The White House's 2010 National Drug Control Strategy, released this morning by President Obama and drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, is both encouraging and discouraging. There's no question that it points in a different direction and embraces specific policy options counter to those of the past thirty years. But it differs little on the fundamental issues of budget and drug policy paradigm, retaining the overwhelming emphasis on law enforcement and supply control strategies that doomed the policies of its predecessors.
First, to give credit where credit is due: The Obama administration has taken important steps to undo some of the damage of past administrations' drug policies. The Justice Department has played an important role in trying to reduce the absurdly harsh, and racially discriminatory, crack/powder mandatory minimum drug laws; Congress is likely to approve a major reform this year. DOJ also changed course on medical marijuana, letting state governments know that federal authorities would defer to their efforts to legally regulate medical marijuana under state law. And they approved the repeal of the ban on federal funding of syringe exchange programs to reduce HIV/AIDS, thereby indicating that science would at last be allowed to trump politics and prejudice even in the domain of drug policy.
The new strategy goes further. It calls for reforming federal policies that prohibit people with criminal convictions and in recovery from accessing housing, employment, student loans and driver's licenses. It also endorses a variety of harm reduction strategies (even as it remains allergic to using the actual language of "harm reduction"), endorsing specific initiatives to reduce fatal overdoses, better integration of drug treatment into ordinary medical care, and alternatives to incarceration for people struggling with addiction. All of this diverges from the drug policies of the Reagan, Clinton and two Bush administrations.
Director Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal last year that he doesn't like to use the term "war on drugs" because "[w]e're not at war with people in this country." Yet 64% of their budget -- virtually the same as under the Bush administration and its predecessors -- focuses on largely futile interdiction efforts as well as arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating extraordinary numbers of people. Only 36% is earmarked for demand reduction -- and even that proportion is inflated because the ONDCP "budget" no longer includes costs such as the $2 billion expended annually to incarcerate people who violate federal drug laws.
There's little doubt that this administration seriously wants to distance itself from the rhetoric of the drug war, but its new plan makes clear that it is still addicted to the reality of the drug war. Still missing is the full throttle commitment to treating drug misuse as a public health issue, and to harm reduction innovations that have proven so successful in Europe and Canada. Still present is the old rhetoric about marijuana's great dangers and the need to keep current prohibitionist polices in place, with no mention of the fact or consequences of arresting roughly 750,000 people each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
I had the pleasure of testifying a few weeks ago before the Congressional subcommittee charged with oversight of the drug czar's office. The subcommittee chair, Dennis Kucinich, broke new ground on Capitol Hill by challenging the drug czar, whose testimony preceded mine, on his continuing commitment to supply control strategies notwithstanding their persistent failure, and on his resistance to embracing the language of harm reduction notwithstanding its growing acceptance by governments elsewhere. In my testimony, I asked the subcommittee to reform the ways that federal drug policy is evaluated by de-emphasizing the past emphasis on reducing drug use per se and focusing instead on reducing the death, disease, crime and suffering associated with both drug misuse and counter-productive drug policies.
So, yes, this administration is headed in a new direction on drug policy -- but too slowly, too timidly, and with little vision of a fundamentally different way of dealing with drugs in the U.S. or global society. The strategy released today offers nothing that will reduce the prohibition-related violence in Mexico, Central America and Colombia, or seriously address the challenges in Afghanistan. It dares not take on the embarrassment of America's record breaking and world leading rate of incarceration, especially of non-violent drug offenders. And it effectively acknowledges that politics will continue to trump science whenever the latter points toward politically controversial solutions.
We still have a long way to go.
Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)
Follow Ethan Nadelmann on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EthanNadelmann
While neither my husband or I had 'criminal convictions nor were in recovery', we were however evicted from our low income housing (2 young children & 2 disabled adults) and later denied access to housing in a different county. Just because my husband had a broken back (in nine places) and used Medical Marijuana for the seizures he now has, as a result of being hit in the back with a baseball bat and thrown off a train bridge. All while protecting dynamite. (story at www.marijuanafactorfiction.org)
We've had several battles at the state and federal level, being denied over and over again. (I call it discrimination, by both the state and federal judges.) We were also denied a jury after requesting one, time and time again.
Now, maybe we will get recompense. Although I highly doubt it.
Actions
A. Encourage States To Adopt Per Se Drug Impairment Laws [ONDCP]
State laws regarding impaired driving are varied, but most State codes do not contain a separate offense
for driving under the influence of drugs (DUID). Therefore, few drivers are identified, prosecuted, or
convicted for DUID. Law enforcement personnel usually cite individuals with the easier to prove driving
while intoxicated (DWI) alcohol charges. Unclear laws provide vague signals both to drivers and to
law enforcement, thereby minimizing the possible preventive benefit of DUID statutes. Fifteen states
have passed laws clarifying that the presence of any illegal drug in a driver’s body is per se evidence of impaired driving. ONDCP will work to expand the use of this standard to other states and explore other ways to increase the enforcement of existing DUID laws.
Alcohol - 79,000 deaths per year
Heroin and Cocaine - 8500 deaths per year
End the bogus drug wars - the Ruling Class is getting very wealthy and our government uses drug wars to justify our military presence somewhere in the world.
Make drugs legal. Treat them as like alcohol under those laws.
Drug prevention is costly and timely. I don't believe it will every be completely stampled out. Not only do we have to worry about illegal and prescription drugs, we also have to be worried about drugs, that are sold legally under assumed names:
http://photoz.hostzi.com/1_21_What-Parents-Should-Know-about-the-latest-Drug-Craze.html
Emphasizing "prevention & treatment" means that instead of arresting drug users and seizing drugs they'll spend the money on initiating drug testing on all of us, at every opportunity for a wide variety of reasons -- and then forcing as many of us as they can into "treatment." They mean it when they say ZERO tolerance -- their goal is prevent all drug use as the sure-fire way to prevent any possibility of personal and societal harms due to drug abuse.
I see precious little that is "encouraging" in either the NDCS or in Ethan's rebuttal. Instead, it looks to me like we've been thrown under the bus to keep the stalemate intact.
I supported President Obama when he ran for office by encouraging people to vote for him and sending small donations. I was happy when he was elected. On this issue he has so disappointed me that I do not see that I can vote for him again.
The heart of the matter is that if someone is so power hungry and has such a lack of integrity that they cannot see and speak up about what is wrong with the War on Drugs they are not fit to be running the country. That applies to all elected officials as well as the Obama administration.
For me, Obama has been a disappointment on many levels. But it is his continued pursuit of a failed drug policy, one that he's on record as pronouncing an "utter failure," that takes the top spot.
Yet Ethan et al. are so enamored by Obama that, one can rightly assume, they seem politically, if not genetically, unable to heap the same scorn on Obama's drug policy as they dumped on Bush's.
In my opinion, humble or not, the glacial pace of drug policy reform is a direct result of employing the incremental approach, exemplified by medical marijuana. But I believe, without reservation, that cannabis has medicinal benefits. But as a political strategy, it has been a failure: just 14 states in 14 years have approved the medicinal cannabis. And many states now contemplating medical marijuana laws look to California not as a template but as a cautionary tale: the nation's most restrictive medical marijuana law is the most recent one, passed in D.C.
Repealing drug prohibition and creating a legal market to control the sale and distribution of drugs, similar to what we now have for alcohol and tobacco, is the only way to end nearly 100 years of this insane and inhumane social experiment. And the sooner those leading drug policy reform understand that simple truth, the better.
We need to be holding Obama's feet to the fire - not bowing down to wash them.
http://www.marijuanalibrary.org/7_presidents.html
and now spending taxpayer money to EXTRADITE persons and imprison them for selling MJ seeds.
Life is too short. I have written letters to my leaders professing that I will not ever obey tyrannical marijuana laws. No threat or act of a bully with a badge will change this fact.
Your rule of law has become a sad joke.
Unless you can square the scheduling of cannabis with the due process clause implied by the 5th amendment, I do not see the constitutionality of the law.
But find out for yourself: http://satanssmoke.us