PARLEY PARTICIPANTS CALL FOR END TO WAR ON DRUGS

NEW BRITAIN - The nation's "War on Drugs" has its roots in efforts to
control and repress ethnic minorities and should be abandoned in favor
of a policy that ends its racially disparate enforcement by the
criminal justice system, speakers at a state college-sponsored
conference said Wednesday.

Moreover, the principal participants in the parley at Central
Connecticut State University argued that public opinion has changed
significantly so that lawmakers now have the political capital to
refocus federal and state drug policies away from incarceration and
toward treatment.

Several speakers also urged Connecticut residents to support a bill
pending in the General Assembly that would reclassify the possession
of minor amounts of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an infraction.

The measure sponsored by two New Haven Democrats, Senate Majority
Leader Martin M. Looney and Sen. Toni N. Harp, the co-chairwoman of
the legislature's Appropriations Committee, would amend the current
law that makes first-time possession of small amounts of marijuana
punishable by up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Instead,
tickets and a nominal fine would be assessed.

* In the conference's keynote address, Ethan Nadelmann, founder and
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, blasted the "War on
Drugs" initiated during the Nixon administration as a "grave moral
failing" driven by fear and ignorance.

Citing its precedents in near-century-old laws he said were spurred by
racist bids to repress minorities and, most notably, migrant workers
such as Chinese railroad builders who indulged in opium and Mexican
farmworkers who smoked marijuana, Nadelmann said the rules were never
about protecting health.

What determined which drugs were criminalized had everything to do
with who was using those drugs," he said.

Nadelmann challenged "the presumption that the criminal justice system
has to be involved" in addressing drug problems, saying the country's
current "punitive approach" also stemmed in part from a sort of
"pharmacological Calvinism."

It's not just about hate and racism, it's about our belief about
drugs," he said. "We are part of the drug-war culture."

Nadelmann said the drug war has propelled the U.S. to rank first in
the world in per capita incarceration rates.

Not only is the country "locking people up at rates five to ten times"
that of other nations with similar problems, he charged, but the
nation tends both to jail people convicted of drug crimes for longer
periods and to keep them still longer under the supervision of the
parole and probation system.

Nadelmann said the current economic crisis might make it possible to
reverse the government's course, if only because of the huge cost of
incarcerating more and more drug offenders.

He cited a significant shift in public opinion so that the
unprecedented level of incarceration in the nation is now seen as the
problem, and said there is a growing momentum, "especially in states
in the West," for decriminalization of marijuana possession.

The hysteria of the drug war peaked in the '80s," he said. "Now, 20
years out, it's fading and people are now willing to move on."

He added: "We're not calling it legalization, we're calling it tax,
tax, tax."

At the same time, Nadelmann decried what he said was the news media's
failure to correct drug war "propaganda."

He said a few years ago news magazines were predicting that might be
350,000 "crack babies," born to mothers who used crack cocaine and
said to be doomed to a life of serious health problems.

But, he added, recent studies have suggested that babies born to crack
addicts suffered no more health issues than those born to "clean"
mothers from similar neighborhoods.

Nadelmann insisted that he wasn't "speaking on behalf of drugs," and
that "the horror stories are there."

But he said he wanted to raise questions that pointed to the
wrong-headedness of current policy and emphasized freedom and compassion.

What I really want to know is how many people are really using
methamphetamine in America and what do they look like?" he said. "And
who is recruiting new meth users - definitely not the people whose
teeth are falling out."