[BRC-NEWS] The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke

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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818&s=abramsky

The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke

by Sasha Abramsky
August 18, 2003
The Nation
 

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 antidrug
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
antimarijuana 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 undergound 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 twentysomething 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 Espaņola, 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 antidrug 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 antidrug 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."
 
  

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