Drug Prohibition Corrupts Law Officers

by Frosty Wooldridge | November 1, 2007

Front page headlines scream out across America each time a cop gets busted for corruption. The rest proves a tragedy for the officer, the family and The Thin Blue Line. How many? The United States Department of Justice stopped keeping statistics in 1988, but experts agree that the drug trade ensnares half of police officers. Prison guards smuggle in drugs, customs officers waive truckloads of narcotics into the country while money corrupts too many. Even as citizens learn how much the officer took, the reader rarely hears of the most pervasive form of corruption; namely how often officers lie under oath.

In this fourth part of a continuing series, I interviewed my brother, 18 year veteran police officer and detective, Howard Wooldridge (retired), with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, LEAP, now stationed in Washington, DC.

“The United States has been at war with its citizens in earnest since President Nixon declared a war on drugs/war on people in 1971,” Officer Wooldridge said. “Since then my profession has spent one trillion tax dollars to arrest 38 million Americans for drug offenses. Corruption has become pandemic across the US, as drug dealers offer huge amounts of money to conceal their valuable cargo. An ounce of cocaine is worth about 20 ounces of pure gold. Although police officers always start out with a ton of integrity that can go to zero all too quickly.”

The bribe becomes the most dramatic form of corruption to protect a dealer from being arrested, his stash or his shipment of drugs. We read of officers paid $10,000 to... Keep reading>>>