What is LEAP?

I often refer to my ongoing campaign to have our obsolete drug laws changed, so thought it appropriate to clarify my position and that of the global organization I formed a branch of here in Scotland to help do that.  LEAP stands for the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and is basically police officers, retired cops, other law enforcement folk and like minded people from various walks of life who think that our drug laws stink. The Action Partnership part was originally Against Prohibition. We all have first hand experience of how the so called ‘War on Drugs’, as  proclaimed in 1971 by President Nixon, has been an abject failure. Unless its purpose was to create a massive black market where criminals and gangsters can make fortunes, and where drug users are left at the mercy of the criminal system and often left to die on our streets. In that case it’s been a huge success.

Listen, for almost 30 years I was right at the front line in the 'war'. From my very earliest days as a detective in Campbeltown and Rothesay I took great pleasure and pride in locking up drug dealers of every description. I honestly thought I was making our streets and communities better and safer, and it took me to the age of 60 to realise otherwise. (I know, I don’t look it). This really only dawned on me while I was writing my book The Ten Percent, and it was brought up during an interview for You Tube with Shaun Attwood on his True Crime series. The light bulb just switched on.

We actually created the market place by restricting demand. Every time we made ‘a seizure’ we just bumped the price up. Maybe created a gap by arresting the dealer, ensuring that 2 or 3 successors would start fighting over the territory or business now waiting for them. Because we certainly didn’t effect the demand.  Oh  no, that was the governments job. What a laugh. The professional opinion of their anti drug campaigns was that they couldn’t have promoted drug use any better. ‘Teenagers do of opposite of what they were told to do’ would hardly be a newsworthy headline to any parent,  but to politicians?

LEAP is about taking control of this market away from gangsters and cartels. We want to bring in proper regulation in order that we can harness the market to our purposes and ensure a safe supply though licensed outlets. We want an evidence led approach, a removal of prohibition and an end to this stupid War on Drugs which has served only as political rhetoric and a tool to criminalize chunks of our communities, who need guidance and support not criminalization and marginalization.

Above all we want people who choose to use drugs to be able to do so fully informed and safely with support and education available in a health based setting. We simply want to ensure Scotland loses its unenviable tag as Europe's capital for drug deaths, and we can do that by mobilising the huge swathe of growing opinion calling for change.  It's surely time to get real.