JUST SAY NO TO DRUG REFORM

Parent lobby groups have had a disastrous effect on America's drug debate,
reports MARIAN WILKINSON in Boston.

"Are you waiting to talk to your Kids about Pot?" The hectoring message,
sponsored by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, leaps
out at every commuter making their way home on the subway here.

Whether America is experiencing a marijuana epidemic is a moot point. The
advertisements are testimony to the ongoing influence of the conservative
parent lobby groups which effectively grasped control of the drug debate in
America back in the 1980s.

At that time, as a wave of crack cocaine and heroin addiction swept through
the black and Hispanic underclass in the inner cities, middle-class parent
lobby groups, such as PRIDE - the Parents Resource Institute for Drug
Education - swayed the White House to devote a greater share of its
prevention budget to fighting marijuana use among teenagers and promoting
"zero tolerance" to all illegal drug use.

The net result of these policies in the last two decades has been, according
to many public health experts, a disaster.

While marijuana use among American students has wavered up and down, the
number of hard-core drug abusers, those addicted to cocaine and heroin, has
risen. As public funds were diverted to the "zero tolerance" policy, funds
for treatment facilities and detox centres in the inner cities were slashed.

At the same time, the country's imprisonment rate has soared as more and
more low level dealers and addicts are jailed for drug offences.

But perhaps the most disturbing impact of the parent lobby on US drug policy
is the deep divide it has created between public health experts in this
country and the politicians wishing to court the vocal parent groups.

America's politicians will quash advice from many of their own public health
experts if it clashes with parent demands.

President Clinton's Health Secretary was persuaded to drop federal funding
support for needle exchange programs after the conservative Family Research
Council lobbied Clinton's drug tsar, General Barry McCaffrey. This was
despite the President's AIDS Advisory Commission supporting the initiative.

Parent lobbying against marijuana use also has had an extraordinary impact
in the criminal justice system.

Arrests for marijuana offences have doubled even under Clinton, and the vast
majority of these, some 90 per cent, are for simple possession.

The Republican Congress, not to be outdone, has passed laws denying student
loans to anyone caught in possession of marijuana.

Throughout the 1980s public health experts who argued against zero tolerance
policies or tried to focus the debate away from marijuana and onto treating
hard core drug abuse were hounded by parent lobbies for being "soft on
drugs".

Some, like Dr Jerome Jaffe, one of the country's most authoritative experts
on drug addiction, found themselves harangued before congressional
committees at the urging of parent lobbyists.

The hysteria in America's drug debate has left specialists like Jaffe
despairing. "Things are so open to demagogy in this country," he told the
Herald in a recent interview. "If you say anything that sounds as if we
ought to do something a little different, you're immediately accused of
being a legaliser. There isn't much room for rational debate."

When Ronald and Nancy Reagan were installed in the White House the parent
lobbyists persuaded Reagan to appoint a new drug tsar whose dominant
interest was in the control of marijuana abuse.

Under Dr Carlton Turner, formerly of the University of Mississippi, the
White House turned US drug policy on its head.

Gone were moves to liberalise marijuana laws. Turner, backed by the parent
lobbies, quashed any distinction between "soft" and "hard" drugs, or the
recreational use of drugs and hard core addiction.

The new policy was to be "zero tolerance" to all illegal drugs. The First
Lady would be the parents' most vocal advocate in the White House.

Under the new policy, criminal prosecution of drug offenders was stepped up.

Most importantly, the policy was openly hostile to the idea of treating drug
abuse, calling it the failed New York model, and federal funding for
treatment programs was slashed.

In some sense, the parent lobbyists brought important balance to drug
policy, forcing public officials and experts to examine the effect of
so-called soft drugs when they were used, not by adults, but young
teenagers.

Marijuana use, often seen as relatively harmless, was at times not even
treated as seriously as alcohol and tobacco abuse.

But by allowing these parent lobby groups to drive US drug policy with its
concentration of teenage marijuana use, drug researcher Michael Massing
argues that the Reagan Administration inadvertently helped create the worst
drug epidemic in American history. By making marijuana the priority, the
President's own drug tsar and his federal officers failed to understand the
upsurge in crack cocaine use in the inner cities until it was too late.

As hard core drug abuse soared, drug-related visits to hospital emerging
rooms, basically overdoses, rose 15-fold, cocaine-related deaths leapt, as
did drug use among pregnant women, drug-related homicides and drug-related
HIV.

Tragically, what happened demonstrated the cost of completely marginalising
the drug policy experts in favour of the parent lobby groups.

The crack epidemic, says Massing in his authoritative book on postwar US
drug policy, The Fix, was "a sweeping repudiation of the gateway theory so
beloved by the parent movement", that is, if you reduce casual, soft drug
use you ultimately reduce hard core abuse.

"Instead in eight years," he explains, "casual use had declined while
hard-core use had soared. In a perverse way, the Administration had
succeeded in pushing Americans in the aggregate way from softer drugs like
pot toward harder ones like crack - the exact opposite of what the gateway
theory would have predicted."

The lesson is not that the conservative parent lobbies be ignored but that
drug policy, like most public policy, does need the input of expert advice.

The highpoint of influence for the parent lobbies was no doubt during the
Reagan and Bush Republican Administration and internal divisions since then
have undercut some of their power.

But their influence over the debate is still critical. President Clinton
came into office with a more liberal drug policy but quickly ditched it as
political advisers and pollsters argued teenage pot use was of far more
interest to swinging voters, mainly parents.

While Clinton has belatedly increased funding for drug abuse programs in the
inner cities he steers away from any initiatives on harm minimisation.

Increasingly, alternative voices among parents are being heard: parents of
young drug offenders imprisoned for lengthy sentences and parents of
overdose victims who couldn't get treatment places but their appeal to US
politicians is limited.

In the US the strident voice of the conservative parent lobbies and
poll-conscious politicians still overwhelm other voices for reform. The very
fact that Australia can have a more balanced debate is viewed in the States
as a major achievement in itself.

As Jerome Jaffe told the Herald, "England sent us the Puritans and you the
criminals; perhaps you people are a little more tolerant and a little more
forgiving of sin."