DRUG POLICY NEEDS MORE PRAGMATISM AND LESS HYSTERIA

If you see me yawning, it's because I've been coffee-free for a couple of
weeks now. I was starting to have a cup or two every day, and I didn't like
feeling the urge to sip every morning, so I've backed off.

OK, you're not impressed. But coffee is a drug. It messes with your mind
and body, and it can be hard to walk away from. Yet we're not going to send
police to raid Starbucks, because coffee is an OK drug.

We've decided that some drugs aren't so OK, and we can get crazy trying to
eradicate them.

There never has been a human society that didn't have drugs and there never
will be, he says, except maybe Inuit people, who lived in a climate where
nothing would grow. A policy dedicated to eradicating certain drugs is
bound to fail.

We should try to reduce drug use, but we also have to accept that some
people are going to use drugs no matter what. Our policies should be aimed
at reducing the harm those people cause to themselves and to society.

Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the most
active voice for change in the way the United States deals with drugs and
the people who use them.

I spoke with him at the downtown Sheraton, where he's a speaker at the
Fourth National Harm Reduction Conference. His hair is short and thinning,
his beard neatly trimmed and tending toward gray. He's 45, about 6-feet
tall and slender, a former Princeton faculty member who has degrees in law
and public policy. You wouldn't be afraid to let him watch your kids.

Besides he wears glasses so you know he has to be intelligent and mild
mannered, right? Sure, until he starts talking about legalizing bad drugs.
He's asking people to examine their perceptions.

You know opiates used to be legal in the United States and regular folks
(those perceptions again) used them. Who were the biggest users of opiates
in the 1870s he asks me? I don't know.

"Middle-class white women in the South," he says. They didn't have aspirin
or Motrin. Take a little laudanum every day, and life is fine.

They would never have thought of themselves as drug addicts; neither would
other people have seen most of them that way.

The images that most people have of drug users, images that reinforce a
tendency to see only the criminal side of drug use, have more to do with
drug policies than with drug use.

Nadelmann asks people to imagine making cigarettes illegal. Prices would
skyrocket, users might commit crimes to get money for a smoke, dealers
would fight it out for business and jails would be stuffed with smokers.
Cigarettes are deadly, but we deal with them pragmatically.

Other drug users are supposed to be bad people, usually black or brown. It
isn't reality, but it is the image on which most people's judgments about
drugs are made.

Nadelmann says racism often drove early laws against the use of certain drugs.

The first anti-opiate laws were directed at Chinese immigrants in
California and Nevada. The first laws against cocaine use were directed at
black people in the South. The first laws against marijuana use were
intended to do something about Mexican and Mexican-American users in the
Southwest and Midwest.

Race is still part of the picture. While black people are about 13 percent
of drug users, black Americans are 38 percent of people arrested for drug
offenses and 59 percent of people jailed for violating drug laws.

Nadelmann got interested in drug policy when he did a stint with the State
Department; it was his job to interview drug-enforcement agents around the
world.

He came away with a clear sense that something wasn't working. He wrote a
book, "Cops Across Borders," and started speaking and writing about drug
issues.

In 1994 he left Princeton to start what is now the Drug Policy Alliance.

He and other advocates of change are addressing the issue on four levels.

First, polling the public to see where people are ready for change, then
sponsoring citizen initiatives in those areas of medical marijuana,
treatment instead of incarceration, reform of asset forfeiture laws.

Second, building relationships with legislators, educating them about the
benefit of needle exchanges, for example.

Third, working with officials at the city and county level. And fourth,
conducting a broad public education effort.

All he's asking is that people use a little common sense. Not all drugs are
the same, not all users are the same.

We need drug policies that recognize the complexities of drug use, not a
one-note policy (incarceration) based on misperceptions and emotion that
makes the situation worse.

[SIDEBAR]

Drug forums: The Fourth National Harm Reduction Conference runs through
today at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, 1400 Sixth and Pike. For more
information, see www.harmreduction.org. Tomorrow, the King County Bar
Association, the Loren Miller Bar Association, the Washington Defender
Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington are
sponsoring an all-day forum, "Race, Class and the War on Drugs," at
Plymouth Congregational Church, 1217 Sixth Ave. Call 206-624-3565 for
information. Ethan Nadelmann has been studying drug policy since the 1980s.
He says we're looking at drugs all wrong, and if we want to reduce the harm
drug use causes, we need to get real.