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A consortium of Washington professional associations led by the King County (Seattle) Bar Association (KCBA) late last week called for an end to the drug war. Releasing a one-year KCBA study on illicit drug use, the five major associations called for a drug policy "shift from criminal justice to public health" and for authorities to stop imprisoning drug users. The report, endorsed by the Washington State Bar Association, the Washington State Medical Association, the Washington State Pharmacy Association and the King County Medical Association called the current policy of jailing drug users an expensive and ineffective failure.

The report and joint call for action from these influential organizations adds considerable heft to an ongoing push for drug reform in the state. In the last legislative session, a bill to shorten drug sentences and increase drug treatment funding passed the state Senate but died in the House. And the state budget crunch, cited by legislators as an important reason for drug reform earlier this year, has only worsened. Bills are expected to be introduced in January that would cut sentences for drug possession -- except for possibly methamphetamine, the demon drug de jour -- and perhaps even small-scale drug dealing.

"This is politically significant," said Roger Goodman, head of the KCBA's Drug Policy Project. "We aren't the pony-tailed fringe, we're the establishment," he told DRCNet. "Nowhere in the country have establishment organizations united like this to question the war on drugs. Our combined institutional weight allows us a place at the table when drug policy is being made in the state of Washington."

Andrew Ko, director of the ACLU of Washington's Drug Policy Reform Project, and a member of the task force that created the KCBA study, agreed with Goodman. "This is incredibly important," he told DRCNet. "We have some of the most respected professional organizations in the state coming forward to say the drug war is an abysmal failure. This will really help the legislative effort," he said.

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng was not so pleased. "The report ultimately concludes that we should eliminate sanctions for drug users, abusers, manufacturers and dealers," Maleng wrote in a November letter to the King County bar, "but it offers no alternative."

This is what the task force on criminal sanctions, whose members included not only lawyers and judges but also clinicians, scholars and professionals from many fields, wrote in its conclusion:

• The use of criminal sanctions is an ineffective means to discourage drug use or address the problems arising from abuse. Further, the use of criminal sanctions is extremely costly in both human and financial terms, unduly burdening the taxpayer and bringing about significantly more harm than the use of drugs themselves.
• Rather than punishing someone for drug use per se, any state sanction or remedy should be aimed at reducing the harm directly caused to others by persons using drugs.
• Criminal sanctions should continue to be imposed on persons who commit non-drug criminal offenses, even if it can be determined that chemical dependency contributed to the offense. However, those offenders should be provided the opportunity to receive addiction treatment.
• The shift away from criminal sanctions requires that the state significantly expand its investment in drug addiction treatment, drug education, and drug prevention programs, which have consistently been shown to be much more cost-effective responses to the problems caused by drugs in society. Funding for these programs could be obtained from the substantial cost savings that will accrue from no longer relying on the use of criminal sanctions.

While the call by the professional organizations helps move the center ground in the drug policy debate in Washington state, ardent legalizers may be disappointed. "Talking about legalization is a non-starter," said Goodman. "Instead, we are asking how the state should respond to someone who is arrested for drugs. We are now negotiating with a group of stakeholders -- prosecutors, judges, treatment providers -- to get a bill drafted and introduced," he said. "We are working on reducing sentences and looking at court-supervised drug treatment or education," Goodman explained.

"But the coercive element of the current system is front and center and not likely to change," he added. "Prosecutors hold sway, and that's who we have to deal with. If we can make a proposal prosecutors can live with, we can get that enacted."

And, Goodman added, if no drug reform proposals appear likely to pass by early spring, there is talk of a "treatment not jail" ballot initiative that could be unleashed by frustrated reformers. "Just the threat of an initiative is a real hammer over opponents' heads," he said.

But whatever pragmatic political considerations of the moment shape the nature of drug reform at the moment, only the most dogmatic of legalizers could find much problem with the task force's guiding principles for future drug policy:

• Any public policy toward drug use should result in no more harm than the drug use itself.
• Any public policy toward drugs should address the underlying causes and resulting harms of drug abuse instead of attempting to discourage drug abuse through criminal sanctions.
• The state should regulate drugs in a manner that recognizes a citizen's individual liberties while answering the need to preserve public safety, public health and public order.
• The state should regulate the use of drugs in a manner that uses scarce public resources as efficiently as possible.

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