Of the 1.5 million people in U.S. federal prisons, 59.6 percent are drug offenders, according to the Department of Justice. Is this overwhelming majority because drug trafficking is extremely high in this country, or is it because our government over-criminalizes drug offenders?

This question has fueled the debate over the war on drugs for years. However, some of the people who promote the decriminalization of drugs are those that you would least expect: law enforcement professionals.

Former policemen, DEA agents, prison wardens and FBI agents have formed the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). This non-partisan group advocates the regulation of illegal narcotics at the same level as tobacco and alcohol.

LEAP members travel around the country and discuss their first-hand experiences with the inadequacy of current drug enforcement.

“The thing I remember most is, no matter what we did, no matter how hard we worked or how many hours we put in, there were always more drugs at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day,” Jack Cole, executive director of LEAP, told the New Haven Advocate.

This movement of legal officers, who were involved with the war on drugs and now so strongly oppose it, speaks volumes about how truly ineffective our U.S. drug policies are.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy says that federal spending on drug control has increased 34.4 percent since 2001. However, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, illicit drug rates since 2001 have remained constant.

It would be a completely different story if the only people the government was putting behind bars were huge, murderous drug lords who dealt hundreds of pounds of cocaine, but this is hardly the case.

According to FBI reports, 81 percent of the drug-related arrests in 2005 were for possession of controlled substances while only 18.3 percent were for sale or manufacturing of drugs.

The government is simply going after the wrong people. Imprisoning citizens who use drugs but do not traffic them punishes the effects, not the cause, of the problem.

The government must distinguish between criminal behavior and drug addiction. The latter should be viewed as a health issue, not a criminal act. The government could use tax dollars to provide small-scale drug offenders access to drug treatment and education rather than spending the money keeping them in jail.

An example of an institution’s drug policies that emphasize rehabilitation are those of Guilford College. A first-offense drug possession on campus is considered a Level I sanction, which means that the student will pay a fine, take a drug awareness course, and be put on disciplinary probation for a year.

This is a much milder sentence than spending 15 months in jail, which is the punishment for first-time possession in North Carolina.

Guilford does use harsher punishments for repeat offenders or students suspected of heavy drug trafficking. These are Level II and III offenses, which result in dismissal from the school.

The drug policies of Guilford are fair in allowing first-time offenders a second chance instead of automatically expelling those who breach the campus drug policy. This is necessary so that students who make mistakes, and never repeat their offenses, are not harshly punished.

While drugs are certainly present on campus, drug-related violence and crime does not exist at Guilford as it currently does in the U.S.

The severe criminalization of drugs is only feeding the problem. The legalization of drugs would eliminate the crime surrounding the illegal drug trade because the government would gain control of it.

“Drug legalization is not to be construed as an approach to our drug problem,” said LEAP member Captain Peter Christ. “Drug legalization is about our crime and violence problem. Once we legalize drugs, we then have to buckle down and deal with our drug problem.”

The emergence of groups like LEAP illustrates the failure of our country’s drug policies. More law enforcers encourage the decriminalization of drugs while government officials, who are not involved with the enforcement process, push for more severe sentences.