13 Quotes by Neil Woods

It made no sense. I’d joined the police to protect the weak and vulnerable – and to fight against those who victimised them. Yet the most vulnerable people I had ever met were now being turned into criminals and sent to prison. If we were fighting a war, then these were the exact people we should be fighting to protect. And if we weren’t, then what were we fighting for at all?

No one seemed to be drawing the blindingly obvious conclusion – why not take the narcotics trade out of the gangsters’ hands, and actually deprive them of all that money?

There is a mythology common in police circles that some people are just ‘bad’ – that if drugs were legalised they would simply find other forms of criminality. It's drivel.

In 1930s America, it was the stories of police corruption that really destroyed public support for Prohibition. My instinct is that if the public were to ever learn just how often current police forces are forced to shrug and say well, how can this not happen? then support for drug prohibition would disappear just as quickly.