 | NORML News: Canadian Judge here to raise awareness of ‘failures of prohibition’ |
 A member of a US group of current, former and retired law enforcement officials is touring New Zealand to raise awareness of the failures of prohibition, as well as offer solutions that have proven to be successful.
Jerry Paradis, retired Judge of the Provincial Court of British Columbia, Canada, and now board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) recently stated that “from a court perspective, prohibition diminishes all the participants: the judges, by requiring them to
park their common sense at home; the prosecutors, who know full well that what
they’re doing is futile and damaging; and the
police who, because these are victimless crimes,
have to resort to two very problematic investigative
approaches: the search and the snitch”.
The War on Drugs has cost US taxpayers over a trillion dollars and arrested nearly 40 million
nonviolent drug offenders; the United States boasts the highest prison population in the world. Where has this gotten the United States? The War on Drugs is a manifest failure, and has only compounded the societal problems associated with drugs.
Is this, says Jerry, a policy that New Zealanders want to emulate?
Jerry’s speaking tour will include stops in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, Timaru, Christchurch, and other spots across
the country, from August 2 to September 10, 2008.
Radio New Zealand
has an excellent interview with Jerry Paradis that you can download here (12.5MB mp3, runs for 35 minutes. Right-click to save to your computer).
For tour dates and places, see LEAP's event calendar or LEAP's upcoming events page or email mildgreens@gmail.com
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