Strange, but apparently a true story:

As a drug officer, [Barry] Cooper said, he made more than 800 drug arrests and seized more than 50 vehicles and $500,000 in cash and assets.

“He was even better than he says he was,” said Tom Finley, Cooper’s former boss on a West Texas drug task force and now a private investigator in Midland. “He was probably the best narcotics officer in the state and maybe the country during his time with the task force.”

But now that he has retired from being paid to find drugs, he has taken up a different cause:

Cooper, who said he favors the legalization of marijuana, made the video in part because he believes the nation’s fight against drugs is a waste of resources. Busting marijuana users fills up prisons with nonviolent offenders, he said.

“My main motivation in all of this is to teach Americans their civil liberties and what drives me in this is injustice and unfairness in our system,” Cooper told the newspaper.

Of course he has critics:

[Richard Sanders, an agent with the Tyler Drug Enforcement Agency, said] “…for him to go to the dark side and do this is infuriating.”

Smith County Deputy Constable Mark Waters, a narcotics officer, said the video is insulting to law enforcement officials.

“This is a slap in the face to all that we do to uphold the laws and keep the public safe,” he said.

Hmmm, but what if you have an informed, perhaps even expert, opinion of what constitutes “safe” with regard to narcotics, as Cooper apparently does? I would have found it more encouraging if his critics had responded to his point about putting nonviolent offenders in jail, rather than trying to demonize him (“the dark side”) and sensationalize his actions (“slap in the face”). After all, you might say while he was the best officer for finding drugs, he disagreed with how offenders were treated or handled. Perhaps he even discovered that the post-discovery enforcement was doing more harm than good? If he is such an expert in narcotics work and he says his work was actually making neighborhoods less safe rather than more (diminishing civil liberties) how does that constitute the dark side? I mean it is not like he is trying to say it is ok to conceal alcohol abuse or a history of shirking public service and accountability for disasters while serving in public office. Now those issues seem more like a slap in the face, and you don’t see Texas law enforcement crying out much about them…