I par­ti­cip­ated in the Law Enforce­ment Against Pro­hib­i­tion (LEAP) board meet­ing last Octo­ber in Bal­timore. While there, I arranged for board mem­bers to do a series of inter­views about the failed glob­al “war on drugs” with the excel­lent and inde­pend­ent Real News Net­work.

The tide of his­tory is with us — more and more coun­tries are speak­ing out about the fail­ure of pro­hib­i­tion.  LEAP sup­ports and con­trib­utes to this discussion.

LEAP has rep­res­ent­at­ives across the world with a wide range of pro­fes­sion­al expert­ise: police officers, drug czars, judges, pris­on gov­ernors, law­yers, drug enforce­ment officers, and even the occa­sion­al former spook.…

Our var­ied exper­i­ences and back­grounds have brought us to one con­clu­sion: we all assess the “war on drugs” to have been an abject fail­ure that causes more glob­al soci­et­al harm than good, as well as fund­ing organ­ised crime, ter­ror­ism and white col­lar bank crime.

We urgently need to rethink the failed UN drug conventions.

Here is the RNN inter­view I par­ti­cip­ated in, along with Brazili­an Judge Maria Lucia Karam: