It's encouraging to see prominent educators take a stand for more sensible drug policies:

As college students gear up for annual back-to-school parties, a group of university and college presidents in California and across the country this week pushed for a national debate over whether the drinking age should be lowered from 21 to 18.

The current limit ignores the reality of drinking during college years and drives it underground, making binge drinking more dangerous and students less likely to seek help in an emergency, according to a petition signed by more than 100 campus presidents. Though they don't call for an outright age rollback, the campus chiefs said they support "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age." [LA Times]

The drug czar's office went code red, of course, and was probably more than a little displeased at having to respond to a bunch of respected college presidents who couldn't be ignored or accused of being pro-drug. With the help of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they've compiled a list of emphatic counterpoints most of which, if true, would compel us to ban alcohol entirely for everyone. My favorite is that, "all underage drinking is unsafe drinking."

And isn't that just precisely the point here? Kids are getting bombed surreptitiously in dormrooms across America. They're being ushered into the drinking culture by the drunkest people on earth. And they're afraid to ask for help in an emergency because well-meaning morons have criminalized their behavior instead of supervising it.

Of course, beyond the practical problems with the 21 drinking age, I'm still a big fan of the old cliché that if you're old enough to fight and die for your country, you're old enough to drink a beer. That argument should've worked a long time ago, but I guess I've been fighting for drug policy reform long enough to know that being right doesn't mean politicians will do what you propose.

So instead, every American between the ages of 18 and 20 should refuse to serve in the armed forces until this is addressed, lest they should find themselves fighting in defense of a freedom they may not live long enough to taste.

The latest outrage in Canada's heated harm reduction debate came at the hands of Health Minister Tony Clement who went off the rails by questioning the ethics of doctors who practice harm reduction:

MONTREAL — The association representing Canada's doctors rapped Health Minister Tony Clement on Monday after he questioned the ethics of physicians who support the use of supervised injection sites for drug addicts.
…

"Is it ethical for health-care professionals to support the administration of drugs that are of unknown substance, or purity or potency, drugs that cannot otherwise be legally prescribed?" Clement said.

He said that in any other medical setting, supervised overdoses would be considered "highly unprofessional." [Canadian Press]

Canada's doctors beg to differ:

The Canadian Medical Association's president responded to Clement by saying 79 per cent of members agree that safe-injection sites and harm-reduction programs work.

Dr. Brian Day said sites that allow addicts to inject their own narcotics under the supervision of medical staff have been successful in curbing illegal drug use and slowing the spread of disease.

"We specifically take issue with the minister using that phrase," Day told reporters after Clement's speech.

"The minister was off base in calling into question the ethics of physicians involved in harm reduction.

"It's clear that this was being used as a political issue."

Doctors are not politicians. They work to save lives and they are the experts on how to do that. If they all agree that existing programs are working, and some politician disagrees, then he is just wrong and he should shut up.

The drug war debate is ugly and that's not gonna change anytime soon. But one thing we can do without is politicians feigning moral superiority over the doctors who are saving lives every day. That's what this is about. Harm reduction shouldn't be a political issue and if you succeed in politicizing it for the wrong reasons, people will die.

Faced with rising drug overdose deaths and high rates of opiate addiction, Massachusetts lawmakers this week began discussing a $5 million plan to fund two "secure treatment centers" for arrested d

The Drug Czar's blog has been very concerned about harm reduction lately. They've taken the counterintuitive position of opposing efforts to save the lives of drug users, which seems like a strange choice. Now I understand why: they think harm reduction is the opposite of what it actually is.

These so-called "harm reduction" strategies are poor public policy because their underlying philosophy involves giving up on those who can successfully recover from drug addiction. [PushingBack.com]

This is wrong for a very simple reason: you cannot recover from addiction if you're dead. Harm reduction programs are not an alternative to treatment, rather they go hand in hand. Harm reduction keeps people healthy and alive, thereby creating opportunities for them to subsequently recover from addiction.

We could do nothing. That would be "giving up." We could ask drug addicts to either quit or die. That would be "giving up." Instead, harm reduction activists have taken to the streets and attacked this problem directly. They've studied the leading causes of death among drug users and created programs to reduce those casualties. That's the opposite of giving up.

Just pretend for a moment that you're cruel and you want drug users to die in large numbers. How would you go about it? Well, you would begin by eliminating regulated distribution so that users are forced to obtain unsafe products from criminals on the street. You would reduce access to clean needles in order to spread AIDS. You would enforce criminal sanctions against users so that they're afraid to seek help. And you would lobby aggressively against anyone who's studied the problem and proposed programs to reduce AIDS and overdoses.

Now I'm not saying the Drug Czar wants to kill people. I'm just saying he presides over a policy that is perfectly tailored to achieve that outcome. And he dares to suggest that the people out there working with addicts and saving lives are the ones who've given up.

An amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that would have barred the dispersal of federal funds from those departments to any city that opened a safe injection site for drug users

San Francisco city officials last Thursday took a tentative first step toward opening the nation's first safe injection site for drug users.

Last year's wave of overdose deaths from heroin cut with fentanyl, a po

When discussing the idea of drug legalization with those who are unfamiliar with the issue, I am commonly asked, "Wouldn't more people use drugs if they were legal?" or "Wouldn't all the problems i

At tremendous risk to my sanity, I read ONDCP's blog Pushingback.com so you don’t have to. Keep in mind that the following was posted sequentially within a 24 hour period:

First ONDCP criticizes Gov. Bill Richardson for signing New Mexico's medical marijuana law:

Medical Marijuana in New Mexico: A Triumph of Politics Over Science

Next, it reports that prescription drugs now kill almost as many people as murderers:

Report: Prescription Drugs Deaths Nearly Equal Murders

Then it follows up with this:

"Anti-pot Message Needs to be Louder."

The announcement that prescription drugs are killing people at alarming rates is sandwiched between two hysterical posts about medical marijuana. Apparently, it requires massive loss of human life to distract ONDCP even briefly from its frantic campaign against patients with pot.

Meanwhile, murderous FDA-approved medicines are massacring Americans left and right, a fact to which the ONDCP pays lip service before exclaiming, in its very next post, that medical marijuana must really be very dangerous precisely because it hasn't been approved by the FDA.

ONDCP's mantra that FDA-approved medicines are safe and effective and that non-approved medicines are dangerous and unpredictable is exposed as utterly hollow and meaningless right on the front page of its own blog. And they have no clue because the actual human consequences of various medical decisions are the furthest thing from their minds when they write this malicious drivel.

Only by ending the fraudulent campaign against marijuana can the anti-drug movement salvage the credibility necessary to warn people about drugs that can kill you. But they're not ready for that. ONDCP is still busy touting these very same killer drugs as alternatives to medical marijuana. If attempting to comprehend the unintended irony of all this makes you nauseous, you're not alone.

Former Irish talk show host and current head of the Road Safety Authority Gay Byrne has called for a

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For Immediate Release: December 18, 2006

Media Contact:

Dr. Sharon Stancliff
Medical Director
Harm Reduction Coalition
(917) 653-3104
stancliff@harmreduction.org

Harm Reduction Experts Urge Feds To Stem Overdose Epidemic

As Drug War Chronicle publishes its last issue of the year -- we will be on vacation next week -- it is time to look back at 2006.

More than 120 medical experts, public health departments, and drug user health advocates have called on the federal government to take more aggressive steps to deal with a wave of overdose deaths c

People are getting wasted on cocaine again. Science Blog reports on data from the University of Florida that may suggest a coming epidemic: