ETHAN NADELMANN CRITIQUES OBAMA'S NEW DRUG WAR STRATEGY

The White House's 2010 National Drug Control Strategy, released this
morning by President Obama and drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, is both
encouraging and discouraging. There's no question that it points in a
different direction and embraces specific policy options counter to
those of the past thirty years. But it differs little on the
fundamental issues of budget and drug policy paradigm, retaining the
overwhelming emphasis on law enforcement and supply control
strategies that doomed the policies of its predecessors.

First, to give credit where credit is due: The Obama administration
has taken important steps to undo some of the damage of past
administrations' drug policies. The Justice Department has played an
important role in trying to reduce the absurdly harsh, and racially
discriminatory, crack/powder mandatory minimum drug laws; Congress is
likely to approve a major reform this year. DOJ also changed course
on medical marijuana, letting state governments know that federal
authorities would defer to their efforts to legally regulate medical
marijuana under state law. And they approved the repeal of the ban on
federal funding of syringe exchange programs to reduce HIV/AIDS,
thereby indicating that science would at last be allowed to trump
politics and prejudice even in the domain of drug policy.

The new strategy goes further. It calls for reforming federal
policies that prohibit people with criminal convictions and in
recovery from accessing housing, employment, student loans and
driver's licenses. It also endorses a variety of harm reduction
strategies (even as it remains allergic to using the actual language
of "harm reduction"), endorsing specific initiatives to reduce fatal
overdoses, better integration of drug treatment into ordinary medical
care, and alternatives to incarceration for people struggling with
addiction. All of this diverges from the drug policies of the Reagan,
Clinton and two Bush administrations.

Director Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal last year that he
doesn't like to use the term "war on drugs" because "[w]e're not at
war with people in this country." Yet 64% of their budget - virtually
the same as under the Bush Administration and its predecessors -
focuses on largely futile interdiction efforts as well as arresting,
prosecuting and incarcerating extraordinary numbers of people. Only
36% is earmarked for demand reduction - and even that proportion is
inflated because the ONDCP "budget" no longer includes costs such as
the $2 billion expended annually to incarcerate people who violate
federal drug laws.

There's little doubt that this administration seriously wants to
distance itself from the rhetoric of the drug war, but its new plan
makes clear that it is still addicted to the reality of the drug war.
Still missing is the full throttle commitment to treating drug misuse
as a public health issue, and to harm reduction innovations that have
proven so successful in Europe and Canada. Still present is the old
rhetoric about marijuana's great dangers and the need to keep current
prohibitionist polices in place, with no mention of the fact or
consequences of arresting roughly 750,000 people each year for
possession of small amounts of marijuana.

I had the pleasure of testifying a few weeks ago before the
Congressional subcommittee charged with oversight of the drug czar's
office. The subcommittee chair, Dennis Kucinich, broke new ground on
Capitol Hill by challenging the drug czar, whose testimony preceded
mine, on his continuing commitment to supply control strategies
notwithstanding their persistent failure, and on his resistance to
embracing the language of harm reduction notwithstanding its growing
acceptance by governments elsewhere. In my testimony, I asked the
subcommittee to reform the ways that federal drug policy is evaluated
by de-emphasizing the past emphasis on reducing drug use per se and
focusing instead on reducing the death, disease, crime and suffering
associated with both drug misuse and counter-productive drug policies.

So, yes, this administration is headed in a new direction on drug
policy - but too slowly, too timidly, and with little vision of a
fundamentally different way of dealing with drugs in the U.S. or
global society. The strategy released today offers nothing that will
reduce the prohibition-related violence in Mexico, Central America
and Colombia, or seriously address the challenges in Afghanistan. It
dares not take on the embarrassment of America's record breaking and
world leading rate of incarceration, especially of non-violent drug
offenders. And it effectively acknowledges that politics will
continue to trump science whenever the latter points toward
politically controversial solutions.

We still have a long way to go.