Seattle Conference on Drug War Exit Strategies Gets Down
to Nuts and Bolts
Last Friday, on the second and final day of the "Exit
Strategy for the War on Drugs: Towards a New Legal Framework"
conference organized by the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project,
dozens of drug reform leaders, academic specialists, and activists
engaged in a rather unusual exercise. Led by Vancouver Coastal
Health Authority addiction services clinical supervisor Mark
Haden, who has been pondering such issues in the context of Vancouver's
living experiment with cutting-edge drug policy reform, the group
confronted a series of dozens of questions about how two drugs
-- marijuana and methamphetamine -- should be regulated in a
post-prohibition era.
Should marijuana be sold over the counter? Should meth? Should
there be restrictions on the hours of sale? Should the sales
outlets be licensed? Should they be run by the state? Should
there be limits on the quantities that can be purchased? Should
medical approval be required? Should marijuana smokers be licensed?
Meth users? Should information on health risks of the drug be
posted at the site? Should there be restrictions on packaging
of the drug?
And on and on. The group voted on each question with a show
of hands, with Haden tallying the vote and assigning number values
from one to five to signal the degree of agreement with the question.
While Haden did not reveal the results of his informal survey,
it was not the results as much as the exercise itself that was
remarkable. On the second day of this groundbreaking get-together,
participants had finally moved beyond the recitation of the familiar
litany of drug war failures and harms and were beginning to confront
the intricacies of what comes after prohibition.
And for a bunch of people presumably on the same side of the
issue, the exercise showed a remarkable divergence of opinion
about just how a post-prohibition regulatory model might work,
with clear libertarian free market and public health models emerging.
(One point of rough consensus came over UCLA scholar Mark Kleiman's
pragmatic and provocative proposals for licensing of drug users.
That went over with a fairly resounding thud, as it always seems
to with the drug reform crowd.) It was an exercise designed to
get people to think about regulation, and the fact that consensus
was elusive is less important than the fact that reformers were
finally looking at what comes next.
"We're not here to talk about what's wrong with the war
on drugs," said KCBA Drug Policy Project director Roger
Goodman. "We are talking about where to go from here."
The KCBA Drug Policy Project has some ideas about that. The
group has spent the last few years bringing together the state's
professional organizations behind a proposal -- now manifest
in the form of legislation that will be reintroduced when the
session begins in January -- for the state to examine alternatives
to prohibition. That proposal is supported by a massive KCBA
study, "Effective
Drug Control: Toward a New Legal Framework" (PDF
format) released earlier this year. While aimed at Washington
state, the KCBA model is applicable elsewhere, and with this
conference the organization is making clear its goals extend
far beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Thanks to Efficacy's
Cliff Thornton and Deborah Small of Breaking the Chains, two of the few blackfaces
visible at the conference, the ugly issues of race, class, and
the drug war were not ignored. "I am amazed that for three
generations we have allowed a disparate administration of justice
without an outcry," said Small. "At every single stage
of the system, we have outcomes that favor whites at the expense
of people of color. If we were talking about anything other than
drugs, people would say hold on! By creating a system where anyone
who has the money and the ability to play it out can escape,
we show that we're not fighting a war on drugs, but a war on
poor and vulnerable people."
Such issues are at play within communities of color as well,
Small said. "Most minority communities believe drugs are
bad, and the immorality of drug use is reinforced by the churches.
The notion that people have a right to consume drugs flies in
the face of the communal traditions in communities of color --
we don't believe it's all about you. While you do see a backlash
to over-policing, that doesn't mean the community is eager to
take the leap to no control at all. There is a fear among people
of color that if you had regulated, controlled drug markets,
that would lead to more use."
Class plays a key role, too, Small argued, even with the black
community. "The use of drugs is associated with the lower
classes," she said. "If you can pretend it's mainly
those people in the projects, you can ignore the degree to which
it is going on in your own house. It may not be crack or meth;
instead, it's martinis or Paxil. To ignore the class aspect of
the drug war is to ignore reality."
Small wasn't done yet. Drug policy doesn't exist in a social
and political vacuum, she argued, and for would-be drug reformers
to ignore the context is a grave error. "There is a strong
sense that the regulation of alcohol and tobacco haven't worked
because we live in a capitalist society where the bottom line
is the bottom line," she pointed out. "If we don't
have an approach that considers these economic issues, if we
are not going to address the fact that the drug war has really
hurt our communities, we are going nowhere. It really troubles
me to think we are engaged in this policy debate without attaching
it to the broader political, economic, and social problems we
have to address in this country. Are the people in this room
the ones who should be here? And who else should be here?"
Small challenged her mainly white, mainly middle-class peers.
Efficacy's Thornton spoke of the need for "reparations"
for communities of color devastated by the drug war. "We
have got to acknowledge and repair the damage done," he
said. Not only has drug prohibition wreaked havoc with minority
communities, Thornton added, but regulation threatens to remove
one of the few income-generating activities available in the
nation's de-industrialized, low-opportunity inner cities. If
we fail acknowledge and address that fact, he said, social injustice
will only be perpetuated.
But "reparations" may not be the best word. "When
people hear that, they automatically think we just want money,"
Small said. "But what we are really talking about is restorative
justice, fixing the havoc we have wreaked on these communities."
A crucial obstacle to ending drug prohibition is the opposition
of the law enforcement establishment, and the conference confronted
the problem of police and prosecutors head on. "How do you
shift the mindset of police officers?" asked Seattle Police
Sgt. Robert Benson. "They're generally a pretty conservative
lot, and they are going to have to shift their thinking 180 degrees
from seeing drug users as criminals to seeing them as victims.
A more appealing way of reaching out to police may be to talk
about the fiscal benefits of shifting the war on drugs into a
treatment model."
"You can't just talk about recreational drug use,"
said King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg. "We are focused
on heroin and cocaine and meth, and we believe these drugs create
victims among their users and a lot of trauma in the communities
where they live. We believe treatment works," Satterberg
said, as he explained how Washington has moved from imprisonment
to the drug court model and on to more recent sentencing reforms.
There is a role for law enforcement, he maintained. "We
can try to use the criminal justice system as an effective intervention
point," he said.
Drug law reform will require that law enforcement get on board
at some point, and former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper made
a hometown appearance. "Many police agencies have developed
their own addiction to the revenue stream from asset forfeiture,"
he told a Thursday news conference. "I went to federal drug
conferences a decade ago, and we were told out front that the
topic of ending prohibition would not be broached. Period. That
mentality still exists today. It is utterly un-American and undemocratic,
but it characterizes the federal government's response to growing
concerns that the war on drugs just doesn't work. It doesn't,
and we need more law enforcement executives to be honest about
that."
Stamper is working on precisely that through his association
with Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition, the rapidly growing group of police
officers and prosecutors who have broken ranks with the drug
war. But in a sign of how tight the public police drug war consensus
remains, LEAP is almost entirely retired police officers. There
is much work to be done on that front, Stamper conceded.
By the time the conference came to an end Friday afternoon,
it was clear that no consensus for a single post-prohibition
reform model had been reached. Free marketers faced off against
public health proponents and the medical model. And perhaps for
a topic as all-encompassing as US drug policy, that is to be
expected. But it was also clear that the American drug reform
movement -- along with its allies in Europe and Canada -- has
reached a consensus that the work of delineating the myriad failures
of drug prohibition has been done. While the failures of prohibition
will still have to reiterated repeatedly, it is now time to move
forward and begin to end the drug war.
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