Law Enforcement Group Backs Legalizing Drugs

A new billboard located off a busy street in Oklahoma City is advertising the legalization of drugs.

Friday, June 12th 2009, 7:52 pm

By: News 9


By Jon Jordan, NEWS 9

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A new billboard located off a busy street in Oklahoma City is advertising the legalization of drugs.

The group funding the billboard is actually comprised of current and former law enforcement officers, but there are other law enforcement officials who don't support what the group is doing.

The billboard, placed off the Broadway Extension near Wilshire Blvd., advertises the need to legalize drugs.

Wes Johnson is one of 10,000 members of the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, known as LEAP. The officers use the badge to make their message more credible.

"Every speaker that comes out of LEAP is either a current or former law enforcement officer who has worked the streets, the drug war, and knows how ineffective and useless it is," Johnson said.

Mark Woodward, with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, not only disagrees with their message but also those behind it.

"It's giving parents and kids the impression that the police support legalizing drugs," Woodward said. "That's not the truth."

Woodward said any real police officer could not support legalizing drugs.

"Anybody that has seen how drug addiction forces children to live in deplorable conditions would never come out and support this," Woodward said. "In fact, they would do everything they could to stop it.

Regardless of what people do to try and stop the spread of messages, Johnson claimed at some point it won't matter.

"It will have cost the governments so much money that we're so close to bankruptcy, we'll have to legalize it," Johnson said. "We'll have to do something about it."

Johnson said he does not feel the billboard helps move the country to legalize drugs. He said only when the state gets legislatures with half a brain, will drugs be legalized.

The current billboard is the group's second they have posted to spread their message.

The first one was located in Nebraska last year.

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