THE DRUG ISSUE: DRUG WAR PEACE PLAN

A King County Bar Group Is Getting National Attention For Its Plan To
Reform Drug Policy By Emphasizing Regulation And Treatment

In his office at the King County Bar Association, attorney Roger Goodman
pulls open a desk drawer and shows off a stash of his drug of choice--extra
dark Neuhaus Belgian chocolate.

He pulls out one of the tiny, 1-and-a-half-square-inch bars piled there.
"That's almost an overdose," he says. "I break them into four pieces and
take one an hour." He's apparently serious.

Dressed in a blue-and-white pinstriped shirt, prone to discursive
monologues in even tones, the 44-year-old former congressional chief of
staff is more policy wonk than druggie.

And that, he is very well aware, is what has helped bring national
notoriety to a years-long effort he has headed aimed at eradicating the war
on drugs and replacing it with a viable, comprehensive legal system that
would emphasize regulation and treatment.

It has become commonplace to hear people say that the war on drugs has
failed, given the tremendous growth of the illicit market and associated
crime despite billions of taxpayer dollars spent on the effort.

Even some cops, like former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and those
belonging to the national group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, have
begun to say it. But Goodman, in his capacity as head of the county bar's
Drug Policy Project, has brought to the table the widest assortment of
quintessentially respectable types ever working on the issue. Among them
are lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and psychiatrists, all participating as
sanctioned representatives of their respective professional groups.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy
Alliance, the country's leading organization advocating reform, says that
Goodman's coalition is noteworthy for working on not just incremental but
sweeping changes. "It's probably the single most substantive effort
anywhere in the United States to engage the elite on both those levels," he
says.

It's the coalition's big-picture work that is the real first.

Saying that the war on drugs has failed is not enough.

The real question is: What's the alternative? That's the question that the
bar's project attempted to answer in a report released in March that was
the result of three years of deliberations. What the coalition came up with
is not, Goodman insists, drug "legalization." In the parlance of drug
policy reform, that term has come to mean lifting criminal penalties
surrounding drugs and letting the free market take over. Goodman's group
wants something quite different, as he articulated when he faced skepticism
at a presentation before the Governor's Council on Substance Abuse. "I
said, wait a minute, we're talking about limiting access more than today,"
Goodman recalls. "We're saying these drugs are so potentially hazardous,
we're going to take control away from criminals."

Control instead would be firmly in the hands of the government, which would
buy, distribute, and possibly sell drugs in accordance with a regulatory
system using such measures as licensing and age restrictions. It's the
alcohol or tobacco model, only one that would more seriously attempt to
control use. Selling by anyone other than government officials, for
instance, would not be allowed, nor would unfettered advertising. "No one's
going to profit," Goodman says. "We're really talking about medicalization,
not commercialization."

The coalition's report does not lay out exactly how this new system would
work. Actually, only 16 of its 145 pages start getting into details. And
those are intended to be a "menu of options," as Goodman puts it, rather
than a precise, recommended model.

But those options give a pretty good picture of what kind of system it
would be. One central proposal is that the hardest of drugs--heroin,
cocaine, and methamphetamine--could be distributed only to addicts at
government-run medical facilities for the purpose of treatment.

Those who receive these drugs might even have to obtain "a proof of
dependence" through a health exam. The government would obtain its drugs
not from criminal networks but from pharmaceutical companies, which are
legally allowed to produce cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin substitutes
like the opiate laudanum.

Other possible ideas in the report include registration and licensing of
drug users, with the possibility that a license might be retracted for
irresponsible use; rationing that would limit the amount of drugs that
could be obtained at any given time; even a "test of knowledge" about safe
drug use.

The report puts marijuana in a separate category requiring less control. It
envisions allowing people to grow their own and possibly licensing local
producers.

By suggesting that marijuana might be regulated similarly to the way hard
liquor is in Washington state, the report also raises the possibility of
state pot stores.

Reaction has, for the most part, been enthusiastic. "We're getting
reverberations literally from around the world," Goodman says. He says that
Canadian elected officials, embarking on their own version of drug law
reform, have called and are eager to consult.

So have a Hollywood screenwriter working on the issue and a hotel/motel
magnate wanting to act as a financier.

Working for a national organization called the Voluntary Committee of
Lawyers as well as the county bar, he is now taking the report on the road,
trying to encourage similar professional coalitions in other states.

He just got back from a two-week tour that took him to Washington, D.C.;
Miami, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; and Alabama.

Even in the conservative Deep South, he has found allies.

Billy Kimbrough, a former U.S. attorney in the Southern District of
Alabama, now a defense attorney in Mobile, has met with Goodman and agreed
to introduce him to other lawyers in the state. "We spend far too much time
and money worrying about drugs," Kimbrough says. "We'd be better off if we
sold them." Alabama may be controlled by Republicans, but Kimbrough says it
wants to reduce its prison costs just like every other state.

Not everyone is a fan, though. "He has left behind many members of the
bar," says Dan Satterberg, chief of staff for King County Prosecutor Norm
Maleng. Satterberg and his Republican boss do not oppose any attempt at reform.

In fact, Maleng recently led the charge to get the state Legislature to
scale back drug sentences and use the money saved on prison costs for
treatment programs.

Maleng's office is also a proponent of drug courts that allow defendants to
choose treatment in lieu of conventional prosecution. But what makes that
approach work, Satterberg says, is the "coercive power of the court." That
power would evaporate in a decriminalized system in which the government
was handing out drugs, even if it tried to encourage treatment at the same
time. "Given the choice between treatment and drugs, addicts will choose
drugs," Satterberg says. "Given the choice between treatment and jail,
addicts choose treatment."

Goodman, however, points out that heroin-prescribing facilities are already
working in Switzerland, England, and Vancouver, B.C., among other places,
where they are reducing use as well as the crime and disorder associated
with the street drug trade.

While he acknowledges that addicts might continue to use, he stresses that
they would still be held accountable for harmful behavior through other laws.

Goodman has fewer answers for another issue that Satterberg raises: the
hazy ongoing role of law enforcement. "I don't quite understand how it's
supposed to work," Satterberg says, referring to potential restrictions
that would limit hard drugs to addicts in medical facilities. "So we arrest
and prosecute people who don't want to use in the right way?"

Andy Ko, on the more radical end of the reform spectrum as director of a
separate Drug Policy Reform Project operated by the American Civil
Liberties Union of Washington, brings up a similar issue.

He notes that there's a commonly accepted rule of thumb: 20 percent of drug
users consume 80 percent of the drugs.

It's a dictum that the King County Bar report takes into account by
concentrating on the 20 percent of users who dominate the market, the addicts.

But, Ko asks, "What are the other 80 percent going to do? They're probably
going to want to buy from someone. So you're not going to solve the problem."

"There's always going to be leakage from the regulatory system," Goodman
concedes. "That's the gray market." How that would be handled, however, is
not something the King County Bar report goes into. Nor does it spend much
time addressing another argument advanced by Ko, that non-hard-core users
as well as addicts have a right to use drugs, and not just in a medicalized
setting that amounts to "compelled treatment." It's a civil liberties
stumbling block for a significant segment of the reform movement. For
further details and debate, the report's authors call for the establishment
of a body of experts to be convened by the Legislature.

There's an argument to be made that this exercise of dreaming up a new
system is pointless.

After all, drugs are prohibited at the federal level. "It would take an act
of Congress" to change that, says Satterberg. It would also take a huge
cultural shift.

But one has only to read the fascinating history section of the King County
Bar's report to know that there have been remarkable changes of attitude
toward different substances throughout time. Heroin was once thought to be
a perfectly legitimate drug. In fact, it was brought to market by Bayer
Pharmaceuticals in 1898 as a cough sedative.

On the other hand, in the Middle East in the 17th century, frequenting a
coffeehouse was punishable by death.

Fact is, our culture is already shifting. That, more than anything, is what
the King County Bar project has revealed by its very existence.