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(Glen Stark has provided the first installment in a multi-part discussion about the challenges we'll have when crafting a post-prohibition system. We thought it was interesting enough to post to our home page. - Dave) I am gradually of the opinion that drug-policy reform is now a sure thing, and the discussion will need to shift to alternative policies. This is the first in a multi-part series, in which I prattle on about what comes next after the war on drugs. This post attempts to formulate a useful basis for the discussion of the subject.

The following is available in full, in correct formatting, here.

The Guardian has an excellent article: Prohibition's failed. Time for a new drugs policy. The first line sums it up perfectly "http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/06/editorial-drugs-policy-latin-america". It's clear that the debate now needs to be about what comes next. We've created a stupid war against the citizenry our own country. It's completely fucking up our civil liberties, and in fact the entire premise is completely unconstitutional. Argentina's government has realized this, and if we lived in a healthier democracy, we would have figured out the same thing by now. The good news is we seem to be getting there, so the time for figuring out an exit strategy would seem to be now. The issues aren't simple. We have a monstrous police-state machinery in place. We have to pull out the troops and integrate them back into society, and provide them with counselling to reintegrate them into normal society. While this should be an easy sell, as there is a peace-dividend (reduced spending on law-enforcement and prisons, improved civil liberties, reduced crime...) the drug-warriors don't want to give up sucking at the government teat, and form a powerful lobby. The most difficult question of course is "okay, prohibition doesn't work, what now?". Unfortunately, the people who should be working on this are still too afraid to admit prohibition has failed. While they get up to speed, the most productive discussions in this arena are taking place online, in in the periphery of other discussions. I'd like to discuss the issue more directly.

Goals:

So, let's identify some (hopefully) uncontroversial goals, by which we can judge whether a drug policy is working or not.

• minimize addiction rates.
• minimize overdose deaths.
• protect children and uninformed consumers.
• minimize crime (e.g. junkies stealing to get their 'fix')

There are other effects which are more difficult to quantify, such as health impacts (cancer and such) and effects on productivity. While these are worth considering, I think it's a reasonable approach to consider them second-order effects. Once we have a policy which optimizes the easily measured first-order effects, we can worry about the second order ones. The key thing to keep in mind here is prohibition is a nightmarish failure, regardless of which effects you consider. It doesn't accomplish any of the desired effects. The results of prohibition are so disastrously bad, that complete deregulation might end up working just as well, without the enormous cost (socially and economically) of funding the war. An error the drug warriors make is framing the discussion in terms of "zero-tolerance". They want to completely eliminate all drug use. What the last 100 years has shown is that that won't happen. You can keep spending more money, you can keep use the constitution as toilet paper after shitting on people's civil rights, you can get more and more violent and intolerant, you can impose increasingly draconian laws, and people will still use drugs. The figures are there. It takes enormous cognitive dissonance to deny them, so let's stop doing There remains of course the question of how much we are willing to pay to achieve those goals. I suspect that the people who are so willing to spend billions on the drug war, will be less willing to spend the same billions on counselling, care, rehabilitation, education, and maintenance programs. Fortunately, the drug war has been so damned expensive, anything we come up with likely be much more effective at a greatly reduced financial cost. This will allow us to frame all such harm reduction spending in terms of savings over the prohibitionist approach. Having identified a set of goals which I hope we can all agree on, let us consider what will be needed to implement a sane drug policy. It's my conviction that a good drug policy will involve the following components.

1. Rational evaluation of drug harm.
2. Honest drug education.
3. Honest drug scheduling (a rational classification system).
4. A sane handling of the respective classes of drugs.
5. Reality based assessment of policy effects.
6. More power to states and communities for deciding drug policies.

Each of these points is non-trivial, and will require some discussion. Thus they will be the subject of future posts. Some might disagree with necessity of a drug scheduling system at all, and would advocate regulating all drugs like we do alcohol. While I see some merits to such an extremely libratarian approach, I would argue against pursuing such a goal for the following reasons: It's unrealistic in today's political climate, it's too rapid and extreme a change, and I suspect such a policy might be nearly as harmful as the current policy. If it's not clear to me, it's going to be extremely unpalatable for the average citizen. Keeping the classification system allows to handle the approach in a more reasonable and rationed manner. We can agree to pursue a policy that accomplished the stated goals, and analyse each drug case by case, based on a rational assessment of its relative harm, made by qualified medical researchers. It also allows us to separate the questions "do we need drug policy reform", and "what is a good drug policy for drug X". The answer to the former question is simple, the answer to the latter is, in some cases, rather difficult. For example, I am torn on what constitutes a good policy for Heroin or Crack (I do know that current American policies are the wrong answer, but I'm not sure heroin and crack bars are the right answer).

Conclusion and caveats:

To successfully advocate for drug policy reform, I think keeping the above goals in mind is extremely useful. It provides a concrete, uncontroversial framework for evaluating the failure of current policy, and provides some useful indications for steps in a positive direction. There may be additional goals which are useful to bring into the discussion, but in the terrible situation we currently find ourselves in, we should strive to work toward unifying, uncontroversial goals. Once these are acheived, we can open up more controversial, difficult discussions, such as "what right does the government have telling me what I can put in my body anyway", or the ethical merits of a drug-free lifestyle versus the spiritual benefits of psychotropic drugs.

Former Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder has made her career as a “tough on crime” prosecutor and “hang ‘em high” judge, reveling in the moniker "The Princess of Darkness." For years on the bench, she routinely sentenced low-level drug offenders to harsh Rockefeller drug law sentences without batting an eye. Now, in a tight race for Manhattan District Attorney against former Assistant DAs and self-admitted former cocaine users (more on that below) Richard Aborn and Cyrus Vance, Jr., in next Tuesday’s election, Snyder seems to be changing her tune. Citing her “progressive” vision, Snyder says : "For more than 20 years on the bench, I have supported alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent, first-time offenders by promoting programs that provide drug treatment, education, and job training. The most important work I did as a judge was finding young people who were not yet locked into the cycle of incarceration and violent crime, and working with all parties to find effective and appropriate sentencing that avoided incarceration and led to rehabilitation." Some Rockefeller law victims, though, aren’t buying what Snyder is peddling. Writing in the Huffington Post, former Rockefeller law prisoner Tony Papa blasted Snyder for sentencing countless low-level drug offenders as "kingpins," including Jose Garcia, who died in a prison cell at age 69, serving a life sentence under the Rockefeller laws. "Nowadays there is a new and improved Leslie Crocker Snyder," wrote Papa. "She is running for New York City District Attorney and, remarkably, now supports Rockefeller Drug Law reform. I almost fell off my chair when I heard this. She sounded nothing like the old "Princess of Darkness." Do I think Snyder really supports drug law reform? No, I don't. She knows that she needs the black and Latino vote. And she knows that public opinion has shifted, as the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of harsh sentences for drug law violations has been brought to light over the past decade. I guess running for a political office has a way of changing a person's thinking." Here’s another Rockefeller law victim who isn’t buying either: In a debate last week, Snyder admitted smoking pot, but both Aborn and Vance trumped that by admitting they had snorted cocaine as young men. Of course, both men did the mandatory ritual negation of their acts, with Aborn calling his coke-snorting “an error” and Vance saying his message to young people was that “drug use is something to be avoided.” Aborn sounds pretty progressive on drug policy reform: "It's time to stop ruining young people's lives because of a single mistake," he says on his web site. "It's time to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws and replace them with a sensible policy grounded in public health and common sense. Drug kingpins deserve prison. First and second-time non-violent offenders deserve an opportunity to rebuild their lives. And the families of offenders unfairly caught up in the draconian Rockefeller laws deserve to be reunited." And so does Cy Vance: "In April, Governor Paterson signed into law significant reforms to New York State’s draconian Rockefeller Drug laws,” he says on his web site. “As a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and member of the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform which provided the blueprint for these overdue changes, I welcome the progress that has been made on this important issue. During the more than two decades I have been involved in sentencing issues, I have always been an advocate for moving toward a treatment model that protects public safety through rehabilitation where possible as opposed to a punitive model based on incarceration….As District Attorney, I will continue to work with the Governor and State Legislature to ensure that our drug laws include statewide treatment options and re-entry programs that break the cycle of crime by changing behavior and strengthening families." But neither Alford nor Vance will come out and say that people should not be prosecuted for drug use or simple possession, like what they did in their youths. Maybe they don’t believe that. Maybe they think they should have been caught and punished for snorting a line or two. Maybe they think they should have been sent to drug treatment. But somehow, I doubt that. I think it’s more likely that just don’t think it would be politically expedient to say that absent harm to others, drug use should not be the state’s business. And that’s too bad. I don’t live in Manhattan, so I don’t get to vote on Tuesday. I wouldn’t presume to tell New Yorkers how to vote, and I’m not sure which candidate I would vote for. But I know which one I wouldn’t vote for. Got that, Princess? (This article was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)