Leading Question (A Weekly Feature)
by Bob Frost

West Magazine, November 16, 1997
The Sunday Supplement to the San Jose Mercury News
Letters to west@sjmercury.com

Q: Why is it so hard for this country arrive at a practical, pragmatic
policy about illegal drugs?

The answer comes from Robert MacCoun. MacCoun, 39, is Associate Professor
of Public Policy at UCBerkeley. He is one of the signers of the Federation
of American Scientists' new statement, "Principles for Practical Drug
Policies" (www.fas.org/drugs/Principles.htm). His email address is
maccoun@socrates.berkeley.edu.

A: The American debate about illegal drugs is organized around two basic
alternatives: on the one hand, the very aggressive criminal justice approach
that was spearheaded by William Bennett when he was the drug czar for
President Bush, which continues today; and on the other hand, the extreme
alternative of some form of legalization. There is very little recognition
of any possibilities between these two extremes. Politicians are reluctant
to try to find a middle ground; they feel that by doing so they would be
open to charges of being "soft on drugs."

There is, however, a substantial middle ground in this debate. A group of
about 40 of us decided to create a statement of principles that would, among
other things, signal to politicians that there is an expert community
willing to support and provide evidence for alternatives to current
policies.

Our group comes from many walks of life. William Bratton is a former New
York City police commissioner. Charles Shuster served under presidents
Reagan and Bush as Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the
major federal organization for research in this field. Reese Jones is a
professor psychiatry at UCSF. Avram Goldstein is a professor emeritus of
pharmacology at Stanford.

Our statement has 14 principles. For example, one states that it's
essential that prevention programs be honest with kids. The temptation in
prevention programs today is to exaggerate the risk of some drugs, such as
marijuana. Marijuana is not harmless, but prevention programs often
overstate how serious it really is, and kids begin to distrust us, and then
don't believe us when we talk about cocaine or heroin, which really are
enormously dangerous.

Another of our principles has to do with American drug treatment policy,
which is largely organized around the idea of abstinence: give up drugs
completely. So policy makers regard a treatment program as successful, and
support it, only if the program results in abstinence. Abstinence would be
ideal. But it's naive to have such a strict adherence to this socalled
"abstinence criterion" as a standard for measuring programs. There's a
great deal of value in reducing consumption among people who won't quit
altogether. If someone reduces their consumption of cocaine, their family
life might improve immensely, there might be less abuse, the person involved
may be much more likely to go to work in the morning. Things have improved,
overall. But, according to "abstinence criteria," it's a total failure! We
need to rethink this.