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A New Haven Lawyer Finds A New Tool For Drug Reform: The Constitution.

For years, drug reformers have lobbied, protested and published to sway
policy makers. Graham Boyd recently enlisted with a simpler yet perhaps
fiercer blade: the U.S. Constitution.

In a movement that has historically pursued policy reform, Boyd -- a
graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School who lives in New Haven -- has
just become the nation's first full-time litigator in the service of drug
policy reform.He represents a promising new strategy for the movement.

Boyd is the first attorney of the Drug Policy Litigation Project, an
inchoate branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, which Boyd
himself helped create last year.

He has already won a preliminary ruling in a First Amendment suit against
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey
involving doctor recommendation of marijuana. A voting rights suit against
the District of Columbia, also a medical marijuana case, is pending in
federal court. Boyd also wants to challenge universal drug testing for
public school students, government employees and welfare recipients as an
invasion of privacy.

The ACLU's turn to the courts seems reminiscent of the early black civil
rights movement. In hiring Boyd, ACLU President Ira Glasser told him "to
identify the aspects of the War on Drugs that are both legally vulnerable
and widely objectionable to ordinary people, and to attack those things in
a way which will point out the worst injustices of the drug war" -- just as
NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall did with Jim Crow laws, Boyd says. Marshall
won a string of important court decisions in the late 1940s and early
1950s, culminating in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education school
desegregation case in 1954.

"My job is to monitor and then confront the excesses of the War on Drugs.
It doesn't matter if it's marijuana or heroin if the government wants to
violate your rights," Boyd says. He stresses that he is not a criminal
lawyer for drug offenders. But by litigating cases that penetrate the core
of unjust drug policy, he may ultimately help more people.

"I want to affect legal precedent for the future," Boyd says. "I want to
have a broad impact."

What is interesting about Boyd is that he was a civil rights lawyer first,
his commitment to civil liberties later drawing him to drug reform
advocacy. He spent time abroad working for environmental justice and spent
several years as a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco before he found his
way to drug reform in late 1996.

That November, California voters approved Proposition 215, which eliminated
criminal penalties for doctors recommending and patients using marijuana in
treating serious diseases. Reno and McCaffrey, among other members of the
Clinton administration, lashed back. They publicly announced that though
patients who use marijuana may be safe from stateprosecution, the federal
government would prosecute doctors -- and revoke their licenses -- on the
basis of federal law. A drug reform advocacy group, the Lindesmith Center,
hired Boyd to file suit.

In the suit, Pearson v. McCaffrey,Boyd argued that the administration's
threat infringed on the doctors' First Amendment rights and violated
federalism, the balance of states' rights with the authority of the central
government.

"This case got me thinking about the connection between the War on Drugs
and issues of racial and economic justice, which is my [main legal]
interest," says Boyd.

He came to view current drug policy as "the modern version of Jim Crow,"
denying people welfare benefits, tax credits for higher education and
voting rights. "It's how our society takes away freedom, the right to vote,
housing, education, jobs and children." And the penalties fall
disproportionately on underprivileged minorities.

Through the California case, Boyd linked up with the ACLU, which also
represented the plaintiffs in that case. The civil liberties union assigned
him a second case, in which the ACLU accuses U.S. Rep. Robert Barr of
violating the rights of District of Columbia voters.

In November 1998, D.C. ran a ballot initiative similar to California's
Proposition 215. It would have passed with 70 percent of the vote,
according to exit polls, had Barr not intervened. The Georgia Republican
sponsored an amendment to the D.C. spending bill, outlawing federal funding
for any initiative that would "legalize or otherwise reduce penalties" for
marijuana users. He couldn't pass the bill early enough to cancel the vote
altogether, but managed it in time to freeze the vote tallying.

The U.S. District Court has yet to rule, but Glasser of the ACLU thought
the trial run successful enough to hire Boyd permanently, with the
possibility of adding a second attorney and paralegal in the future.

Graham Boyd isn't merely a hired suit. (He doesn't even wear one to work.)

Since his arrival in the drug reform movement -- and back in New Haven --
he has also become a mover at the grassroots level. In March 1998 Boyd
founded the Connecticut Drug Policy Leadership Council, a body of 75
high-profile doctors, lawyers, community leaders and government officials
- -- including New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and former Police Chief Nick
Pastore. Boyd also joined the Connecticut Harm Reduction Coalition and is
"very involved" with A Better Way, both drug education and policy
organizations.

The Leadership Council has already successfully lobbied the state to
increase funding for needle exchange programs and reduce the minimum
sentence for non-violent drug offenders, previously on par with violent
offenders, says New Haven Alderman Jelani Lawson, who assumed leadership of
the council from Boyd last winter.

Boyd stays active at the grassroots level, acknowledging that the courts
are only one front in a complex war.

"I think the role of a lawyer in a political movement is one of support,"
he says. "I don't think litigation is ever going to become the engine that
drives the movement."

Boyd favors a multi-pronged approach to any reform movement. He takes
exception to the claim that many drug reform advocacy groups with different
approaches suggests weakness. You have to chip away at the War on Drugs any
way you can, he says, because "you never know which one is going to work."