AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS

Lawmakers, CEOs, Police Chiefs, Academics And Artists Talk About One Of The
Most Controversial Issues Of Our Time

RICHARD BRANSON - CHAIRMAN, THE VIRGIN GROUP

As far as marijuana is concerned, it's ridiculous that people are given
criminal records and have their lives ruined for something that's less
dangerous than a cigarette. I definitely support marijuana legalization,
but also decriminalization for all drugs if it helps to combat the problem.
If taking heroin is an illness, then people need to be given help.

In Liverpool, we have a place where addicts can go to get clean needles for
free. They can go there every night, and they know that they can be helped
off drugs. Because of this, the prevalence of HIV among drug addicts in
Liverpool is low. In Edinburgh, where they don't have this program, the
amount of addicts with HIV is much higher.

I used to go to Boy George's home to try and persuade him to get help with
his addiction. Two of his friends had already died from drugs. He went to
Necker Island to get away from the press and try to get off drugs, but some
newspaper called the police and said he should be arrested. So the police
arrested him at the point that he was almost clean. They arrested him, and
he got back on drugs. The experience made me think that it's not a police
matter but a matter of someone who has a problem and needs to get help.

BOB BARR - U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, GEORGIA (REPUBLICAN)

We finally have, after eight years, an administration that intends to give
high priority to the war against mind-altering drugs. Time's a-wasting; I'd
like to see some action.

Clinton was AWOL. President Reagan got it right - both he and first lady
Nancy Reagan consistently and repeatedly talked publicly about the war
against mind-altering drugs, the damage done to our young people,
particularly, and the need for society to fight. And it had an impact,
making it much easier for law enforcement to operate, because the citizenry
was supporting them.

The most disturbing trend I see is the notion that marijuana is a medicine.
The drug legalizers, I give them credit - they've been very effective in
shifting the focus from drug legalization to medical use of marijuana,
which makes it seem very benign. Once they get people to start accepting
the notion that marijuana is a positive medicine to help people, that makes
it very easy to go to the next drug. It's the most serious policy problem
we have out there.

There's a fundamental question: What do we stand for in a society -
accountability and rationality and responsibility? Or are we going to
become a society that has to be propped up by mind-altering drugs in order
to do the things that we want to do as a society?

PAUL WELLSTONE - U.S. SENATOR, MINNESOTA (DEMOCRAT)

The first time I went to Colombia, they wanted to show me their aerial
spraying operation [to eradicate coca and poppy crops]. And they sprayed
me, after claiming it was so accurate. Sprayed me good, in fact. So I'm the
only person in the U.S. Senate with the authority to speak on that subject.

The leftist revolutionaries aren't Robin Hoods. But the paramilitaries
really trouble me. They are too often connected to massacres, and the
military is very closely connected to them.

I don't think Plan Colombia [the $1.3 billion U.S. anti-drug aid package]
will work because we're not insisting that Colombia's government live up to
human-rights conditions. Second, when we spray the coca, we don't provide
economic assistance. Third, there is evidence of nausea, skin rashes and
other medical problems associated with the spraying. And the fourth reason
is, our head is stuck in the sand when it comes to the demand side. I had
an amendment on the Plan Colombia bill that would have taken $100 million
and put it into drug treatment, and it failed.

WILLIAM E. KIRWAN - PRESIDENT, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

The Drug War shows no signs of becoming a deterrent for drug abuse in the
U.S. Education is our best hope: Quality educational opportunities for
youth in the inner city, where drug abuse is especially high, can provide
direction for lives that too often have none. More generally, systematic,
persistent and extensive education about the perils of drug use given to
all young people in the schools - starting in preschool and continuing
through to our colleges and universities - is the best hope for meaningful
deterrence. I have seen both alcohol and drugs destroy the lives of friends
and family members. In every case, the abuse began in a social context
where the eventual addicts thought they were in complete control of their
recreational use of drugs or alcohol. In these personal examples, I've been
struck by the fact that the signs of addiction were evident in their
behavior before the addiction occurred. The university has many programs
that try to educate our students about substance abuse, starting with an
orientation for new students and their parents. It's a powerful
introduction, which is followed by education programs in different settings
throughout the year.

JOHN GILMORE - COMPUTER ENTREPRENEUR AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER FOUNDATION

I support the legalization of marijuana. I believe, like Governor Gary
Johnson [R-N.M.], that you and I can disagree about whether marijuana is
useful, but that's not a reason to lock others up.

We need to stop conflating use with abuse, the choice to use the drug with
addiction. The idea that people who use recreational drugs need treatment
is false. I've known hundreds of people over the years who've used
recreational drugs - teachers, parents, scientists - and who function
normally. They're not rolling around on the ground tearing up the yard, yet
if they're caught, they'll be kicked out of their jobs and their lives will
be ruined. That's a crime. I've contributed money to drug education and
research. There's been a lot of misinformation about Ecstasy and club
drugs. I've given a significant amount of money to DanceSafe [a club-drug
information network]. The largest danger is from adulterated substances,
not pure drugs. In a legal market, you'd be able to buy MDMA and know it's
pure. DanceSafe checks for adulterants. The only way for adults or teens to
make responsible choices is to understand the drugs' long-term effects and
addictive qualities, and then make an educated choice.

As an entrepreneur, I'm more tolerant of risk than the average person. I
try things people haven't done before and see if they work, things that
require a leap of faith. People listening to thirty-five years of anti-drug
propaganda aren't willing to take a leap of faith that people they know
have been taking drugs, and most of them are doing OK. It's not the end of
the world if someone smokes a joint.

JERRY A. OLIVER - CHIEF OF POLICE, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

I am not a legalizer. But if you're going to hit the duck, you have to move
your gun. This idea that we're going to arrest our way out of the problem
isn't going to happen. Even though the politics of the past two decades has
been to get tougher and tougher on drug users and drug dealers, the problem
has gotten worse.

We have an industrial-strength appetite for drugs in this country -
illegal, legal or alcohol. And we have to deal with that. We can't keep
drugs out of maximum-security prisons; how are we going to keep them out of
the country?

In most of the communities where the sales are made, there isn't enough
money to support drug hot spots. The only reason they exist there is young
African-American males in particular are willing to put their lives on the
line to make that drug transaction, and usually there's a white person
coming from the suburbs with the dollar contributing to that trade. Our
police nets are able to pull out more African-Americans because they're the
easiest ones to catch. Then we play it as if African-Americans are more
prone to use drugs and be involved in drug activity. But, really, they're
just the ones in the middle. The ones running the big drug operations, and
most of the ones buying the drugs to use, are white. But we catch the ones
in the middle - the ones selling on the street - because they're easier to
catch.

Most homicides are drug- or alcohol-related; most rapes, robberies, child
abuse, are generated by some sort of drug nexus. If the drug issue were
addressed in a different kind of way, police would be free to do more
quality-of-life enforcement. I think we're on the edge of a lot of Fourth
Amendment problems. I'm a police officer, so I argue, "Let's use all the
tools available to us and get right up against the line on searches and
seizures," because of the pressure of cleaning up those hot spots. A lot of
people don't care about the Fourth Amendment. And that concerns me,
especially as a black man. It doesn't take a law scholar to go back and
look at all the major cases that have come to the Supreme Court - Miranda,
Gideon v. Wainwright, Escobedo - all cases that have come about because of
police taking advantage of minority people. I want to make sure that
policing is professional and people's rights are protected. When we snoop
and sneak to nab somebody, it takes away from the luster of the
profession's integrity. The pressure to produce gets us into a lot of
trouble. That's at the bottom of the racial-profiling issue. I really
believe, as an African-American police chief, that we need to not go
overboard with violating any rights we have as citizens.

BILL O'REILLY - ANCHOR, FOX'S THE O'REILLY FACTOR

Five years ago, I got a midcareer master's degree at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard. I did one of my theses on coerced drug rehab. In
Alabama, they have coerced drug rehab, which means if you're arrested, you
get tested - they take hair from your head - and if you're positive, the
case goes to the judge, and if you're not violent, you go to drug
treatment. If it coincides with a guilty plea, you go to a drug-rehab
prison. It's not like the old federal hospital at Lexington, Kentucky; it's
tougher. You have to do a certain amount of rehab, and you have to do
life-skills training.

The difference between this and the drug-court model is that in Alabama
you're held accountable for your performance, and in drug courts you're
not. In Alabama, if you have to come back, it's more punitive. Alabama has
been doing this for eight or ten years, but has only ramped up in the past
five. And the recidivism rate in Alabama is much lower than in other states
because they keep addicts on a very short leash.

If you want to solve the drug problem, you cut the demand by taking addicts
off the street and putting them in therapeutic centers. It's involuntary -
coerced. There would be due process, of course; addicts would have to be
convicted of a crime. You offer them: "Plea-bargain down and go to a
therapeutic center." If you cut the demand, the price will drop. Four to
six million hard-core drug addicts are a resource that can't be replaced by
drug dealers.

I've suggested this idea many times. President Bush asked me to send him my
thesis, which I did. The federal government could wipe the drug problem out
totally.

WOODY HARRELSON - ACTOR

People do drugs to deal with their pain. So you take a person who is in
pain, take away their drug and throw them into prison? I don't consider
that a very compassionate way to deal with someone who has some kind of
issue. But, also, it's hypocritical. It's odd to me; this so-called Drug
War is really what I would call a war against noncorporate drugs. I'm not
saying that pot cannot be a problem and that it's totally innocuous,
because it's a medicine that you can abuse or not abuse. But they basically
take away a drug that is at least more natural in dealing with pain, and
they say it's OK to use these drugs that are the most addictive and really
hard to kick, like pharmaceuticals.

I can remember my mom telling me, "Now, son, if you ever smoke marijuana,
I'll be so disappointed," you know, and she's sitting there with her first
morning coffee and a cigarette, which are two of the most potent drugs I've
ever run into. Incidentally, if you want to make a whole room full of drug
addicts violent, cut off the coffee at Starbucks.

TOMMY LEE - MUSICIAN

God, I've seen it all. I've overdosed and woke up surrounded by guys in
white suits going, "Hey, dude, you're lucky to be alive." It was heroin. My
buddy was the professional heroin user - I would just fuck with it here and
there - he was like, "I'll hook you up," and then all of a sudden, I'm in
the hospital. That shit's like the best high that there is out there, and
that's why it's so scary. But I've had friends who are completely in its
grasp and can't get out. Heroin's a dangerous one, kids. The guy who sent
me to the hospital, about a year after that, he was driving around all
fucked up in a convertible Cadillac, and he drove right underneath a
semitrailer and got killed. It was early in the morning, he was going over
to a buddy of mine's house to score some more dope, and blam! I guess he
didn't see the truck coming or nodded out and went right underneath it - no
one really knows, but he died.

PETER SINGER - PHILOSOPHER AND PROFESSOR OF BIOETHICS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

There are simple things we could do that many other countries are doing. In
Australia, where I come from, they've implemented a program that provides
safe injecting rooms for heroin addicts so they're under supervision in
case anything happens. I also support needle exchanges. People can't seem
to face the truth: "Just say no" doesn't work. We should rethink strategies
like decriminalization and drug legalization. We need to think about how we
can minimize the harm drugs cause and not automatically assume that law
enforcement will do that. Legalization may be the way to go, or
decriminalization for the possession of a small amount. If we take the
drugs out of the hands of the illegal market by letting people grow three
or five marijuana plants and not make the possession of small quantities a
criminal offense, perhaps the market will drop.

SCPTT TUROW - NOVELIST

I came on the job [of assistant U.S. attorney] as a child of the Sixties in
1978, and my colleagues viewed drug prosecution with a jaundiced eye. So it
was an eye-opener for me to find that drug dealers were genuinely
unappetizing. They weren't the nice guy down the hall from whom I scored
dope in college. It is a vicious, murky, unlettered world.

My experience as a defense lawyer in narcotics was in night drug court five
years or so ago. And I dealt with an enlightened prosecutor who was a
breath of fresh air. He said to me, "Most of the people who are here are
here because they're poor." He was a hard-nosed career prosecutor, yet he
certainly understood the difference between low-level offenders and major
drug lords. But I've certainly found that rare.

Clinton took a relentless position on drugs. He stifled a lot of criticism
in the liberal community. Once he took office, there were viewpoints that
weren't allowed to be heard. I have the misfortune of having actually been
informed about this by people in the Justice Department. According to the
people I was in touch with, the upper precincts of the Justice Department
regarded [criticism of the Drug War] as absolutely politically taboo.

I'm the parent of three adolescents. And everybody draws the line when it
comes to their children. That's the problem with decriminalization or
legalization: Nobody's going to propose that it be OK to sell drugs to
minors. Where there's a market, there will be entrepreneurs, and
legalization wouldn't put all drug dealers out of business, because they'd
still be selling to people younger than twenty-one. So all high school and
college campuses would still be places where illegal drug money is made.
And somebody selling cocaine to a sixteen-year-old is going to get in
trouble - and should.

TPBOAS WOLFF - WRITER

People like getting high, and always have. They've always found ways to get
high. There's that constant in human nature. As part of religious ritual,
people have found ways to alter their sense of the world from the usual
into something else. What's happening now is the absence of ritual that
used to surround the process of leaving the everyday. Instead, we punish.
Cultures have found ways of creating that moment that is not only
respectable but even sacred. But it has passed beyond what is natural to us
into something else, and that's because of what is offered out there in
contrast to the drug. The obvious thing is to look at schools with
bathrooms overflowing, not enough textbooks, ceiling tiles falling. When
children are treated like garbage, that's the idea they have of themselves.
And the desire to escape that kind of life becomes desperate. You look at
kids in the suburbs, who are equally prone to drugs - they're not subjected
to the material deprivation, but they do suffer a cultural deprivation.
They're not offered much of a place in life except on a conveyor belt.

I have two boys in college - twenty and twenty-two - and an eleven-year-old
daughter. Neither boy got in trouble with drugs. Both became extremely
interested in music when they were young, and it took up a lot of the slack
in their lives that might have made them available to the kinds of
influences that can lead to drugs. One kid is in the jazz program at NYU.
My other boy was courted by the conservatory at Oberlin for the flute.

I teach at Stanford, and I've been beside myself trying to figure out how
to present to my kids - both my own and those in the classroom - a vision
of life that's different from what society presents them, which is going to
leave them screaming, "This isn't enough!" The media are also at fault -
not just for the drugs but for the sense of life they convey. The answer is
not to make children feel like they're being corralled into a kind of
stockyard. You can't offer young people such limited options and then
punish them for trying to break out of that very constricting mind-set.

JONATHAN P. CAULKINS - DRUG-POLICY ANALYST, RAND AND CARNEGI MELLON
UNIVERSITY'S HEINZ SCHOOL

I started working on drug policy in 1988, at Rand and at Carnegie Mellon. A
lot has changed about the drug problem, and not much has changed about the
policy. The language is often of epidemics. For many different drugs they
exist at a low level of use, then explode. Then use plateaus, and usually
tapers off. Sometimes it is a sharp drop-off, sometimes it settles only
slightly. My basic question is: How should drug-control policies change
over the course of an epidemic?

There is discrimination in criminal justice just as there is in hiring at
grocery stores and in media reporting. The racism in our policy manifests
in the absence of action, not in the action, necessarily. For example, we
passed a set of laws against crack, not because crack is associated with
blacks but because crack was spreading like crazy. We were in the explosion
phase of the epidemic. Now, fifteen years later, we tolerate those laws
even while they fall so heavily on minorities. We failed to repeal those
laws when the explosion phase passed and the plateau and decline phases
began. I don't condemn the people who went so overboard in 1986.

There was a true emergency then. What I criticize us for is not having gone
back and changed things now that we're in the plateau stage.

I think it's wrong to even use the term "War on Drugs." It's a term that
people who want to critique the drug policy use. It isn't a term the people
making the policy use. However, it provides a handy way for critics to make
the policymakers look like fools. Drug policy is made in a diffuse way, in
many agencies. And the vast majority of people working on it really do care
about reducing harm and about justice.

There may well be too many nonviolent offenders in prison, but the way the
data are presented is grossly distorted. If you want to make it sound like
there are a lot of nonviolent drug offenders in prison, you ask, "How many
people are in prison because they were convicted of drug possession?" But
you get a much smaller number if you ask, "How many people are in prison
because they were arrested for drug possession but nothing else?" Many
people are dealers, sometimes very violent ones, but who pleaded down to
possession. There's also a big difference between prison and jail, so if
you want to inflate the figures, you say "incarcerate." It's hard to get
into prison as a person who uses only marijuana and has no other criminal
behavior.

NELLY - MUSICIAN

I done seen cocaine or heroin straight bring people's lives down to a halt.
I done seen people get murdered over it, to a point where, yeah, I think
they should be illegal. And I think the law should be fair. I think if
there's gonna be a cocaine law, there's gonna be a cocaine law. It
shouldn't be a cocaine law and a crack law, 'cause crack is cocaine. Make
it one law for everybody. Not for one substance 'cause it's powder. That's
shitty. If you gonna make it illegal, make it illegal. That's when it gets
segregated.

"Just say no" - I'm with that. We joked about it as kids, but we knew it,
you know? Drugs in a lot of urban communities is deeper. It's in the
household; it's in the surroundings. Your parents straight ought to let you
know that drugs ain't it. My daddy would have beat my ass if it was like
that. Flat-out. If you gotta beat a little ass, beat a little ass. Get that
point across. Rather beat your ass now than go to your funeral later.

BOB WEIR - MUSICIAN

The band I'm playing with right now, every now and again we'll take
mushrooms. The idea is pretty much on a musical level - to see if we can't
kind of blast our way out of the old habits we've fallen into.

I've lost so many friends to heroin and cocaine, I can't really very freely
sing the praises of those drugs. But, on the other hand, you have to
recognize that they're there and they're going to be there, and that a
certain kind of person's going to find their way into that trap. Whether it
be for social reasons or personal psychological reasons, people will find a
way into that trap. Society should have compassion to begin with and try to
reclaim these lives, as I say. It's self-serving - it would be enlightened
self-service for society to do this; it would make these people productive
again. I think these drugs should be legal and regulated. There's too much
money to be made if they're illegal. I think the only way to trump the
cartels is to legalize the drugs, and the cartels will disappear overnight.
The crux of the effort to stop drug abuse shouldn't be in the punishment,
because that patently doesn't work. The best plan is to make them available
to people who would otherwise be robbing, stealing and killing to get the
drugs; just make it available to them, and see if you can't reel them back.
Make treatment available, and do research. The government could easily be
funding research that could find chemical or other ways of reclaiming the
lives that are being lost to these drugs.

Violent drug users should be sent to camp and reprogrammed. I don't think
jail's the right place for them. We're talking about reclaiming lives here.
One of the problems we're facing now is that there's a prison system that's
been set up. For instance, in Texas they have private prisons, and they're
trying to do that elsewhere. There's a whole industry now that's dependent
on these drug laws to fill their stables full of slaves, basically.

KAY REDFIELD - JAMISON PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

There's a big group of people who use drugs and alcohol and have major
psychiatric illnesses. Patients are often self-medicating or prolonging a
mania by getting higher or blotting out the pain they feel. It makes the
illness worse and increases the risk of suicide. Kids don't know about
depression but have access to drugs. One problem is that by the time we get
around to treating the mood disorder, we're also dealing with a
substance-abuse problem.

No matter how many times people say addiction is a disease, I don't know
how effective it is. People need to understand that addiction is located in
the brain - it's biological.

A long time ago, I had a patient who had a severe problem with marijuana
and alcohol and was also bipolar. The clinical lore at that time was: Treat
the mood problem and the substance abuse will go away on its own. That was
a given fifteen years ago, but it's totally untrue.

I feel very strongly that legalization of all kinds of drugs should be
publicly debated. Politicians are condemned for even discussing it. I can't
believe that on an issue as important as this, we're not talking about all
the options. Needle exchange is a perfect example. Not providing needles is
exceedingly punitive. Right now, we're sending some of these people to
their deaths.

JOE ARPAIO - SHERIFF, MARICOPA COUNTY, ARIZONA

I'm supposed to be the toughest sheriff in the universe. I spent thirty
years with the DEA. I'm also president of the International Narcotics
Enforcement Officers Association. I'm going into my third term here as
sheriff. I'm the guy who puts people in pink underwear and stripes, and
runs chain gangs. Sixty to seventy percent of my 7,500 jail inmates are in
there for drugs or drug-related crime. I have a great drug-prevention
program in jail. Only eight percent come back, and, usually, recidivism is
sixty or seventy percent. I'm the guy who gives them green bologna, and I
went from giving them three meals to two a day last month. I'm going to
have a reunion of all those who I had in my jail and who never came back.
We have 500 already signed up.

I was a young federal narcotics officer in Chicago for forty years. The
three ways to fight drugs then were enforcement, education and treatment.
Today it's the same thing: enforcement, education and treatment. Nothing's
changed.

We seized 300 meth labs last year. We should stop complaining and blaming
foreign countries. We ought to look at our hometowns. These labs are made
right here in the United States. What changed my attitude since I became
sheriff is I now run jails instead of just putting people in jail. I've
changed more toward prevention and treatment. We need to do more to get
people off drugs while we have them locked up.

When I was an agent, there was a six-month federal hospital in Lexington,
Kentucky, where they sent addicts. Maybe we ought to be putting those
nonviolent druggies in jail, but instead of going to the regular jail,
you're going to a jail that's like a hospital-type thing. I now have 2,000
in my tents. Maybe we ought to do something like that. A jail just for drug users. Send them there and give them a large dose of drug-prevention education and still be eating that green bologna that I feed them.

When I was starting out, we used to say we caught ten percent of the drugs at the border. I'll bet it's still ten percent that we catch at the border. When I was an agent, if you made a two-kilo heroin case it was a headline. Now it has to be tons. I never thought we'd see tons of cocaine.

Our biggest mistake was that we gave up the streets of America to the drug traffickers. Everybody in law enforcement now is going for the biggest case they can find. Everybody wants to make the big conspiracy case, which takes years. We should be out on the streets more, undercover, gathering intelligence. Not busting people for joints but catching the middlemen.

I'm strictly opposed to the military being involved in law enforcement. I've worked in too many countries where the military does law enforcement. I worked with [Nicaraguan Gen. Manuel] Noriega. If you're going to build up an apparatus, build it up with legitimate federal agents. And the FBI should go away. Two agencies shouldn't do the same thing. Drugs should be left to the DEA.

PETER JENNINGS - ANCHOR AND SENIOR EDITOR, ABC'S WORLD NEWS TONIGHT

I was in Mexico a few weeks ago talking to [President Vicente] Fox, and I asked him if he didn't think it was hypocritical to place the burden on Mexico and not pay more attention to demand. He exploded. He acknowledges that what's already happened in Mexico is the corruption of the Mexican government and military, but he said that almost every political leader in Mexico has always seen the war as a U.S. consumption issue rather than a Latin American production issue. I did an hour in Bolivia back in the mid-1980s. I said, "We're going to show you why the Drug War has failed." It had to do with the Bolivian military operation, and here we are doing the same thing now in Colombia fifteen years later. There's a fairly long-standing notion in the nonminority communities that if those evil Peruvians, Colombians, Mexicans and those dreadful cartels didn't exist, that we'd have less of a dreadful problem in the United States.

The media have been mixed. I, on the air, always make a point of saying "the so-called Drug War." But there's a tendency to accept the line from the drug czar's office on both the nature of the drug problem and the application of resources used to fight it. At the same time, a lot of the critical reporting about the futility of government policy and the seeming reluctance of the political establishment has been done by the establishment press. Ten years ago, the press in some ways believed that if you ran a military campaign, you could really solve the drug problem. We wouldn't have been having this debate ten years ago.

ROBERT A. IGER - PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, THE WALT DISNEY CO.

Drugs aren't as scarce or as taboo as they ought to be. There are those in the media who are more irresponsible than others. ABC and Disney have behaved extremely responsibly, I think. When you run a company that can affect behavior in the extreme, there's a huge responsibility. I think it's fine for movies and television shows to include story lines about drugs and drug use, but they shouldn't be glorified. And drugs shouldn't be used in humor. There's nothing funny about drugs or people on drugs.

Traffic is an unbelievably important and powerful film. I'd encourage kids to see it. It shows drugs at their cruelest. I think the film's message about treating drugs as an illness instead of merely trying to legislate and regulate is pretty legitimate. I've been in debates with parents who think kids shouldn't see it because it's too rough. Having testified about how movies should be marketed to kids, that's one where I think the responsible thing is for kids to see it.