WAR ON THE WAR ON DRUGS

A Conference at Trinity Aims to Bring Supporters of Decriminalization Together With Those Who Favor a More Aggressive Fight Against Illegal Drugs

In 1963, two weeks before Clifford Wallace Thornton Jr. was to
graduate high school, his mother died of an apparent heroin overdose.
"At that particular time, I thought that all illegal drugs should be
eradicated from the face of the earth," Thornton says.

But after years of living in Hartford and studying the drug problem,
that opinion changed. Thornton, now 60 years old, says drugs are not
the problem, but that they're illegal is. He is the president of
Efficacy, Inc., a Hartford-based organization of people who want to
end the War on Drugs.

"I watched, decade after decade, my native Hartford go downhill and I
began to delve into the drug problem to see what was wrong," Thornton
says. "More and more people were using drugs and more and more people
were going to jail, with no apparent stop to the flow of drugs into the city."

Thornton now says the best way to solve the drug problem is through
commitments to the decriminalization, medicalization and legalization
of presently illegal drugs.

"All drug-policy reform begins with one question: Are people ever
going to stop using these illegal drugs? The overwhelming response is
no," Thornton says. "So the next question becomes: How do we create
an atmosphere that causes the least amount of harm to the people that
use and the least amount of harm to society as a whole?"

Thornton will be one of many to speak at the upcoming "Illicit Drugs
- -- Burden & Policy" conference Friday and Saturday (Oct. 21 and 22)
at Mather Hall on the Trinity College Campus. Law enforcement groups,
state agencies, state and city representatives and national experts
are slated to attend the conference, presented by the city of
Hartford and sponsored by the Aetna Foundation. It is open to the public.

The conference will bring together groups that often disagree on how
to combat the drug problem: the authorities and drug-policy reform advocates.

"This is supposed to be a conference where the broadest possible
considerations for how to do this better are presented to the
people," says City Councilman Robert L. Painter, who organized the conference.

Police Chief Patrick Harnett, and Drug Enforcement Administration
representative Mark Kaczynski, along with other local, state and
national law enforcement officials, are scheduled to speak.

In addition to Thornton, other reform advocates will speak out
against drug prohibition, including Jack Cole of Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition, a national group of current and former members
of law enforcement who are looking at ways, other than prohibition,
to reform drug laws. "This is not a conference that is advocating
anything, but we sure do have people coming that are advocates of
some pretty interesting ways to go about [regulating drugs]," Painter says.

A man who has spoken at conferences across the nation, Thornton
cannot recall another time when law enforcement officials have been
brought together in the same room with devout drug-policy reformers.

Painter hopes the conference will yield suggestions that could be
turned into "clean-slate" legislation, for instance, which may help a
person who's turned their life around after jail time get a job by
regulating questions asked by potential employers about an
applicant's criminal history.

Nixon created the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1971 and,
over 30 years later, we're still fighting. "We have more people in
jail; we have higher quality drugs; we have lower prices and we have
more [drug activity] going on. Either we haven't put enough effort
into the way we're doing things, or we need to look at an entirely
new and different way to go about it," says Painter.