[Sidebar: Deborah Peterson Small Takes Five

The Drug Policy Alliance is a national organization in New York and
Washington, D.C., that works to promote drug policies based on common
sense, science, public health and human rights. DEBORAH PETERSON SMALL is
director of public policy and community outreach for the alliance. A native
New Yorker, Small believes that many of the nation's drug laws have had a
discriminatory impact on minority communities, and her organization is
working to reform laws that warehouse non-violent drug offenders in prison
instead of getting them into drug treatment. Small is a graduate of the
City College of New York and Harvard Law School. Before assuming her
current position at the Drug Policy Alliance, she was legislative director
of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Small is helping to organize a
regional conference on reforming drug laws, which is June 6 and 7 at the
Racine Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, 7111 W. Washington Ave. The
"Breaking the Chains" conference is being sponsored by WISDOM, a statewide
interfaith organization of 125 congregations. Small talked with Journal
Sentinel urban affairs reporter Leonard Sykes Jr. while in Milwaukee.]

TAKING A HARD LOOK AT HARD TIME FOR DRUGS

Q. How do you make the point to legislators and the public that drug laws
need reforming?

A. It really has to do with the ways in which we as a country deal with
crime and punishment, which in my view is in an extreme punitive way in
comparison to other societies. We have a long-standing tradition of using
extreme punishment as a way of behavior modification. If you think about
it, from a society point of view, incarcerating drug offenders is stupid.
The problem they have never gets addressed in the criminal justice system.
And they just keep coming back. I believe those laws are doing what they
were designed to do, which is to continue the systemic marginalization and
exclusion of certain groups of people. And our drug laws provide a
convenient way for doing that.

Q. Particularly on minority communities, wouldn't you say?

A. Well, those are the communities I'm talking about. I mean, this country
has a long history of using punishment and coercion as a way of modifying
the behavior of people of color - whether they're African-American, Latino
or Asian. So if you look at our drug laws in that context, then they
actually are serving a social function because they're allowing us to
continue to criminalize, marginalize and exclude large numbers of people of
color based on activity that they engage in that isn't significantly
different than the activity of the larger community.

Q. Wouldn't you say that many of the nation's drug laws are draconian and
haven't really addressed the societal causes of drug addiction?

A. I think they're draconian in the sense that we don't have a sense of
proportion when it comes to sentencing. To give someone a 10- or 15- or
20-year sentence for having brought or possessed a small amount of drugs is
considered in much of the rest of the world draconian but not here because
we still have the death penalty.

Q. What's the difference in sentencing between the U.S. and Europe?

A. In Europe, for instance, a five-year sentence is considered a long
sentence, and it's usually only given for violent crimes. People would
never get that kind of sentence for non-violent activities, whether it
involves drug or property crimes. And yet our sentencing structure does
that, in part, because it allows us to do what it is we're trying to do,
which is to keep people out of society for long periods of time. Giving
someone a five-or 15-year sentence does nothing to deal with their
underlying addiction problem or any other problems they may have which
brought them to abusing drugs in the first place.

Q. You and I can talk to each other about this and agree, but how do you
get the John Ashcrofts and George Bushes of the world to understand that
point of view?

A. I've given up on Ashcroft. I don't expect that there is really any hope
for him. But I do think that Bush understands the concept of
rehabilitation. He understands what it means for a person to overcome
addiction because he did that with respect to alcohol. The problem with
Bush is that like a lot of people, he's found religion - and I don't mean
in the denominational way. He assumes that because it happened for him, it
can happen for other people. But the reality is, addiction is a brain
disease. And most people spend a lifetime recovering.