US JUDGES CALL FOR LEGALISING OF DRUGS

The restricted sale of heroin, cocaine and cannabis 'would break the
vicious cycle of violence' Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles

American judges are growing so uneasy about their country's drugs laws
that they are to go public with their calls for change. The judge who
will publish the names of his concerned colleagues is calling for the
regulated sale of cocaine, heroin and cannabis as the only way to
break the current international cycle of violence and
imprisonment.

The move comes as an advertising campaign is launched advising jurors
to acquit people on drugs possession charges even when they are guilty
and as a citizen's commission publishes a report calling for drugs to
be treated as a medical and social rather than a criminal problem. It
also coincides with this week's report on the enormous disparity
between the numbers of black and white people jailed for drug offences.

James P Gray, a superior court judge in Orange County, California told
the Guardian yesterday that his new book will contain the names of
more than 20 judges who favour a change in the policies, some of whom
support his call for legalisation, and are happy to say so publicly.
He said that three times that number of judges had given him
permission to quote them by name. Many others had told him privately
of their belief that a radical change to the drugs laws was urgently
needed.

Judge Gray, 55, has been on the bench for 16 years and was previously
a prosecuting attorney. His experience on the bench convinced him that
the drugs laws were causing more crime than they were stopping and
that the "war on drugs" had been a failure.

"There is an increasing number of judges who want change," said Judge
Gray, the author of the soon-to-be-published Why our Drugs Laws have
failed and What we can do about it. "The momentum is truly building,
we're making progress and it is no longer a question of if there will
be changes, but when."

Judge Gray, who is due to outline his views at a meeting in Los
Angeles later this month, is critical of the United States' drugs
tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, whose budget has just been increased
from $17.8bn a year to $19.2bn (UKP13bn). He suggests that asking Gen
McCaffrey whether the right policy is being pursued is "like asking a
barber if one needs a haircut".

The changes that Judge Gray would like to see include the regulated
sale to adults of heroin, cocaine and cannabis. No advertising should
be allowed, said the judge, so that drugs could be "de-profitised". He
also favours needle-exchange programmes. He believes that the
likeliest route for change would be for individual states to be
allowed to decide on what drugs policy suits them best.

"First of all, we have to legitimise the discussion," he said. He
stressed that talking about change did not mean that he or fellow
judges condoned the use of drugs, merely that the existing laws were
causing more harm than good.

His move comes as the organisation Common Sense for Drug Policy (CSDP)
has been placing advertisements in magazines headlined "Just Say Not
Guilty".

The ad argues that "the jury right to say 'not guilty' is an essential
safeguard against injustice. [This] dates back to English common law
and the founding of the United States."

Doug McVay of the Virginia-based CSDP said yesterday that the aim of
the advertising campaign was to remind people that "justice is not
simply the application of the law. The current situation violates
common sense". He said that the FBI made 1,559,000 arrests for drug
violations in 1998, 78% of them for possession and the campaign wanted
to "plant the seed" in the minds of potential jurors that they could
acquit people if they be lieved that the punishment did not fit the
crime.

The United States is now building a new prison every week to cope with
the people serving mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession.
The prison population in the US has risen from just under 200,000 in
1966 to 2m today accounting for a quarter of the entire world's prison
population.

A further call for change has come from the influential
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington which has
published the findings of a citizen's commission on drugs
policy entitled The War on Drugs: Addicted to Failure. In
the foreword to the report, Professor Craig Reinarman
states: "Drugs are richly functional scapegoats. They
provide the public with a restricted aperture of attribution
in which only the chemical bogey man or lone deviant come
into view and the social causes of a cornucopia of complex
problems are out of the picture."

The chairperson of the commission, actor, singer and civil rights
activist Harry Belafonte, said: "Having grown up in Harlem during the
Great Depression, I knew that the real roots of drug abuse and
addiction had more to do with poverty, alienation and despair than
crimes of malice."

He pointed out that in California five African-Americans were in jail
for every one in a state university. The commission has called Gen
McCaffrey's "war on drugs" a "monumental failure" and recommends the
ending of mandatory minimum sentences for drug cases. It calls on
President Clinton to revise the drug laws.

Belafonte's point was emphasised by this week's publication of a
report by Human Rights Watch saying that 482 out of every 100,000
African-American men are in prison for a drug crime compared with 36
out of every 100,000 white men. In Illinois, a black man is 57 times
more likely to be jailed for drugs than a white man.

The figures were described as a "national scandal" by the
organisation, whose report was funded by George Soros's Open Society
Institute.