced with liquor stores and state-run lotteries, Christ argues, drug lords could be disarmed with the stroke of a pen..

Christ is not preaching to choir either. He's on the road most of the year speaking to Kiwanis, Rotary Clubs and other hotbeds of conservative thinking. And he's winning converts. 80-year-old Rotarian Dick Shadroui says, "I thought it was very, very useful and very sensible and I agree with him 100 percent," says Shadroui, a piano teacher in Barre. "I don't think prohibition has ever worked, just like he said. I think it should be legalized, just like I think prostitution should be legalized."

Christ tells his audiences that the drug war cannot succeed because it asks police to accomplish an impossible task: to protect people who don't want to be protected from harming themselves. "Prohibition doesn't work because prohibition has never worked in the history of our species," he says. "Anything that smacks of a victimless-crime prohibition is doomed to failure."

If you can't believe a retired cop, who are you going to believe?