Why Can’t We Have a Rational Drug Policy?

There was tremendous hope that when President Obama asked former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to head up drug policy that this would herald a new and rational direction in national drug policy. Sadly, it appears nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather than Kerlikowske informing policy it appears policy is corrupting him.

I once would have said I had great respect for the man but that is hard to say after reading this:

"As President Obama himself has said, “Never has it been more important to have a national drug control strategy guided by sound principles of public safety and public health.” We cannot continue to pursue the same old strategy."

and expect better results. The Obama Administration’s strategy is unique because it takes advantage of what we now know about how to more effectively prevent drug use, provide addiction treatment, and enforce the law against illegal drugs.

The strategy itself is a document released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The quote above is from page five.

Sadly it appears that almost nothing of what Kerlikowske is claiming is true. Yes, they are trying to use more treatment than in the past but as a plan of action their strategies for doing this are empyt and meaningless. It is tragic that the status quo of keeping street drugs illegal persists in the absence of any rational justification for the policy. For details visit the web site of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

Treating drug users as criminals only perpetuates cycles of crime and violence. We know this, Obama knows this, but he will not support any effort to use real science to guide policy. The science tells us that prohibition is just about the worst idea, unless one’s goal is to keep huge numbers of people locked up. This, I assume, is the real goal. The government uses drug policy as a way of covering the fact that it has no coherent economic policy and so cannot deal with unemployment. Instead of providing jobs and meaningful opportunities to all the Obama adminsitration prefers to keep locking them up – at truly horrific rates.

This leaves untouch three additionally important reasons why the President’s policy is really just an abuse of the citizenry. The first is the medical benefits of cannibis. These are not studied because actual science would contradict government policy so the government keeps marijuana out of medical research. This is not just irrational but down right cruel. It is difficult to think of the Obama administration, indeed the whole of the Democratic Party, as nothing more than a theater production that tries to leave people with a good feeling. It is just theater, with no substance, no thought, no significant improvement in policy from the past.

Second, the environmental benefits of switching from petroleum to hemp based plastics would transform our world. Hemp is food, fuel, building material, paper, medicine and plastics – all from one plant, one illegal plant. The reasons, of course, that this plant are illegal are economic not moral. The plant was outlawed when it became a threat to new products being developed by big corporations. They have tried to convince people there is a moral arugment to be made for this policy with lie after lie, but in truth it is only rational if one’s goal is making rich people richer.

Third, the economic benefits to a change in policy are huge. If we just treated marijuana like alcohol many social problems would dramatically decrease and many different levels of government would benefit from this huge addition to the tax base.

Why can’t we have a rational drug policy? Because such a policy would threaten certain people’s profits and the government works for them and not us. I, of course, am running to represent people instead of corporations and would introduce legislation to immediately legalize all forms of hemp and decriminalize other drugs so as to rely on treatment exclusively.

It is not complicated, there are just too many greedy jerks and their toadies in the way of sound policy.

Richard Curtis, PhD

Drug War. Michelle Alexander on Bill Moyers Journal

Last week was the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

To mark the anniversary Bill Moyers  sat down with Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander "to discuss how far we've really come as a country, how poor and working class Americans have been falling behind and what America must do to fulfill Dr. King's vision."

Alexander, a legal scholar and civil rights advocate, is the author The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Here is some of what she had to say:

Just a couple decades after the collapse of the old Jim Crow system, a new system of racial control emerged in the United States. Today, people of color are targeted by law enforcement for relatively minor, nonviolent, often drug-related offenses. The types of crimes that occur all the time on college campuses, where drug use is open and notorious. That occur in middle class suburban communities without much notice, right?

Targeted, often at very young ages, for these relatively minor offenses. Arrested, branded felons, and then ushered into a parallel social universe, in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in many of the ways in which African Americans were discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

Alexander is coming to Seattle. She will talk about her book be at William Gates Hall at the University of Washington Law School April 13th and at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center the following evening.

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The so-called War on Drugs is a waste of resources and a lost opportunity for tax revenue. History clearly teaches us that prohibition leads to increases in violent crime not decreases in drug abuse.
The so-called War on Drugs is a cheap excuse to lock people up rather than provide meaningful opportunities. Dr. Curtis supports decriminalizing possession of small quantities of almost all drugs and full legalization of marijuana (along with taxation of it to fund health and education programs).

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Review of New Jim Crow at Real Chance
Interview with Michelle Goodman at Democracy Now!