Former Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy gave a lecture Tuesday on the failures of the war on drugs.
With the mission of educating the general public, the Students for Sensible Drug Policy invited Nick Morrow to California State University, Long Beach to share his experiences.
Through his experience with law enforcement, Morrow said that he realized that police followed a traditional hierarchy where they simply listened to orders.
“There is a lot of stuff that I consider now that I would never have considered before because I was always told as law enforcement, ‘This is it, this is what you do, this is the little box you check on the form,’” Morrow said. “Okay great. That was good when I started but where I’m at now it just seems silly.”
In the lecture, Morrow vehemently agreed with the assessment that the war on drugs contributed to the vast overcrowding of prisons in the United States.
After 40 plus years of the war on drugs, half of the inmates in the federal prison system are drug offenders as of 2014, according to a report by the Huffington Post. Of all the drug offenders in the federal system, 27 percent were locked up for crimes directly related to marijuana.
“I like working within and I like to affect change on [law]. If you have to go to jail then great but I want it to be for something you actually did, not some crap based on somebody’s opinion that’s not supported by fact,” Morrow said.
Despite his love for the law, Morrow acknowledges its faults.
“I’ve always been a law freak,” Morrow said. “I love the law. I love the process; this is the best legal system in the world. It’s flawed like crazy, but it’s the best one we have.”
Morrow discussed his history as a deputy in law enforcement who ended up on the other side as a court expert witness. After suffering a severe back injury in the line of duty, Morrow retired from the force, eventually going to law school to pursue a career on the prosecution side of the law.
Two more back surgeries prevented him from continuing down this path, but his background in narcotics helped lead him to become a private investigator and later a court expert witness in regards to drug policy.
“It’s been a slow evolution towards drug policy and the further I got into it the more I found that my law enforcement training was never focused on where it should be,” Morrow said. “The goal was to just lock people up.”
Morrow’s experience with law enforcement and now as a court expert witness gives him a unique perspective on marijuana legislation and policy. He said that he does much of his own research and goes to court on a regular basis as one of the only expert witnesses in his respective field in Los Angeles County.
“If I didn’t get injured, I probably would still be in the police business,” Morrow said. “But getting out of it allowed me to take a look from a distance to examine the training and protocols, especially with the war on drugs. Some people I know probably don’t agree, but this is what I truly believe. Hopefully things will change sooner rather than later.”