westybosm
08-14-2003, 07:56 AM
The Nation Magazine - August 18, 2003 issue
The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke
by Sasha Abramsky
The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat. But this
nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than a quarter-century,
ever since New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller mandated harsh drug
sentencing in 1973 -- and it may be time to announce that this is one war
we've lost. More than a million people are serving time in our prisons and
jails for nonviolent offenses, most drug-related, at a cost to the public of
some $9.4 billion a year. Many billions more are spent by the states and the
federal government on drug interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug
prosecutions. Harsh laws that require lengthy minimum sentences for the
possession of even small amounts of drugs have created a boom in the
incarceration of women, tearing mothers away from their children. Much of
the country's costly foreign-policy commitments -- especially in Latin
America and the Caribbean -- are determined by drug-war priorities. And yet
drug use has actually soared, with twice as many teenagers reporting illegal
drug use in 2000 as in 1992.
The idea of putting more and more Americans in prison, a great number of
them for crimes related to drug addiction, grew out of "broken
windows"
social theories developed by criminologists such as James Q. Wilson in the
1970s. Wilson and his acolytes believed that unless police and the courts
aggressively cracked down on crime, the social compact would degenerate into
anarchy. They argued that even nonviolent offenses, such as breaking windows
or possessing small amounts of marijuana, contributed to an anything-goes
climate in which more serious crimes would proliferate. By the 1980s, these
theories had entered the political mainstream, allowing Presidents Reagan,
Bush, Clinton and now George W. Bush to score political points by denouncing
addicts and appearing tough on crime all at the same time. Though
politicians may have embraced this framework because it sold well to voters,
its implications for the nation's health have been extreme. The drug war
exiled addiction from the realm of public health, placing it almost
exclusively in the hands of law enforcement and the courts.
At the philosophical core of this war on drugs, as fought by the likes of
Bush Sr.'s drug czar, Bill Bennett, are twin ideas: Drug use is a moral
wrong in itself, and drug use makes people more likely to commit a host of
other crimes, from prostitution to burglary to murder. To fight drugs, the
drug warriors have insisted, it isn't enough to go after the narco-kingpins;
government agencies and courts must disrupt the drug supply-and-demand by
prosecuting, and imprisoning, increasing numbers of low-level street
dealers, even users themselves.
In the past few years, however, these policies have come under attack from
surprising quarters. Opponents range from public health activists to
libertarian-minded political figures such as former Secretary of State
George Shultz. On the one hand, the critics have argued, these policies have
failed to make progress toward a drug-free America. On the other, the war
has proved to be too expensive to sustain. In an era of shrinking state
resources, legislators have come to understand that budgets cannot be
balanced, and needed social programs cannot be maintained, unless the
country's bloated prison system is shrunk back down to a more realistic
size. These two concerns have converged to create a window of opportunity
for drug-policy reformers to push their case where it matters most: in the
states.
Winter is hesitatingly giving way to spring, and New Mexico's former
Governor Gary Johnson is tending to a broken leg in preparation for an
expedition to climb Mount Everest. His daredevil athleticism is a marker of
the same temperament that allowed Johnson, a Republican, to become the only
governor ever to publicly support drug legalization while in office. The
significant progress he made on drug-policy reform during his eight-year
tenure helped to turn the tide for state reform movements across the
country. "Johnson was a huge advocate," says Jerry Montoya, who runs
a
county needle-exchange program in the state, "ahead of federal policy in
terms of thinking, in terms of philosophy."
In 2002, the last year of Johnson's tenure, state legislators voted to limit
the ability of state police to seize the assets of those accused of
drug-related crimes; to return a certain degree of case-by-case discretion
to judges trying nonviolent drug cases; and to waive the federal ban on
welfare benefits for former drug offenders who have completed their
sentences.
During his tenure, Johnson, a fiscal conservative, made enemies of liberals
through his hostility to tax-and-spend policies and his fondness for
privatizing government functions -- including prisons. He frequently vetoed
the creation of new government programs, using, in his words, "an iron
fist"
on the state budget. But he made enemies of conservatives as well, primarily
over his outspoken views on drug policy. He combatively declared the war on
drugs "a miserable failure" and ambitiously investigated
alternatives,
including legalization.
Although he abstains now even from caffeine, sugar and alcohol, Johnson
admits that he once inhaled--quite often. "I didn't hide it," he
says.
"Growing up [in the 1960s], I smoked marijuana regularly in college and a
little bit after college. And I experimented with other drugs." This
experience, combined with a strong libertarian streak, allowed him to be an
iconoclastic thinker on drug policy. "If we legalized all drugs tomorrow,
we'd be better than we are now regarding death, disease and crime
reduction," he says. "There'd be more money into education; and more
money
into treatment for those who want or need treatment. At present rates, I'm
going to see, in my life, 80 million Americans arrested for illegal drugs.
The human cost of what we're doing is untold."
Johnson concluded that policies such as distributing clean needles to
addicts and opening up regulated heroin-maintenance programs would do more
to manage addiction than simply sending the police out to round up addicts;
he also concluded that legalizing some categories of drugs and carefully
regulating their sale would remove a huge pool of money from organized-crime
cartels, boost government tax revenues and free up large amounts of money to
be invested in drug education and health centers.
Retired Judge Woody Smith, who served on the bench in Albuquerque in the
1980s and '90s before joining a Johnson task force on drug law reform, says,
"He believes our approach [to the war on drugs] was wrong, from a personal
liberty standpoint and a pragmatic standpoint." Smith, too, was eventually
persuaded that the country's approach to drugs needs to be drastically
overhauled. "Legalization and regulation are the only answer," he says
now.
"It's not a perfect solution, but it's a hell of a lot better than what
we're doing now."
This evolution of thinking in New Mexico has spread across the country in
recent years. Increasingly impatient with the costly combination of policing
and prosecution, voters, along with a growing number of state and local
elected officials, have abandoned their support for incarceration-based
anti-drug strategies and have forced significant policy shifts. From
conservative states like Louisiana to traditionally progressive states like
Michigan, from small states like New Mexico and Kansas to large states like
California, all the big questions are up for debate: Should marijuana be
decriminalized, at least for those with pressing medical needs? Should
mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders be abandoned?
Should prison terms for crimes of addiction be replaced by mandated
treatment? Should governments fund needle exchanges and other harm-reduction
programs for drug users as a way of controlling epidemics? Increasingly, at
the local level, the answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.
In 1996 voters in Arizona passed Proposition 200, transferring thousands of
drug offenders into treatment programs. In California, a similar initiative
passed in 2000, Proposition 36, channeled tens of thousands of addicts into
treatment -- and reduced the number of inmates imprisoned on drug-possession
charges from almost 20,000 at the time of the law's passage to just over
15,000 in June 2002.
In 1998 Michigan repealed its notorious "650-lifer" laws, which
decreed a
mandatory life sentence for those caught in possession of more than 650
grams of certain narcotics. Then, last Christmas, Governor John Engler
signed legislation rolling back the state's tough mandatory-minimum drug
sentences and its equally tough "lifetime probation," which had been
imposed
on many drug offenders following their release from prison.
Early this year North Dakota repealed its one-year mandatory-minimum
sentence for those convicted on a first-time drug-possession charge, as did
Connecticut in 2001. Indiana and Louisiana have repealed some of their
statutory sentences, and Louisiana has restored parole and probation options
for inmates convicted of a host of nonviolent offenses.
In Kansas a sentencing commission has proposed major reforms of the state's
mandatory sentencing codes coupled with an expansion of treatment
provisions. Despite opposition from conservative legislators, these
recommendations were accepted in late March. "It's definitely a change of
philosophy regarding how you deal with drug offenders," says Barbara
Tombs,
executive director of the Kansas Sentencing Commission. "With the state
budget cuts and [many] drug treatment programs in prisons being eliminated,
there is an urgent need to look at alternatives to incarceration for drug
prisoners."
At the same time, a clutch of states, including California, Washington,
Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska and Nevada, have adopted medical marijuana
legislation, legalizing the drug's use for specific medical conditions such
as AIDS wasting, and a similar measure in Colorado was invalidated on a
technicality.
Taken as a whole, these reforms represent the biggest change to state drug
policies in more than a generation.
But while state legislatures have opened up the financial and moral debates
about drug policy at the local level, the federal government is having none
of it. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that the
number of people charged with drug offenses in federal courts rose sharply,
from 11,854 in 1984 to 29,306 in 1999. During roughly the same period, the
amount of time a federal drug prisoner could expect to serve in prison more
than doubled, from thirty months to sixty-six months.
On many issues, from gun ownership to environmental regulation, the Bush
team has backed the conservative cause of states' rights. But the
Administration has blocked even mild attempts at state drug-law reform and
has challenged state reformers over issues such as medical marijuana and
needle exchange. The Justice Department has fought medical marijuana laws in
court and launched a massive PR campaign against pot use. It has even
pursued federal prosecution of those who legally distribute medical
marijuana under state laws. Attorney General John Ashcroft is "willing to
push even the smallest cases," says David Fratello, political director of
the Campaign for New Drug Policies. "We're seeing a new level of pettiness
and aggression."
Clinton's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was criticized by drug policy
reformers for his refusal to discuss legalization initiatives and his zeal
for militarizing the drug wars overseas. But these advocates find Bush's
czar, John Walters, to be even worse. Under Walters's reign, the Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has encouraged state prosecutors to go
after medical marijuana providers, especially in California, and has driven
underground virtually every medical-marijuana buyers' club in the country.
It has held press conferences against citizens' reform initiatives. And it
has sponsored extravagant advertising campaigns in state and local papers
and on television stations--with $180 million earmarked for anti-marijuana
ads alone -- that demonize teen drug use by linking it to terrorism.
Walters has also put pressure on state legislators, declaring that many
drug-law reforms would contravene federal laws. In the fall 2002 elections,
he traversed the country, stopping in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Ohio,
campaigning against medical marijuana efforts and meeting with newspaper
editors to push his case. The House version of the ONDCP Reauthorization Act
originally included a provision that would have brought such politicking to
a new level, allowing the White House to spend almost $1 billion in public
money on ads attacking state and local ballot measures that promote drug-law
reform. Interestingly, a Republican-led House committee removed that
provision before approving the bill.
Yet in many ways Walters may be fighting yesterday's war on drugs. States
like California, with its extensive system of medical-marijuana buyers'
clubs, and New Mexico, with its public support for needle exchange, are
beginning to shape up as the vanguard of a whole new approach to drug
addiction.
In the poorest barrios of Albuquerque, teams of workers with Youth
Development, Inc. (YDI) take their vans from one addict-client to another.
Late into the night, they visit shooting galleries, ordinary private homes
and the cardboard shelters constructed in alleyways by some of the city's
homeless. At each, they reclaim dirty needles, fill in forms identifying the
numbers returned, give out an equivalent number of clean needles, provide
bottles of needle-cleaning solutions and also offer their clients HIV tests.
This was once a fairly underground operation. But now groups like YDI
operate across the state with strong support and funding from New Mexico's
Department of Health. All told, they distribute hundreds of thousands of
clean needles per month to almost 7,000 card-carrying clients -- and
retrieve hundreds of thousands of dirty needles.
New Mexico's harm-reduction approach seems to be bearing fruit. A study from
1997 found that while the majority of the state's injection-drug users had
been exposed to hepatitis C -- suggesting that considerable needle-sharing
was taking place -- less than 1 percent of injection-drug users tested
positive for HIV. Health experts saw a brief window of opportunity in which
to create workable needle-exchange programs that could prevent HIV from
spreading, as hepatitis C already had. So far, the programs appear to have
worked: In a state with one of the largest per capita injection-drug-using
populations in the country (New Mexico recorded 11.6 heroin deaths per
100,000 between 1993 and 1995, compared with a national average of 5.4
deaths per 100,000), the needle-exchange program has kept HIV to a bare
minimum within the close-knit community of users. Department of Health
experts estimate that even today, that number is around 11 percent--a low
rate, compared with data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention showing that 27 percent of injection-drug users are HIV-positive
in cities like Boston, Miami and Washington.
"My whole attitude about drugs and drug users has changed," says
Rosie
Clifford, a nurse who works in a public health center in the hardscrabble
community of Los Lunas, twenty miles south of Albuquerque. "I used to be
very conservative, very law and order. But even if you're really
conservative, and you look at needle exchange, you ought to see it as a good
way to stop the further spread of HIV and hepatitis and any blood-borne
disease."
Danny, a twenty-something heroin addict, has been a client of YDI since 1999
and speaks with gratitude about the group's services. "I don't have to
worry
about used needles, about diseases," he says. "There was a time if I
needed
a new syringe I'd have to buy it for five bucks, and you don't know if it's
new or not." YDI has provided Danny with health information, and, if he
needs it, the group will arrange for a doctor to visit him at home.
Elsewhere in the state, in Rio Arriba County, near the nuclear laboratories
of Los Alamos, public health workers are distributing not only needles but
Narcan, an injected medication that can reverse the effects of a heroin
overdose. So far, they believe they have saved about a dozen lives by
training addicts in its use.
Many of the communities in this beautiful mountainous region are desperately
poor. Often the roads are dusty and unpaved, dotted with impromptu altars
set up in memory of those killed in car accidents -- or murdered in battles
over drugs and drug money. Heroin and methamphetamine addiction is so
widespread here that in some houses, three generations of users share drugs
with one another. Yet, while the police in many parts of the country
routinely arrest users--and even level paraphernalia charges against addicts
bringing dirty needles into exchange programs -- in the town of Española,
police chief Richard Guillen allows harm-reduction coordinators into his
jail and encourages his officers to coax addicts to seek treatment.
Guillen believes that the old approach to drug addiction has failed: "All
we're doing is interdiction at the federal level," he says, "and we
haven't
been successful in reducing demand." By contrast, he says, his local
police
have recognized that "an addiction to drugs is just like any other
illness.
Let's try to get them treatment, counseling. Without treatment, all we have
is a revolving door."
In the 1980s and early '90s, faced with a growing crack epidemic and the
attendant media reports of out-of-control drug gangs and waves of violent
crime, the public threw its support behind extremely coercive anti-drug
policies. Then the crime rates began falling and, gradually, public
attitudes began to soften. High-profile research projections and a growing
cadre of advocacy groups -- many, like the Lindesmith Center and the Drug
Policy Foundation, funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros --
encouraged this shift in attitudes by suggesting that treatment was more
effective than prison at lowering both addiction and crime. The advocacy
groups drafted model reform legislation and promoted ballot initiatives like
those that have diverted nonviolent drug offenders away from prisons in
Arizona and California. The researchers produced numerous studies showing
that it costs far less to place an addict in treatment than in prison--and
that treatment has a higher success rate in breaking the addiction cycle. A
survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2001 found that fully 73
percent of Americans favored permitting medical marijuana prescriptions; 47
percent favored rolling back mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug
offenders; and 52 percent believed drug use should be treated as a disease
rather than a crime. Faced with this grassroots shift, local elected
officials, too, began to re-examine the beliefs and theories underlying
America's anti-drug strategy.
Ever since recession hit two years ago, these changes in thinking have been
bolstered by fiscal realities. While the Bush Administration may think it
can fight a war on terror and run an occupation of Iraq while also cutting
taxes and continuing the drug-war imprisonment boom, states are dealing with
a more bitter reality. The Administration may want to devote resources to
shutting down medical-marijuana buyers' clubs set up legally under new state
laws, but states are no longer so enthusiastic. They are realizing that
their budgets, buffeted by declining tax revenues, simply can't support
major domestic-security spending and, at the same time, continued high
expenditures on drug-war policing and mass incarceration. With drug
treatment cheaper than incarceration and increasingly viable in the court of
public opinion, drug-law reform is gaining ground despite federal
intransigence. More and more elected officials are beginning to conclude
that it's time to bring home the troops in the war on drugs as we know it.
"Treatment instead of incarceration across the whole country has become a
political safe ground," former Governor Johnson says. "It could not
have
been said safely prior to three years ago. Now it's totally safe."
***************
Tom Murlowski
The November Coalition
795 South Cedar € Colville, WA 99114
(509)684-1550 € tom@november.org
http://www.november.org € http://www.journeyforjustice.org
"It's not a war on drugs; it's a war on people!"
The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke
by Sasha Abramsky
The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat. But this
nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than a quarter-century,
ever since New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller mandated harsh drug
sentencing in 1973 -- and it may be time to announce that this is one war
we've lost. More than a million people are serving time in our prisons and
jails for nonviolent offenses, most drug-related, at a cost to the public of
some $9.4 billion a year. Many billions more are spent by the states and the
federal government on drug interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug
prosecutions. Harsh laws that require lengthy minimum sentences for the
possession of even small amounts of drugs have created a boom in the
incarceration of women, tearing mothers away from their children. Much of
the country's costly foreign-policy commitments -- especially in Latin
America and the Caribbean -- are determined by drug-war priorities. And yet
drug use has actually soared, with twice as many teenagers reporting illegal
drug use in 2000 as in 1992.
The idea of putting more and more Americans in prison, a great number of
them for crimes related to drug addiction, grew out of "broken
windows"
social theories developed by criminologists such as James Q. Wilson in the
1970s. Wilson and his acolytes believed that unless police and the courts
aggressively cracked down on crime, the social compact would degenerate into
anarchy. They argued that even nonviolent offenses, such as breaking windows
or possessing small amounts of marijuana, contributed to an anything-goes
climate in which more serious crimes would proliferate. By the 1980s, these
theories had entered the political mainstream, allowing Presidents Reagan,
Bush, Clinton and now George W. Bush to score political points by denouncing
addicts and appearing tough on crime all at the same time. Though
politicians may have embraced this framework because it sold well to voters,
its implications for the nation's health have been extreme. The drug war
exiled addiction from the realm of public health, placing it almost
exclusively in the hands of law enforcement and the courts.
At the philosophical core of this war on drugs, as fought by the likes of
Bush Sr.'s drug czar, Bill Bennett, are twin ideas: Drug use is a moral
wrong in itself, and drug use makes people more likely to commit a host of
other crimes, from prostitution to burglary to murder. To fight drugs, the
drug warriors have insisted, it isn't enough to go after the narco-kingpins;
government agencies and courts must disrupt the drug supply-and-demand by
prosecuting, and imprisoning, increasing numbers of low-level street
dealers, even users themselves.
In the past few years, however, these policies have come under attack from
surprising quarters. Opponents range from public health activists to
libertarian-minded political figures such as former Secretary of State
George Shultz. On the one hand, the critics have argued, these policies have
failed to make progress toward a drug-free America. On the other, the war
has proved to be too expensive to sustain. In an era of shrinking state
resources, legislators have come to understand that budgets cannot be
balanced, and needed social programs cannot be maintained, unless the
country's bloated prison system is shrunk back down to a more realistic
size. These two concerns have converged to create a window of opportunity
for drug-policy reformers to push their case where it matters most: in the
states.
Winter is hesitatingly giving way to spring, and New Mexico's former
Governor Gary Johnson is tending to a broken leg in preparation for an
expedition to climb Mount Everest. His daredevil athleticism is a marker of
the same temperament that allowed Johnson, a Republican, to become the only
governor ever to publicly support drug legalization while in office. The
significant progress he made on drug-policy reform during his eight-year
tenure helped to turn the tide for state reform movements across the
country. "Johnson was a huge advocate," says Jerry Montoya, who runs
a
county needle-exchange program in the state, "ahead of federal policy in
terms of thinking, in terms of philosophy."
In 2002, the last year of Johnson's tenure, state legislators voted to limit
the ability of state police to seize the assets of those accused of
drug-related crimes; to return a certain degree of case-by-case discretion
to judges trying nonviolent drug cases; and to waive the federal ban on
welfare benefits for former drug offenders who have completed their
sentences.
During his tenure, Johnson, a fiscal conservative, made enemies of liberals
through his hostility to tax-and-spend policies and his fondness for
privatizing government functions -- including prisons. He frequently vetoed
the creation of new government programs, using, in his words, "an iron
fist"
on the state budget. But he made enemies of conservatives as well, primarily
over his outspoken views on drug policy. He combatively declared the war on
drugs "a miserable failure" and ambitiously investigated
alternatives,
including legalization.
Although he abstains now even from caffeine, sugar and alcohol, Johnson
admits that he once inhaled--quite often. "I didn't hide it," he
says.
"Growing up [in the 1960s], I smoked marijuana regularly in college and a
little bit after college. And I experimented with other drugs." This
experience, combined with a strong libertarian streak, allowed him to be an
iconoclastic thinker on drug policy. "If we legalized all drugs tomorrow,
we'd be better than we are now regarding death, disease and crime
reduction," he says. "There'd be more money into education; and more
money
into treatment for those who want or need treatment. At present rates, I'm
going to see, in my life, 80 million Americans arrested for illegal drugs.
The human cost of what we're doing is untold."
Johnson concluded that policies such as distributing clean needles to
addicts and opening up regulated heroin-maintenance programs would do more
to manage addiction than simply sending the police out to round up addicts;
he also concluded that legalizing some categories of drugs and carefully
regulating their sale would remove a huge pool of money from organized-crime
cartels, boost government tax revenues and free up large amounts of money to
be invested in drug education and health centers.
Retired Judge Woody Smith, who served on the bench in Albuquerque in the
1980s and '90s before joining a Johnson task force on drug law reform, says,
"He believes our approach [to the war on drugs] was wrong, from a personal
liberty standpoint and a pragmatic standpoint." Smith, too, was eventually
persuaded that the country's approach to drugs needs to be drastically
overhauled. "Legalization and regulation are the only answer," he says
now.
"It's not a perfect solution, but it's a hell of a lot better than what
we're doing now."
This evolution of thinking in New Mexico has spread across the country in
recent years. Increasingly impatient with the costly combination of policing
and prosecution, voters, along with a growing number of state and local
elected officials, have abandoned their support for incarceration-based
anti-drug strategies and have forced significant policy shifts. From
conservative states like Louisiana to traditionally progressive states like
Michigan, from small states like New Mexico and Kansas to large states like
California, all the big questions are up for debate: Should marijuana be
decriminalized, at least for those with pressing medical needs? Should
mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders be abandoned?
Should prison terms for crimes of addiction be replaced by mandated
treatment? Should governments fund needle exchanges and other harm-reduction
programs for drug users as a way of controlling epidemics? Increasingly, at
the local level, the answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.
In 1996 voters in Arizona passed Proposition 200, transferring thousands of
drug offenders into treatment programs. In California, a similar initiative
passed in 2000, Proposition 36, channeled tens of thousands of addicts into
treatment -- and reduced the number of inmates imprisoned on drug-possession
charges from almost 20,000 at the time of the law's passage to just over
15,000 in June 2002.
In 1998 Michigan repealed its notorious "650-lifer" laws, which
decreed a
mandatory life sentence for those caught in possession of more than 650
grams of certain narcotics. Then, last Christmas, Governor John Engler
signed legislation rolling back the state's tough mandatory-minimum drug
sentences and its equally tough "lifetime probation," which had been
imposed
on many drug offenders following their release from prison.
Early this year North Dakota repealed its one-year mandatory-minimum
sentence for those convicted on a first-time drug-possession charge, as did
Connecticut in 2001. Indiana and Louisiana have repealed some of their
statutory sentences, and Louisiana has restored parole and probation options
for inmates convicted of a host of nonviolent offenses.
In Kansas a sentencing commission has proposed major reforms of the state's
mandatory sentencing codes coupled with an expansion of treatment
provisions. Despite opposition from conservative legislators, these
recommendations were accepted in late March. "It's definitely a change of
philosophy regarding how you deal with drug offenders," says Barbara
Tombs,
executive director of the Kansas Sentencing Commission. "With the state
budget cuts and [many] drug treatment programs in prisons being eliminated,
there is an urgent need to look at alternatives to incarceration for drug
prisoners."
At the same time, a clutch of states, including California, Washington,
Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska and Nevada, have adopted medical marijuana
legislation, legalizing the drug's use for specific medical conditions such
as AIDS wasting, and a similar measure in Colorado was invalidated on a
technicality.
Taken as a whole, these reforms represent the biggest change to state drug
policies in more than a generation.
But while state legislatures have opened up the financial and moral debates
about drug policy at the local level, the federal government is having none
of it. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that the
number of people charged with drug offenses in federal courts rose sharply,
from 11,854 in 1984 to 29,306 in 1999. During roughly the same period, the
amount of time a federal drug prisoner could expect to serve in prison more
than doubled, from thirty months to sixty-six months.
On many issues, from gun ownership to environmental regulation, the Bush
team has backed the conservative cause of states' rights. But the
Administration has blocked even mild attempts at state drug-law reform and
has challenged state reformers over issues such as medical marijuana and
needle exchange. The Justice Department has fought medical marijuana laws in
court and launched a massive PR campaign against pot use. It has even
pursued federal prosecution of those who legally distribute medical
marijuana under state laws. Attorney General John Ashcroft is "willing to
push even the smallest cases," says David Fratello, political director of
the Campaign for New Drug Policies. "We're seeing a new level of pettiness
and aggression."
Clinton's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was criticized by drug policy
reformers for his refusal to discuss legalization initiatives and his zeal
for militarizing the drug wars overseas. But these advocates find Bush's
czar, John Walters, to be even worse. Under Walters's reign, the Office of
National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has encouraged state prosecutors to go
after medical marijuana providers, especially in California, and has driven
underground virtually every medical-marijuana buyers' club in the country.
It has held press conferences against citizens' reform initiatives. And it
has sponsored extravagant advertising campaigns in state and local papers
and on television stations--with $180 million earmarked for anti-marijuana
ads alone -- that demonize teen drug use by linking it to terrorism.
Walters has also put pressure on state legislators, declaring that many
drug-law reforms would contravene federal laws. In the fall 2002 elections,
he traversed the country, stopping in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Ohio,
campaigning against medical marijuana efforts and meeting with newspaper
editors to push his case. The House version of the ONDCP Reauthorization Act
originally included a provision that would have brought such politicking to
a new level, allowing the White House to spend almost $1 billion in public
money on ads attacking state and local ballot measures that promote drug-law
reform. Interestingly, a Republican-led House committee removed that
provision before approving the bill.
Yet in many ways Walters may be fighting yesterday's war on drugs. States
like California, with its extensive system of medical-marijuana buyers'
clubs, and New Mexico, with its public support for needle exchange, are
beginning to shape up as the vanguard of a whole new approach to drug
addiction.
In the poorest barrios of Albuquerque, teams of workers with Youth
Development, Inc. (YDI) take their vans from one addict-client to another.
Late into the night, they visit shooting galleries, ordinary private homes
and the cardboard shelters constructed in alleyways by some of the city's
homeless. At each, they reclaim dirty needles, fill in forms identifying the
numbers returned, give out an equivalent number of clean needles, provide
bottles of needle-cleaning solutions and also offer their clients HIV tests.
This was once a fairly underground operation. But now groups like YDI
operate across the state with strong support and funding from New Mexico's
Department of Health. All told, they distribute hundreds of thousands of
clean needles per month to almost 7,000 card-carrying clients -- and
retrieve hundreds of thousands of dirty needles.
New Mexico's harm-reduction approach seems to be bearing fruit. A study from
1997 found that while the majority of the state's injection-drug users had
been exposed to hepatitis C -- suggesting that considerable needle-sharing
was taking place -- less than 1 percent of injection-drug users tested
positive for HIV. Health experts saw a brief window of opportunity in which
to create workable needle-exchange programs that could prevent HIV from
spreading, as hepatitis C already had. So far, the programs appear to have
worked: In a state with one of the largest per capita injection-drug-using
populations in the country (New Mexico recorded 11.6 heroin deaths per
100,000 between 1993 and 1995, compared with a national average of 5.4
deaths per 100,000), the needle-exchange program has kept HIV to a bare
minimum within the close-knit community of users. Department of Health
experts estimate that even today, that number is around 11 percent--a low
rate, compared with data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention showing that 27 percent of injection-drug users are HIV-positive
in cities like Boston, Miami and Washington.
"My whole attitude about drugs and drug users has changed," says
Rosie
Clifford, a nurse who works in a public health center in the hardscrabble
community of Los Lunas, twenty miles south of Albuquerque. "I used to be
very conservative, very law and order. But even if you're really
conservative, and you look at needle exchange, you ought to see it as a good
way to stop the further spread of HIV and hepatitis and any blood-borne
disease."
Danny, a twenty-something heroin addict, has been a client of YDI since 1999
and speaks with gratitude about the group's services. "I don't have to
worry
about used needles, about diseases," he says. "There was a time if I
needed
a new syringe I'd have to buy it for five bucks, and you don't know if it's
new or not." YDI has provided Danny with health information, and, if he
needs it, the group will arrange for a doctor to visit him at home.
Elsewhere in the state, in Rio Arriba County, near the nuclear laboratories
of Los Alamos, public health workers are distributing not only needles but
Narcan, an injected medication that can reverse the effects of a heroin
overdose. So far, they believe they have saved about a dozen lives by
training addicts in its use.
Many of the communities in this beautiful mountainous region are desperately
poor. Often the roads are dusty and unpaved, dotted with impromptu altars
set up in memory of those killed in car accidents -- or murdered in battles
over drugs and drug money. Heroin and methamphetamine addiction is so
widespread here that in some houses, three generations of users share drugs
with one another. Yet, while the police in many parts of the country
routinely arrest users--and even level paraphernalia charges against addicts
bringing dirty needles into exchange programs -- in the town of Española,
police chief Richard Guillen allows harm-reduction coordinators into his
jail and encourages his officers to coax addicts to seek treatment.
Guillen believes that the old approach to drug addiction has failed: "All
we're doing is interdiction at the federal level," he says, "and we
haven't
been successful in reducing demand." By contrast, he says, his local
police
have recognized that "an addiction to drugs is just like any other
illness.
Let's try to get them treatment, counseling. Without treatment, all we have
is a revolving door."
In the 1980s and early '90s, faced with a growing crack epidemic and the
attendant media reports of out-of-control drug gangs and waves of violent
crime, the public threw its support behind extremely coercive anti-drug
policies. Then the crime rates began falling and, gradually, public
attitudes began to soften. High-profile research projections and a growing
cadre of advocacy groups -- many, like the Lindesmith Center and the Drug
Policy Foundation, funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros --
encouraged this shift in attitudes by suggesting that treatment was more
effective than prison at lowering both addiction and crime. The advocacy
groups drafted model reform legislation and promoted ballot initiatives like
those that have diverted nonviolent drug offenders away from prisons in
Arizona and California. The researchers produced numerous studies showing
that it costs far less to place an addict in treatment than in prison--and
that treatment has a higher success rate in breaking the addiction cycle. A
survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2001 found that fully 73
percent of Americans favored permitting medical marijuana prescriptions; 47
percent favored rolling back mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug
offenders; and 52 percent believed drug use should be treated as a disease
rather than a crime. Faced with this grassroots shift, local elected
officials, too, began to re-examine the beliefs and theories underlying
America's anti-drug strategy.
Ever since recession hit two years ago, these changes in thinking have been
bolstered by fiscal realities. While the Bush Administration may think it
can fight a war on terror and run an occupation of Iraq while also cutting
taxes and continuing the drug-war imprisonment boom, states are dealing with
a more bitter reality. The Administration may want to devote resources to
shutting down medical-marijuana buyers' clubs set up legally under new state
laws, but states are no longer so enthusiastic. They are realizing that
their budgets, buffeted by declining tax revenues, simply can't support
major domestic-security spending and, at the same time, continued high
expenditures on drug-war policing and mass incarceration. With drug
treatment cheaper than incarceration and increasingly viable in the court of
public opinion, drug-law reform is gaining ground despite federal
intransigence. More and more elected officials are beginning to conclude
that it's time to bring home the troops in the war on drugs as we know it.
"Treatment instead of incarceration across the whole country has become a
political safe ground," former Governor Johnson says. "It could not
have
been said safely prior to three years ago. Now it's totally safe."
***************
Tom Murlowski
The November Coalition
795 South Cedar € Colville, WA 99114
(509)684-1550 € tom@november.org
http://www.november.org € http://www.journeyforjustice.org
"It's not a war on drugs; it's a war on people!"