PROF ALMOST GOT POT PAST NIXON

Marijuana Commission Major Step In TJ Award Winner's Career

In 1969, Richard J. Bonnie was teaching at UVA's School of Law, from
which he had just graduated, when he read about a case in Roanoke
that involved a sentence of 20 years in jail for possession of a
small amount of marijuana. It was the height of the counterculture
wars, and similar events were playing out around the country. White
Panther John Sinclair, for instance, was sentenced to a decade in
prison that same year for possession of two joints and became an
icon when John Lennon named a song after him, demanding, "They
gave him 10 for two, what else could the bastards do?"

Bonnie, meanwhile, took a more scholarly approach. He applied a
cost-benefit analysis to drug laws that at the time made no
differentiation between hard drugs like heroin and cocaine and
lesser substances like marijuana, and published a paper calling for
reform. In a volatile time of marches and riots, Bonnie's practical
approach was so refreshing that it soon gained the notice of then
U.S. president, Richard Nixon. After a one-year stint in the Air
Force, the young attorney found himself on the National
Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse.

Serving as the Commission's executive director, Bonnie and his
cohorts issued a report two years later calling for
decriminalization of marijuana when it came to private consumption,
including possession for personal use and casual nonprofit
distribution. Instead of penalization, the Commission called for
more effort in the area of prevention. "We looked at drug use as
a public health problem as opposed to a moral problem," Bonnie says
from his office in the UVA law school. "We were trying to reduce the
adverse social and welfare consequences of the use of these drugs."

While Nixon decided against implementing their suggestions, the
nation was a different matter. During the 1970s, 12 states
decriminalized marijuana, Bonnie testified before Congress twice,
the UVA Press published his research and findings in 1974 as The
Marijuana Conviction and President Jimmy Carter endorsed
decriminalization nationwide. But then came the monolithic backlash
of Ronald Reagan and "Just Say No."

By that time, Bonnie was director of UVA's Institute of Law,
Psychiatry and Public Policy, where he was using a model he had
perfected while with the Commission-what he describes as a
scientific approach to policy making-for the areas of mental health
and death penalty law, among others. "We make so much policy
without actually thinking, measuring and paying attention
to whether we're getting the benefits we're trying to get," he
says. "Instead we make highly politicized, moralized decisions."

For example, take the death penalty, Bonnie says. "One of the issues
is whether deterrence really has anything to do with this. Or isn't
the grounding of why we continue to have the death penalty a set of
intuitions that people have about why you have to have the ultimate
penalty for certain kinds of really awful things that human beings
do to other human beings?" he asks, pointing to sharp views on
either side of the issue. "Oliver Wendell Holmes called these kinds
of attitudes the 'can't helps,' because people just can't help
feeling the way they do," he says. "If that's so, it may be that the
empirical features of this don't really have much to do with it.
…At some point, the evidence is important in order to promote
rational informed decisions, even when they are driven by moral
views," he says. "I think we can do better than we've done."

Over 35 years of employing this type of pragmatic approach has
earned Bonnie two recent honors. In 2006, he was picked to head the
Commonwealth of Virginia Commission of Mental Health Law. That body
got much more recognition following the April 16 Virginia Tech
massacre because of the political support the killing spree has
brought to efforts to reform a severely outdated mental health system.

"It would compound the [Tech] tragedy if we failed to take advantage
of the opportunity that it has provided," he says.

Last month, Bonnie received the 2007 Thomas Jefferson Award, UVA's
highest honor, which he likens to winning the Nobel Prize. "I've had
a number of awards over the course of my career, but there's
something genuinely special about receiving an award from the
University called the Thomas Jefferson Award, and to be in the
company of the people who have received it previously," he says.
"It's almost embarrassing actually."