Voices:
Rolling
Stone
Magazine
Interviews
35
Thinkers
on
US
Drug
Policy
7/27/01
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected], 7/27/01 Often, some of the most serious discussions of important social issues appear in the pages of pop-culture oriented publications. Rolling Stone is no exception to that, and in fact has offered some of journalism's most insightful reporting on drug policy issues to its readers for the past several years. Rolling Stone's latest issue, #875, dated August 16 ('N Sync is on the cover), includes one of their most interesting pieces on the drug issue, a set of brief statements from 35 leaders in different professions speaking out about drug policy from their widely ranging set of viewpoints. Some of them are well known to the drug reform movement -- New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, for example, or the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation's Eric Sterling. Others names might be new to most readers in association with this issue. DRCNet here excerpts a few interesting quotes from some of Rolling Stone's interviewees -- mostly but not exclusively ones with which we disagree -- plus our own comments explaining why. Some quotes we've presented on their own because they were especially well expressed or say things that aren't heard as often as they should be. Orrin Hatch, US Senator (R-UT), in Rolling Stone: "I think marijuana is a gateway drug; nobody can deny that." DRCNet: Nobody except the distinguished scientists from the Institute of Medicine, whose 1998 report was only the latest scholarly work to debunk the gateway theory. What's undeniable is Orrin Hatch's capacity to deny reality. Bernard Parks, Chief of Police, Los Angeles, in Rolling Stone: "[M]ost people we arrest are not just into marijuana, but a myriad of things... Look at Al Capone. They got him not on murder but on taxes." DRCNet: This is a curious example for a couple of reasons. What does Al Capone -- the most notorious gangster in history, who often resorted to violent crime to carry out his multiple illegal businesses -- have to do with average Joe Marijuana User in the US today? Not an especially meaningful example. Then again, maybe it is meaningful, but not the way Chief Parks meant it: Al Capone was made wealthy and powerful by Alcohol Prohibition. Asa Hutchinson, US Representative (R-AR), DEA Chief Nominee, in Rolling Stone: "The current move toward legalization of drugs such as marijuana is harmful and sends the wrong message to young people." DRCNet: What current move toward legalization of marijuana? Dave Matthews, musician, in Rolling Stone: "Whoever came up with the idea of restricting financial aid for drug offenses? He needs to be in prison." DRCNet: DRCNet isn't quite ready to advocate actually sending Rep. Souder to prison for proposing his awful law -- which we're campaigning to repeal -- but the sentiment is appreciated. Carl Hiaasen, novelist and columnist, in Rolling Stone: "I've seen whole neighborhoods destroyed by crack cocaine, and it's terrible. The question is, Would it be better or worse if it wasn't illegal? Would there be less killing? It's something worth considering." Scott Weiland, musician, in Rolling Stone: "Alcohol is legal, and most people aren't alcoholics." DRCNet: Exactly, there would be no mass wave of self-demolition with drugs if they became legal. Most people don't become addicted to drugs because most people have the desire and ability to survive and enjoy life! The human race wouldn't have survived evolution, much less expanded into the billions, if that weren't the case. There will always be some people who have problems related to substance abuse, but the nation is not going to march off a cliff of self destruction like lemmings just because doing so won't get them incarcerated anymore. Norm Stamper, former Seattle chief of police, in Rolling Stone: "[D]ealers are there for reasons that anyone in a capitalist society ought to understand. There is a huge demand for illegal drugs, and as individuals who are also armed want to expand their share of the market, we wind up with a whole lot of cops, dealers and innocent citizens finding themselves literally in the line of fire." Paul Wellstone, US Senator (D-MN), in Rolling Stone: "The first time I went to Colombia, they wanted to show me their aerial spraying operation [to eradicate coca and poppy crops]. And they sprayed me, after claiming it was so accurate. Sprayed me good, in fact. So I'm the only person in the US Senate with the authority to speak on that subject." DRCNet: Hopefully some other Senators will listen to Mr. Wellstone as related bills come up for a vote next week. John Gilmore, computer entrepreneur and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in Rolling Stone: "We need to stop conflating use with abuse, the choice to use the drug with addiction. The idea that people who use recreational drugs need treatment is false. I've known hundreds of people over the years who've used recreational drugs -- teachers, parents, scientists -- and who function normally. They're not rolling around on the ground tearing up the yard, yet if they're caught, they'll be kicked out of their jobs and their lives will be ruined. That's a crime." Bill O'Reilly, anchor, Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, in Rolling Stone: "President Bush asked me to send him my thesis, which I did. The federal government could wipe the drug problem out totally." DRCNet: No, the idea that anything could "wipe the drug problem out totally" is a far-fetched utopian (or perhaps dystopian) fantasy, which even Bill O'Reilly's mixture of treatment and punishment won't come close to accomplishing -- written at Harvard or not. Scott Turow, novelist and former assistant US attorney, in Rolling Stone: "That's the problem with decriminalization or legalization: Nobody's going to propose that it be OK to sell drugs to minors. Where there's a market, there will be entrepreneurs, and legalization wouldn't put all drug dealers out of business, because they'd still be selling to people younger than twenty-one. So all high school and college campuses would still be places where illegal drug money is made." DRCNet: With all due respect to Mr. Turow, this argument is so weak that it always amazes me to see intelligent people make it. Is illegal money being made selling alcohol or cigarettes on the campuses? Are people shooting each other over underage alcohol turf? There is a black market in alcohol and cigarettes, but its impact is trivial in comparison with the enormous destructive power of the black market in totally illegal drugs -- despite the fact that vastly more people use alcohol than use those drugs! One could say that any provision of alcohol or cigarettes to underage users constitutes black market activity, and in that sense, the black market in those legal drugs would have to be considered substantial. I think it's more meaningful, however, to think of that kind of activity as age limit violations within a licit market. Underage substance use and sometime abuse is a legitimate issue in and of itself; but the idea that age limits for currently illegal drugs will produce an underground market of the scale or nature that exists today under total prohibition is ludicrous. Jonathan P. Caulkins, drug policy analyst, RAND and Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School, in Rolling Stone: "There may well be too many nonviolent offenders in prison, but the way the data are presented is grossly distorted. If you want to make it sound like there are a lot of nonviolent drug offenders in prison, you ask, 'How many people are in prison because they were convicted of drug possession?' But you get a much smaller number if you ask, 'How many people are in prison because they were arrested for drug possession but nothing else?' Many people are dealers, sometimes very violent ones, but who pleaded down to possession. There's also a big difference between prison and jail, so if you want to inflate the figures, you say incarcerate.'" DRCNet: This statement may be technically accurate but has multiple problems intellectually. First, jail _is_ incarceration, and including people in jail for nonviolent drug offenses is not an inflation of the figures. Quite the opposite -- not including jail figures undercounts the reality of how many are being denied freedom by perhaps a third. Secondly, Caulkins focuses on people incarcerated for drug possession. But drug law critics are not only concerned about nonviolent drug possessors, but nonviolent drug offenders in general, especially low level offenders. Of course counting only possession will make the numbers look smaller, but that is because it only counts a subset of the people involved. A closely related flaw in Caulkins' remarks are that he points out that some dealers plead down to possession, but fails to mention -- as has been pointed out by Jerome Miller of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in the book "Search and Destroy" -- that many mere users are overcharged with dealing, or are considered dealers because they happened to share with friends or acquaintances, or through the difficult to prove or disprove charge of "intent to distribute." Nelly, musician, in Rolling Stone: "I done seen people get murdered over [drugs], to a point where, yeah, I think they should be illegal." DRCNet: This is one of the most tragic self-fulfilling prophecies of our time. As Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, explains, people as fighting a war over drug money. The vast amounts of money exist, and the fighting over it, because drugs are illegal, not because of any intrinsic property of the drugs other than their desirability to some people to the point where they'll pay large amounts of money and risk arrest to get them. Keeping drugs illegal will only assure that the murders over them continue to happen. Doubtless Nelly has seen terrible tragedies both from drugs and the drug money wars, and these are stories that should be told. But his understanding of the cause and effect relationships underlying them is muddled, leading to a self-defeating policy prescription that can only perpetuate the tragedy. Also from Nelly: "I think the law should be fair... It shouldn't be a cocaine law and a crack law, 'cause crack is cocaine... That's when it gets segregated." DRCNet: Fairness is always important, and even some of the drug warriors like Asa Hutchinson talked about addressing the crack/ powder cocaine sentencing disparity in Rolling Stone's forum as well. The problem is they're just as likely to increase powder cocaine sentences as to reduce crack cocaine sentences. Much of the disparity exists in the way the laws are enforced, not just what the laws say, and criminal justice experts have pointed out that powder cocaine enforcement is also racially disparate and that harsher sentences for powder will send more people of color to prison with lengthy sentences, not fewer. So of course the law should be fair, but be careful what you ask for -- better to change the entire system to something more positive for everybody. Bob Weir, musician, in Rolling Stone: "I've lost so many friends to heroin and cocaine, I can't really very freely sing the praises of those drugs. But, on the other hand, you have to recognize that they're there and they're going to be there, and that a certain kind of person's going to find their way into that trap... I think these drugs should be legal and regulated... I think the only way to trump the cartels is to legalize the drugs, and the cartels will disappear overnight... The best plan is to make them available to people who would otherwise be robbing, stealing and killing to get the drugs; just make it available to them, and see if you can't reel them back." DRCNet: Or if the cartels don't disappear, at a minimum they'll lose some tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year of income and will shrink -- there's no criminal activity whose profitability compares with the illegal drug trade. Paul Greengard, neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner, in Rolling Stone: "It's good that the government tries to restrict access to harmful drugs like heroin and LSD -- street drugs -- that do terrible damage to the brain. But some of the punitive measures against people who use marijuana, those I disagree with." DRCNet: It's good that Dr. Greengard supports marijuana law reform, but as a scientist he should also realize that the harmfulness of other drugs only raises the question of how to best deal with them, but doesn't answer it and certainly doesn't automatically mean they should be banned. A host of reasons both civil libertarian and practical suggest they should not be. Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's publisher: "The war on drugs has become a war against the nation's citizens. The time for drug law reform is now." And thank you, Mr. Wenner, for all you've done to make that possible. Go buy the August 16 issue of Rolling Stone, or look it up at your local library and check it out.
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