TEXAS REFORMERS TEST FEDERAL GAG ORDER ON DRUG-POLICY DEBATES

There's $500 available right now from the Drug Policy Forum of Texas for
anyone who wants to go there to speak on the philosophy behind drug
prohibition. The only catch is that you have to be prepared to justify and
defend it, a task that so far has intimidated all the best anti-drug
speakers in the nation. The DPFT's well-publicized offer has been standing
for over three months now, but absolutely no one has accepted the
opportunity. "We began to realize many years ago that we can't get these
damn guys to come out and debate," the Austin Chronicle was told by DPFT
founder Alan Robison, a retired pharmacology professor at the University of
Texas Health Center there. "This is a deliberate strategy. These guys know
if they don't come, there's no discussion."

Since the early '90s, anti-drug advocates have methodically exploited the
mainstream media's timidity at addressing the issue, by simply refusing to
confront and debate reform advocates in public forums, face to face. While
TV networks and national newspapers will readily serve as one-sided
sounding boards for anti-drug propaganda from the White House drug czar's
office, PRIDE, DARE, and Columbia University's Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse, none will ever present progressive drug-reform arguments
without "balancing" them against standard prohibitionist mouthpieces. So
when anti-drug advocates simply refuse to appear on shows or debate panels
to confront reform advocates, they succeed in getting the media to
effectively censor themselves from ever addressing any progressive ideas
for drug-law reform.

Decorated General Turns Tail And Runs

Carl Veley, operations manager for the 300-member DPFT, says the success of
this censorship routine was driven home for them in 1997, when everyone
there was eagerly awaiting the appearance of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Czar of
the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, on a panel in
Houston assembled by the Texas state Bar Association. This panel was also
to have included judge James Grey of the Orange County Superior Court in
San Diego, CA, a moderate but very well-spoken critic of the War on Drugs
(and subject of the April 1996 HIGH TIMES Interview.) But when McCaffrey's
ONDCP learned that the General would be going up against a highly
conservative judge with qualms about his "zero tolerance" dogmas, the White
House abruptly canceled McCaffrey's participation. "And right after that
happened," says Veley, "the Bar Association also withdrew the invitation to
Judge Grey, so they wouldn't look lopsided in favor of reform."

The calculated cowardice of anti-drug champions like McCaffrey is nothing
new to veteran marijuana spokesman Alan St. Pierre of Washington NORML.
"It's very, very hard to get these people to defend their positions in
public," says St. Pierre. "People who you'd think would otherwise be happy
to have a forum to present their anti-drug arguments -- I'm talking about
CASA, CADCA, PRIDE, DARE, DrugWatch International -- they'll never agree to
a face-to-face debate. Even on radio, they'll always insist to the
producers that they get a totally separate broadcast segment, and will only
go on if their segment's broadcast first."

Chuck Thomas of Washington's Marijuana Policy Project recalls how a
producer from a local radio talk show recently tried setting up a debate
between the MPP and CASA, the tax-funded detox-and-rehab lobby run out of
Columbia University in New York City by erstwhile Democratic Party politico
Joe Califano. Thomas was looking forward to see how Califano would justify
the often-debunked statistical manipulation by which CASA continually warns
that marijuana makes its users go on to harder drugs -- but then the entire
show was abruptly canceled, because CASA refused a face-to-face debate
format, insisting instead on separate segments, with CASA going first.
Since this would have been pretty much the equivalent of dead air time,
media self-censorship again precluded any broadcast of drug-reform ideas.

St. Pierre at NORML has an even better story. "About a year ago, some
people at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington invited me to a
debate on marijuana decriminalization," he says. "When they mentioned that
another panel member would be a DEA agent who was doing postgraduate work
there, I told them they might as well forget about it, because the DEA
national office would cancel their approval for it as soon as they heard
NORML would be there. They laughed, and said I was being paranoid -- but
then that's exactly what happened, just as I told them it would." Pretty
much the same thing happened a few months later, when the Law School at
American University retracted an invitation to St. Pierre to speak at a
forum (not even a debate!) alongside a mouthpiece from the White House Drug
Czar's office. "They told me," chuckles St. Pierre, "'The ONDCP has advised
us they would not feel comfortable with your presence in the room.' "

Silent On The Taxpayer's Tab

This across-the-board policy of cravenly chickening out of any public
debate over drug-policy reform has been manifested by virtually every
tax-funded anti-drug organization on the public teat. It may have its
genesis in a 1994 directive out of the Drug Enforcement Administration
which was deceptively titled, "How to Hold Your Own In A Drug-Legalization
Debate." A stuporous catechism of easily-deflated arguments in support of
the government's zero-tolerance doctrine, this DEA tract sternly counsels
against discussion of any authentically germane or important policy-reform
topics: "side issues such as the needle-exchange program, the medical use
of marijuana, and the emerging issue of the cultivation of hemp" are
fiercely discouraged, for example, and the implication is clear that the
DEA will not be pleased to see tax-funded prohibition outfits inadvertently
opening public forums to highly articulate "proponents of legalization."
This implicit gag order was obviously directed to every anti-drug outfit
with access to the federal tax money: CASA, PRIDE, DARE, National Families
in Action, DrugWatch International, Gary Bauer's "Family Research Council,"
and innumerable other tax-funded "parents" outfits and aspirants to the
public trough.

For the record, the main current sucker on the federal anti-drug teat, the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America ("This is your brain on drugs," etc.),
actually condescended to present an alibi to the Austin Chronicle for
turning down the DPFT's $500 offer for an anti-drug interlocutor. "Part of
the reason they can't find anybody," said Partnership mouthpiece Steve
Dinistran, "is that nobody takes them seriously. What do you want to debate
this for?" Dinistran also indicated that $500 wouldn't begin to cover the
accommodations to which Partnership speakers are accustomed: "Best
Western?" he asked contemptuously.

In Austin, Carl Veley of the DPFT indicates that they're likely to raise
that offered stipend considerably in the very near future. After the annual
convention of the Drug Policy Foundation concludes in Washington next week,
the official bribe fee is likely to rise suddenly to $10,000 or more, Veley
suggests. "At first, we got an awful lot of calls from people who
misunderstood the offer," he relates, "people saying, Hell yeah, I'll argue
in favor of decriminalization for $500. When we straightened them out,
though, and mentioned that no one was coming forward to collect money for
arguing in favor of the drug laws, they usually wanted to help us up the
ante. One fellow in Tennessee offered to match it with $500 of his own."

It's a win-win proposition for drug-reform advocates, as Veley outlines it.
"We just want someone to come forward and tell us why these laws are good
laws," he says, and of course that will be impossible: "Those laws are just
not defensible." So even if the DPFT succeeds in raising the bribe fee
sufficiently to attract some big-name prohibitionist -- "McCaffrey,
Califano, one of those turkeys" -- the result is going to be rosy indeed
for the cause of drug reform. And if none of these turkeys is prepared to
publicly justify their position, then the longer the offer stays open, the
more morally bankrupt they reveal themselves to be.

If it gets to that point, says Veley, addressing all comers, "We'll tell
you precisely what we want to say in the debate: here's our script in
advance, no changes afterward. We'll give you in advance all the questions
we're going to ask you, and you can ask us any questions you want to. You
can have separate segments, no face-to-face debate, even." And they'd still
lose, no doubt in the world about that.

Starting The Parade

If that sounds Machiavellian, the DPFT's long-term project is even more
sinister, as Veley outlines it. Eventually, they'd like to challenge some
elected anti-drug public official to a debate, and when he or she declines,
have them confronted with a rival candidate ready to exploit their
political cowardice. Why wouldn't Sen. Lardbucket (or even just Sherrif or
D.A. Lardbucket) even address the question of why black and Latino drivers
are subject to racial profiling in "anti-drug" traffic stops? Why wouldn't
Sen. Lardbucket explain how his anti-marijuana statistics come from a
tax-funded propaganda lobby with a manifest vested interest in sucking
teenagers into tax-funded "drug-treatment" brainwashing mills? Why wouldn't
this anti-drug blowhard reveal how much of his campaign money was coming
out of the prison-industrial complex? And so on, making terrific headlines
for any politician ready to go out to capture the burgeoning nationwide
drug-reform constituency.

"We're looking for a politician who's got the guts to start that parade,"
smiles Carl Veley of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. No wonder Gen.
McCaffrey would never dare show his bemedalled butt in the same room with
dangerous people like this.

Dean Latimer - Special to HT News