The failure of prohibition

In Philadelphia, 33,000 pounds of cocaine were seized in one of the biggest U.S. drug busts … worth more than $1 billion on the street. Heads up! This measures the failure of drug prohibition.

Neil Woods says that large seizures are always less than one percent of what’s on the street. When drug warriors brag about increasingly large seizures, they’re actually confessing how much the black market grew, under their watch.

Woods was an early undercover cop in the UK, who helped to build the undercover program. He was involved in the development of tactics, and in training the undercover officers, the length and breadth of the country, and had access to national and international intelligence on the topic.

His arrestees’ sentences total 1,000 plus years. Nevertheless, in any city, he only interrupted the flow of drugs for about two hours.

Woods’ experience as an undercover cop motivated him to co-author “Good Cop, Bad War,” and “Drug Wars.”

Woods says that when there’s a photo-op of seized drugs, there’s a dirty secret that every cop in that room knows: the supply is only interrupted until competing merchants learn that that sales territory has been made available. Two hours?

Prohibition has created professionals. Woods says, “The business allowances that cartels make for police seizures are proportionately smaller than most main-street retailers make for shoplifting.”

Wiley Hollingsworth

Pullman