Global Commission Declares War on Drugs a Failure

By Kellen Russoniello, George Washington Law School student, NORML legal intern

In the first sentence of a new report, current and former world leaders agree that “[t]he global war on drugs has failed.” They then call for drastic reform in both national and global drug policy. As the report recognizes, the current regime is a criminal justice and public health nightmare.

Released on June 2, 2011 by The Global Commission on Drug Policy, the report details the need for a new approach in drug policy. The Commission is comprised of nineteen current and former high-ranking policymakers from around the world, as well as experts in the field. Included in this committee are former presidents of Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Switzerland, the current prime minister of Greece, former UN High Commissioners, and a former US Secretary of State.

The report lays out four core principles that should be the guideposts for developing national and international drug policies: Basing policy on scientific evidence; basing policy on human rights and public health principles; developing and implementing a globally shared drug policy that recognizes diverse political, social, and cultural realities; and pursuing drug policy through comprehensive means including both law enforcement and the citizenry.

Additionally, the Commission outlines eleven recommendations for developing a more rational drug policy. These include removing criminal penalties for drug use and developing effective treatment, prevention, and harm reduction programs.

Especially notable for NORML supporters is the Commission’s call for governments to experiment with the legal regulation of cannabis in order to cut down on violent organized crime and provide safety and security to citizens. The taxation and regulation of illegal drugs “is a policy option that should be explored with the same amount of rigor as any other.” The report also calls for examination of the scheduling system and the placement of cannabis in that system.

The other recommendations are designed to eliminate the dogma of current drug policy and the stigma on current drug users and sellers. Ultimately, the Commission recognizes the following:

[F]or every year we continue with the current approach, billions of dollars are wasted on ineffective programs, millions of citizens are sent to prison unnecessarily, millions more suffer from the drug dependence of loved ones who cannot access health and social care services, and hundreds of thousands of people die from preventable overdoses and diseases contracted through unsafe drug use.

For us, the points made in the report are not news: marijuana policy reformists have been making these arguments for almost three quarters of a century. But it is heartening to hear that such powerful figures in international policy are not only realizing the harm of prohibition, but openly speaking about that harm and calling for alternatives. Additionally, the report is getting massive news coverage. The Drug Policy Alliance reported that over 1,000 news stories about the Commission’s report have been published worldwide.

You can use this report to make a difference. Send a message to your legislators and urge them to read the report. Find your legislator here.
Also, check out Erik Altieri, Communications Coordinator for NORML, discussing the report in an interview with CBS-Pittsburgh.

Associated Press: After 40 Years, $1 Trillion, US Drug War “Has Failed to Meet Any of Its Goals”

Just days after the White House released their inherently flawed 2010 National Drug Control Strategy (Read NORML’s refutation of it on The Huffington Post here and here.), and mere hours after Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske told reporters at the National Press Club, “I have read thoroughly the ballot proposition in California; I think I once got an e-mail that told me I won the Irish sweepstakes and that actually had more truth in it than the ballot proposition,” the Associated Press takes the entire U.S. drug war strategy and rakes it over the coals.

It’s about damn time!

AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals
via FoxNews.com

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

Seriously, if you care at all about drug policy and marijuana law reform, you really must read the entire AP analysis. It’s that good.

In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.

“This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people,” Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: “Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”

His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it’s $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon’s amount even when adjusted for inflation.

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

— $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

— $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

— $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

— $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

— $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — “an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction” — cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.

“Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use,” Miron said, “but it’s costing the public a fortune.”

The so-called ‘war’ on some drugs — which is really a war on consumers of certain temporarily mood-altering substances, mainly marijuana, can not survive if continually faced with this kind of scrutiny. Even the Drug Czar — when faced with the actual evidence and data above — folds his cards immediately, acknowledging that U.S. criminal drug enforcement “has not been successful.” Yet apparently neither he, nor the majority of Congress, the President, the bulk of law enforcement officials, or any of the tens of thousands of bureaucrats in Washington, DC have the stones to stand up and put a stop to it.

And that is — and always has been — the problem.

And so the drums of war beat on, and the casualties mount.

Isn’t it about time that we all said: “Enough is enough?“

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

The only thing more shocking to me than the new Jim Crow of the drug war is how few African-Americans are involved in ending it.

• The board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is composed of 14 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Latina (Full disclosure: this board is my employer)
• Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board as far as I’m aware (MPP does not publish this information on their website, as far as I can tell)
• Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) boasts three African-American men on their board of directors
• Americans for Safe Access (to medical marijuana, or ASA) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board
• Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has one African-American on their board

Medical Marijuana march in Madison, Wisconsin (I know Madison, Seattle, and Albuquerque aren't exactly Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, but there has to be SOME black people there, right?)

This sort of racial homogeneity is also found at the grassroots activist level as well. I coordinate NORML’s 95 active state, local, and college chapters and off the top of my head I can think of only one chapter not run by a white person (Oregon NORML‘s Madeline Martinez, who, coincidentally, is that sole Latina on the National NORML Board).

When I speak at conferences and festivals to crowds ranging from 50 to 50,000, it is always a nearly unbroken sea of white faces looking back at me. When I participate in the marches and protests against the drug war, I rarely see black or Latino people carrying a sign.

My view from the stage before speaking at last year's Seattle Hempfest, the largest marijuana reform rally in the world.

The War on Drugs is primarily a War on Marijuana, which makes up 49.8% of all drug war arrests, 89% of those arrests for simple possession. In New York City, a black man is nine times more likely to be busted for pot than a white man and three times more likely to get a custodial sentence out of that arrest. Yet when we look at the cannabis community, the only place we find many African-American faces is in rap videos extolling the virtues of “the chronic”.

Where is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movement to end the War on Drugs? Why is he or she not responding to the efforts to end the single greatest cause of racial inequality in this nation?

Is he or she dissuaded by the culture of the black church, which demonizes drugs and drug use to the point where those who support sensible drug policies are shamed into silence?

Drug Policy Alliance's Int'l Reform Conference in Albuquerque, 2009

Is he or she turned away by looking at the leadership of drug law reform and seeing no faces like theirs?

Is he or she already feeling like they wear a target for law enforcement on their back already based on skin color and don’t feel like exacerbating that by publicly standing for drug law reform?

Whatever it is, this white man who’s used cannabis for twenty years and never once had an interaction with police is urgently calling out to my black and Latino brothers and sisters to get involved with your own liberation!

Literary Attack on Drug Prohibition, Principals behind HBO’s ‘The Wire’ Advocate Jury Nullification

When trying to make fair assessments and analysis regarding where at any particular place in time the now almost 40-year old public advocacy campaign to repeal cannabis prohibition laws is, while data, scholarly reports and budget priorities are all helpful, so too are tea leaves. Cultural ‘tea leaves’.

When reading the jaw-dropping column in Time this morning, penned by the award-winning team of writers from the provocative—and often spot on—‘The Wire’, broadcast on HBO, I had tears landing in my lap.

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