FORMER REAGAN COUNSEL RAISES ISSUES ON DRUG WAR

Eric Sterling, a former counsel for the Congressional Judiciary Committee,
spoke to students Thursday about his experiences as a criminal justice
policy maker during the Reagan administration. He said that his experiences
shaping drug war policy during the 1980's led him to become an advocate for
drug legalization.

"No person who loves laws and sausages should ever watch them being made,"
Sterling said. "I was a sausage-stuffer for nine years."

Describing the behind-the-scenes difficulties of policy-making in
Washington, D.C., Sterling recalled late-night sessions of frantically
cutting and pasting together congressional crime bills. He also described a
trip to Latin America that he said made him aware of widespread corruption
and the futility of the drug war. He said that he saw drug war officials
pretend to destroy coca plants, the base component of cocaine, while
actually making the plants healthier.

Sterling said that one of the aspects of the drug war mentality he found
most disturbing was the tendency for members of Congress to ignore the
humanity of drug addicts. He said that a congressman once told him that the
government would not need to worry about heroine addicts for much longer
because they would all die of AIDS.

The drug war disproportionately targets African-Americans while ignoring
the much larger number of white drug users, according to Sterling. He said
that 88 percent of all federal prosecutions involving crack cocaine are
brought against black defendants even though there are more white crack
users than black ones nationwide.

Sterling said that although illegal drugs can be harmful and even lethal,
government officials often distort the dangers posed by drugs in order to
create hype and fear that they hope will motivate voters.

"Drugs serve an extremely useful role in the theater of politics," he said.
"The government is utterly committed to lying about the harmfulness of drugs."

According to Sterling, although three out of four Americans believe the
drug war has been a failure, the press and the public refuse to take the
issue of drug legalization seriously. He said that politicians who support
legalization risk being ridiculed as stoned hippies.

In response to a question from the audience about the effectiveness of
California's three-strikes law, Sterling said that although the law may
have reduced crime to some small degree but that it has done so at the cost
of producing grossly unjust sentences. The three-strikes law imposes life
sentences on people convicted of three felonies even if their offenses are
relatively minor, he said.

Public policy graduate student Nick Howard invited Sterling to participate
in the public policy lecture series.

"I just found myself nodding my head to everything he said," Howard said.