cannabisnews.com: Protesting The Drug War





Protesting The Drug War
Posted by CN Staff on July 09, 2004 at 22:28:46 PT
By Bill Steigerwald, Tribune-Review
Source: Tribune Review 
National Review magazine has shocked and annoyed more than a few of its conservative faithful with its current cover story, "Going to Pot: The growing movement toward ending America's irrational marijuana prohibition." Written by Ethan Nadelmann, the country's most dogged and arguably most influential proponent of drug-law reform, the piece calls for decriminalizing marijuana and humanizing the federal war on (some) drugs.
The son of a rabbi, Nadelmann is executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance -- http://www.drugpolicy.org -- a group that has 20,000 paying members and owes its existence to early funding by billionaire George Soros. I talked to Nadelmann by phone from San Francisco. Q: What is the Drug Policy Alliance and what are its aims? A: We're the leading organization promoting alternatives to the war on drugs. Essentially, we're the organization composed of people who believe the war on drugs is doing more harm to society than good. Our membership, our board, our staff, spans the spectrum, from people who believe that the answer is to legalize all drugs to people who are hesitant to legalize anything but who basically believe that treating drugs as fundamentally a criminal-justice issue is fundamentally misguided. Where the consensus lies right now is in ending marijuana prohibition. Q: How is society hurt by drugs? A: There's no question that some substances in and of themselves can cause harm. What's interesting, of course, is that two drugs that are legal (alcohol and nicotine) are in some respects the most dangerous in health terms of all the drugs. Marijuana may well be the safest of all the substances. The other factor is that when you make these drugs illegal, you end up making them more dangerous. Cocaine, heroin, amphetamine, all these drugs, are much more dangerous because they are illegal. They are adulterated, they are unregulated, they are of unknown potency and purity. And the result is oftentimes more, not fewer, fatalities. Q: How is society hurt by the war on drugs? A: That's the crazy part of this. As dangerous as drugs can be for many people, the war on drugs is causing dramatically more harm than drugs themselves. When you are arresting 1.5 million people a year; when you have almost half a million people behind bars on any one night on drug charges; when you are effectively encouraging the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and hepatitis by depriving people of legal access to sterile syringes; when you're spending something like $40 billion a year on the war on drugs -- all of these things are extraordinary wastes. Then there is the corruption of our morals, when people are turned into informants and rats by police pressure and obliged to turn against one another. The war on drugs is not something that is just targeting the most heinous and predatory people in this country; it's something that is targeting and criminalizing tens of millions of people every year and employing government tactics -- surveillance and undercover police -- that are really antithetical to what it means to live in a free country. Q: Are all illegal drugs worthy of being decriminalized or just marijuana? A: You have to distinguish between the issue of possession and the issue of distribution. Our core principle is that people should not be punished simply for what they put in their body if they don't hurt other people. Hold people responsible for their actions and harm against others, but don't punish people for what they put in their body. If you possess small amounts of a drug for your own personal use, that should not be a crime -- regardless of the drug. When it comes to the issue of production and distribution, we're very clear that with respect to cannabis, that this should ultimately be treated more or less like alcohol. It should be legally regulated. It should be subject to state and local control with respect to local norms. With respect to the other drugs, we have an internal debate within our organization and our movement whether these also should be treated by legal regulation of some sort or whether they should be just by prescription only. Q: Is this a political debate, a moral debate or a health debate? A: Well, it's all three of those. If you look at this from a public health perspective, the question is, "How do we most reduce the negative consequences of drug use?" The optimal policy, we say, is the one which most effectively reduces the cumulative death, disease, crime and suffering, both with the use of drugs and drug-control policy. There's also a very powerful moral dimension. There are people who regard any use of some of these drugs as immoral. On the other hand, you have people like myself, the Drug Policy Alliance, who also regard this as a moral issue. But for us, the morality is that people should not be punished for what they put in their body. We regard this very much as a moral struggle on our part, and it's about freedom, it's about compassion, and it's about responsibility. And we think the war on drugs is violating all three of these basic notions. Q: When you look around the world of drugs and drug policy, what are you encouraged by? A: There are a number of things. The first is that public opinion has clearly been shifting in favor of reform over the last 10 to 15 years. The second thing is that we are actually winning things. Almost 150 drug policy reforms have been enacted into law at the state level since 1996, either by ballot initiative or the state legislative route. And the third thing is that what you see throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other parts of the world is a very significant moving forward in terms of embracing decriminalization and harm reduction. Q: Do you see the end of the war on drugs in our lifetimes? A: I'll tell you this: It's definitely going to be changing. I'd say the odds of marijuana prohibition coming to an end in our lifetime -- how old are you? Q: 56. A: And I'm 47. I'd say that the odds of that happening in the next 10 to 15 years are quite good. I think the thing I'm most concerned about right now is that there is really a push on the part of the government, with really ominous totalitarian consequences -- and I do not use that word lightly -- that involves trying to drug test greater and greater and greater portions of the population, and employing drug testing backed by different types of sanctions in order to basically try to put whatever force they can behind a zero-tolerance policy. I think that is an extraordinary ominous development. It is clearly the obsession and focus of this particular administration. If you listen to what the drug czar John Walters is saying and focusing on as he travels around the country, it's all about, first of all, marijuana and drug testing. There is an extraordinary lack of sensitivity to basic concerns of individual freedom, and I think that's part of why we see very prominent conservatives beginning to speak out and stand up. If you look at the war on terrorism on one hand, where people are legitimately scared, and then you look at this war on drugs on the other hand, where people are almost in a drug craze and scared, what you realize is that this is a very ominous development, and people need to be aware of what is going on. Bill Steigerwald is the Trib's associate editor. Source: Tribune Review (Pittsburgh, PA)Author: Bill Steigerwald, Tribune-ReviewPublished: Saturday, July 10, 2004 Copyright: 2004 Tribune-Review Publishing Co.Contact: opinion tribweb.comWebsite: http://www.triblive.com/Related Articles & Web Site:Drug Policy Alliancehttp://www.drugpolicy.org/High Time To Eliminate Drug Laws?http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19118.shtmlAn End To Marijuana Prohibition http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19112.shtmlFree Weeds: The Marijuana Debatehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19103.shtml 
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on July 14, 2004 at 09:19:09 PT
Related Published Letter To The Editor
Seeking Truth in The Drug War  
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 Ending prohibition is not about drugs, but about ending the evil empire of the drug lords and their network of drug dealers. As one who has researched the failures of our drug policy for much of the past 10 years, I want to thank the Trib, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, and National Review magazine for more dialogue about ending the prohibition on marijuana ("Protesting the drug war," Q&A with Bill Steigerwald, July 10). Prohibition is an economic system that inevitably enriches criminals who use their profits to make the drug problem worse. Ending prohibition is not about drugs, but about ending the evil empire of the drug lords and their network of drug dealers. Right now we are financing our worst enemy. My suggestion is to revisit the old call of Walter Cronkite and numerous experts at the Hoover Institution for a much-needed independent federal commission on marijuana -- we haven't had one since 1982 -- to provide scientific information and ideas to the public that are free of political spin. It would provide a focus for media attention. 
 
 The public should have easy access to little-known government-funded reports, including those that show that: Prohibition has surrendered control and made marijuana easier for most of our young to get than alcohol -- and involved them in sales. Marijuana is markedly safer than alcohol. The immense burden of 700,000 annual marijuana arrests on the criminal justice system -- more than for murder, rape, robbery and armed assault combined -- makes it far less effective, detracting from prosecution of violent crime and homeland security. Enormous fiscal costs could be replaced with substantial tax revenues. Jerry EpsteinHouston, Texas Copyright: 2004 Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on July 10, 2004 at 04:38:36 PT:
Conservatism: time to seperate the wheat
from the chaff.A major litmus test of *true* conservatism is the issue of personal freedom balanced by personal responsibility. Another such litmus test is the issue of just how far may government intrude into the lives of its' citizens in pursuit of the 'common good'.True conservatives - often called 'paleoconservatives' - reject the argument of the NeoConservatives (they aren't even conservatives, they're Imperialists, and have amply demonstrated their aims with the Afghan and Iraq debacles) that support The State having unrestricted powers to enter into the lives of the citizens. Which, BTW, is exactly what the DrugWarriors want; go to DEAWatch http://members.aol.com/deawatch/daily.htm and read for yourself the almost Communist screeds of its' writers suggesting abnegation of basic rights to 'win' their precious little DrugWar. They make no bones about wanting to be the 'stars' in 'star chamber' justice, vigilantes with badges able to kill any citizen they want, and to Hell with 'due process'.(It is also interesting to note that the NeoCons are actually reconstituted 'former' Trotskeyites, practitioners of a form of Communism; maybe that explains their almost Bolshevik-like dependence upon The State to achieve their aims. Trotsky must be laughing his arse off in Hell at seeing how close his stepchildren are to achieving his dream for America.)REAL conservatives do NOT support the DrugWar; it really *is* that simple. They know the system is self-defeating, for many reasons, the simplest of which being because it goes against demonstrable 'human nature' as exemplified by 5,000 years of recorded history. Create black markets, and someone will fill the niche of supplying it. No amount of ideology or moralizing will change that.Like ticks bearing Lyme Disease, NeoCons have fastened onto and sucked the life's-blood of true conservatism and imparted nothing but their own poisonous agenda into the conservative body. It's long past time for the true conservatives to force these faux moralizing bloodsuckers out. And supporting drug law reform would do that and more; it would return real conservatives to their former state of health as robust defenders of individual rights against encroachments by the murderous State. (This is not hyperbole: remember Peter, Tom, Rollie and all those who died because of their stances, and all the innocents who've died here and elsewhere courtesy of the NeoCon agenda.) Calling all paleos! Put down the pen and pick up the trashbag; we've got work to do, to clean up the sordid mess the NeoCons have made in the House of Freedom. And the freedom to be self-regulating as to what an aware, sovereign individual puts in his or her body is what needs to be restored, first.
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