In 1982, a young, tenacious senator from Delaware, Joseph Biden, was frustrated with the country's scattered efforts to stop drug addiction and violent drug trafficking. Drugs, particularly new and cheap ones like crack cocaine, were destroying the most vulnerable among us -- the poor, disadvantaged and forgotten -- and were a major driver of health care costs, homelessness, neighborhood neglect, mental illness and child abuse.
So, like a good moderate, he came up with a practical idea to alleviate what he saw as needless suffering. Rather than leaving policy uncoordinated and subject to the whims of more than a dozen different Cabinet Heads with competing interests, he thought there should be one coordinating agency on drug policy, aptly named the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).
Both United Press International, reporting on a vote that created the office's director, and Senator Biden, called its head the drug czar. Soon enough, President Reagan rallied around the idea, too, in a show of bipartisan support rarely seen today.
To historians of drug policy, Biden's action was simply one of many from a great bipartisan tradition. After all, it was the great Progressive Democrat, Francis Harrison, who worked with Republicans to pass the first major piece of federal anti-drug legislation. Subsequent leaders from both parties, from Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft to Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, championed drug policy as an important part of their policy agenda. President Clinton worked very closely with Majority Leader Bob Dole to pass several policies focused on sensible measures like drug courts and community policing.
Unfortunately, today's discussions about drug policy are dominated by the ever-popular but banal discussion about "legalization" and a "failed war on drugs" -- even though the former is unsupported by science and the latter is a term abandoned by drug czars past and present (and Joe Biden). Legalization is something most politicians aren't interested in, and for good reason: We know that legalizing drugs would increase their consumption, could spark a new, commercial industry that targets kids (a la Joe Camel), and would do little to make a dent in today's transnational criminal organizations that make much of their money from human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion and piracy (on top of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana).
Those of us who have studied and practiced the issue know it is time we start speaking and acting intelligently about drugs. Implementing good drug policy takes hard work, and there are no silver bullets.
But there is some good news.
Indeed, we know a lot more about drug addiction now than we could have dreamed about twenty years ago. Advances in treatment -- both medications and behavioral therapies -- have improved the lives of millions, and should continue to be relentlessly pursued, we can all agree. Getting people to go to treatment in the first place should become an obsession for anyone who cares about the public health and safety costs of drug abuse on society today -- which hovers around $200 billion every year. We should be moving more quickly to implement the last great bipartisan effort on the drug issue -- the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008, which ensures that insurance companies provide health coverage for addiction and mental illness.
Innovative and smart law enforcement strategies that employ carrots and sticks -- treatment and drug testing complete with swift but modest consequences for continued drug use and incentives for abstinence -- have produced miraculous results, whether through drug courts or HOPE-probation programs. And drug prevention has moved on from slogans and class workbooks to a science of teaching resistance skills and changing local policies based on data and community capacity (think liquor store zoning laws or community activism against open air drug markets).
We also know now that recovery from addiction is possible, especially when public policies that give former addicts a second chance and opportunities are in place.
Finally, we know that our drug problem is not intractable. Drug use is in fact lower than it was 30 years ago, and the innovative tools discussed above are both cost-effective and scalable. We still have work to do, however, to reduce the consequences of addiction -- overdose (especially from prescription drugs, today's fastest growing drug problem and leading cause of accidental death in this country), HIV/AIDS, drug crime, etc. -- but that is a problem of will, not of want for effective strategies.
This year, exactly three decades after both Democrats and Republicans first focused on creating the office that today leads drug policy efforts, both parties should not only remember their rich history on the drug issue, they should co-lead today's drug challenges based on what we know can work.
This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.
HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at America's failed war on drugs August 28th and September 4th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.
Follow Kevin A. Sabet, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kevinsabet
Your argument about how legalization will necessarily result in greater drug use because it would lower the market price of drugs is seriously flawed because it ignores how regulation, taxation, and alternative civil statutes that would heavily penalize unregulated distribution of those drugs could provide a better deterrent to dangerous drugs being available to those most vulnerable to the dangers they pose: our nation's children. Because unlike in today's unregulated drig markets, legit vendors of those drugs would not be willing to jeopardize their licenses to sell those drugs by making them easily available to children.
But it WOULD lead to a LOT of folks who currently enjoy healthy careers benefitting from this insane criminal drug law and enforcement regime seeing the market price of their services drop considerably.
TTG
---
Kevin,
Attributing this trend to the enforcement of criminal drug statutes is farcical because of two major factors that determine recreational drug use: age, employer practices.
A) Young people are much more likely to be casual drug users because they tend to have fewer responsibilities and understanding of the detrimental effects of recreational drug use on their productivity. Because the population has aged considerably in the past 30 years, drug use, on average, should be lower. Because the same longterm trend can be seen in violent crimes that are more likely to be committed by young people.
B) Employers 30 years ago didn't employ random drug testing like they do now, which definitely discourages many people from experimenting with those drugs or "reliving" the days of their youth. Heck! I know someone who once gave up eating poppyseed bagels because of fear of testing positive for opiates!
TTG
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It worked with Budweiser, didn't it?: :)
"Prohibition Denied Americans Budweiser for 13 Years"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGgosT-v5sw
Actually you can do the math yourself Kevin. How do we create the MOST avenues for addiction treatment while reducing the number of addicts. It's to bring the use of narcotics into the light as opposed to policy that forces use underground.
It can be argued that addicts suffer mental illness. Current policy suggests to all addicts that addiction is something to be ashamed of. How are these people to get help when they feel undeserving thanks to past and current policy?
Let's talk about stigma associated to addiction...or do we really have to? Making "addiction" a human trait, rather than a despicable attribute of sub-human monsters, is the first step to resolving this issue.
Legalization brings the fearful and mentally ill out of the dark and into the light. An addict being able to joke about their stay in a rehab-clinic with their grand children is preferable to the alternative of a self loathing addict lying in a ditch waiting to die simply because they can't get help.
This is the best compromise and that's the best we can hope for. Present policy doesn't create the avenues for needed identification & treatment. Pushing drug use underground cannot be as effective. Drug courts simply cannot intervene quickly enough. This is common sense.
You know, much of the problem with our current drug policy is that it is based on lies; maybe if you stopped that, things might get better.
Sincerely
Dr.Sabet
I recently watched all of the episodes of the BET's documentary series "American Gangster" and the recurring theme was how ridiculously profitable those gangsters got from their illegal drug businesses. And even if the cops took out particularly powerful local drug dealers, there was always someone else or some other gang with the "brass" to step in meet that market demand.
People like Kevin need to listen to highly knowledge ex drug warriors like Judge Jim Gray and the leaders of LEAP about how ridiculous our criminal drug law regime is.
TTG
I'm sorry, but you and I don't agree. What else can I say. The facts are against you? Or, you see the facts you want to see? Been there, done that! It didn't work. America's ready for change!
As for Joe Biden, he dealt with the "new crack cocaine" menace by helping institute a mandatory minimum sentencing for 5 grams of crack that equaled the sentence for 500 grams of cocaine. The difference between the two drugs is cultural, not molecular. Poor inner city black people do crack, rich suburban white people do cocaine. President Obama has managed to reduce that 100:1 ratio down to 18:1... so our cocaine laws are now less than a fifth as racist as his Vice President created.
As usual, when you read a Kevin Sabet piece, you only need to end by exclaiming, "And that's why we need to throw adults in a cage for smoking a weed!" to clear all the obfuscation. Sabet's bogeyman of "consumption will increase" basically says the government must cage pot smokers or else more people will smoke pot and then... well, I guess bad things happen.
1. "increase their consumption"
-You link to a study about the possible impacts of legalizing marijuana in California. The brief does state that "consumption will increase", but concedes that "it is unclear how much". This paper: http://tinyurl.com/c8rv4qa, explains that Marijuana use (as well as other drug use) declined following Portugal's decriminalization of drugs. I do not have a crystal ball and thus I cannot predict future rates of drug use. I can however state that for the social costs of legalization to outpace the social costs of our current system of incarceration, usage rates would have to increase exponentially. Somehow I doubt their exists a large constituency of would-be heroin addicts waiting for the governments okay to pick up the needle.
2. "could spark a new, commercial industry that targets kids (a la Joe Camel)"
-It is reasonable to assume that if marijuana were legalized the government would impose advertising restrictions similar to those placed on cigarette companies. Surveys consistently report that teens have easier access to marijuana than alcohol. Drug dealers don't check ID's, state regulated marijuana shops would.
3. "would do little to make a dent in today's transnational criminal organizations..."
-It would make a huge dent, illegal drugs sales are the primary source of revenue for countless criminal organizations. Piracy and extortion are terrible, but drug violence is what is killing teenagers where I live.
You are right, we need to discuss drugs intelligently. This was not that.
You CANNOT overdoes on POT.
Unlike booze.
pot prohibition is a crime against humanity pushed by republicans and conservative.
No bipartisanship about it.
Any lip service you hear from the lying GOPT is ....a lie.
Legalize pot,
save millions of live.