PROTESTING THE DRUG WAR

National Review magazine has shocked and annoyed more than a few of its
conservative faithful with its current cover story, "Going to Pot: The
growing movement toward ending America's irrational marijuana prohibition."

Written by Ethan Nadelmann, the country's most dogged and arguably most
influential proponent of drug-law reform, the piece calls for
decriminalizing marijuana and humanizing the federal war on (some) drugs.
The son of a rabbi, Nadelmann is executive director of the Drug Policy
Alliance - http://www.drugpolicy.org - a group that has 20,000 paying
members and owes its existence to early funding by billionaire George
Soros. I talked to Nadelmann by phone from San Francisco.

Q: What is the Drug Policy Alliance and what are its aims?

A: We're the leading organization promoting alternatives to the war on
drugs. Essentially, we're the organization composed of people who believe
the war on drugs is doing more harm to society than good. Our membership,
our board, our staff, spans the spectrum, from people who believe that the
answer is to legalize all drugs to people who are hesitant to legalize
anything but who basically believe that treating drugs as fundamentally a
criminal-justice issue is fundamentally misguided. Where the consensus lies
right now is in ending marijuana prohibition.

Q: How is society hurt by drugs?

A: There's no question that some substances in and of themselves can cause
harm. What's interesting, of course, is that two drugs that are legal
(alcohol and nicotine) are in some respects the most dangerous in health
terms of all the drugs. Marijuana may well be the safest of all the
substances. The other factor is that when you make these drugs illegal, you
end up making them more dangerous. Cocaine, heroin, amphetamine, all these
drugs, are much more dangerous because they are illegal. They are
adulterated, they are unregulated, they are of unknown potency and purity.
And the result is oftentimes more, not fewer, fatalities.

Q: How is society hurt by the war on drugs?

A: That's the crazy part of this. As dangerous as drugs can be for many
people, the war on drugs is causing dramatically more harm than drugs
themselves.

When you are arresting 1.5 million people a year; when you have almost half
a million people behind bars on any one night on drug charges; when you are
effectively encouraging the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and
hepatitis by depriving people of legal access to sterile syringes; when
you're spending something like $40 billion a year on the war on drugs --
all of these things are extraordinary wastes.

Then there is the corruption of our morals, when people are turned into
informants and rats by police pressure and obliged to turn against one
another. The war on drugs is not something that is just targeting the most
heinous and predatory people in this country; it's something that is
targeting and criminalizing tens of millions of people every year and
employing government tactics -- surveillance and undercover police -- that
are really antithetical to what it means to live in a free country.

Q: Are all illegal drugs worthy of being decriminalized or just marijuana?

A: You have to distinguish between the issue of possession and the issue of
distribution. Our core principle is that people should not be punished
simply for what they put in their body if they don't hurt other people.
Hold people responsible for their actions and harm against others, but
don't punish people for what they put in their body. If you possess small
amounts of a drug for your own personal use, that should not be a crime --
regardless of the drug.

When it comes to the issue of production and distribution, we're very clear
that with respect to cannabis, that this should ultimately be treated more
or less like alcohol. It should be legally regulated. It should be subject
to state and local control with respect to local norms. With respect to the
other drugs, we have an internal debate within our organization and our
movement whether these also should be treated by legal regulation of some
sort or whether they should be just by prescription only.

Q: Is this a political debate, a moral debate or a health debate?

A: Well, it's all three of those. If you look at this from a public health
perspective, the question is, "How do we most reduce the negative
consequences of drug use?" The optimal policy, we say, is the one which
most effectively reduces the cumulative death, disease, crime and
suffering, both with the use of drugs and drug-control policy.

There's also a very powerful moral dimension. There are people who regard
any use of some of these drugs as immoral. On the other hand, you have
people like myself, the Drug Policy Alliance, who also regard this as a
moral issue. But for us, the morality is that people should not be punished
for what they put in their body. We regard this very much as a moral
struggle on our part, and it's about freedom, it's about compassion, and
it's about responsibility. And we think the war on drugs is violating all
three of these basic notions.

Q: When you look around the world of drugs and drug policy, what are you
encouraged by?

A: There are a number of things. The first is that public opinion has
clearly been shifting in favor of reform over the last 10 to 15 years. The
second thing is that we are actually winning things. Almost 150 drug policy
reforms have been enacted into law at the state level since 1996, either by
ballot initiative or the state legislative route.

And the third thing is that what you see throughout Europe, Australia, New
Zealand, Canada and other parts of the world is a very significant moving
forward in terms of embracing decriminalization and harm reduction.

Q: Do you see the end of the war on drugs in our lifetimes?

A: I'll tell you this: It's definitely going to be changing. I'd say the
odds of marijuana prohibition coming to an end in our lifetime -- how old
are you?

Q: 56.

A: And I'm 47. I'd say that the odds of that happening in the next 10 to 15
years are quite good. I think the thing I'm most concerned about right now
is that there is really a push on the part of the government, with really
ominous totalitarian consequences -- and I do not use that word lightly --
that involves trying to drug test greater and greater and greater portions
of the population, and employing drug testing backed by different types of
sanctions in order to basically try to put whatever force they can behind a
zero-tolerance policy.

I think that is an extraordinary ominous development. It is clearly the
obsession and focus of this particular administration. If you listen to
what the drug czar John Walters is saying and focusing on as he travels
around the country, it's all about, first of all, marijuana and drug testing.

There is an extraordinary lack of sensitivity to basic concerns of
individual freedom, and I think that's part of why we see very prominent
conservatives beginning to speak out and stand up. If you look at the war
on terrorism on one hand, where people are legitimately scared, and then
you look at this war on drugs on the other hand, where people are almost in
a drug craze and scared, what you realize is that this is a very ominous
development, and people need to be aware of what is going on.