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An Easy Way to Ask Obama About Drug Policy Reform
President-elect Obamaâs Change.gov website has opened a new round of questions, providing us yet another opportunity to push drug policy reform into the political mainstream. We won the last round of voting, making a marijuana legalization question the top vote-getter on the entire site.Simply click here and create an account. Scroll through to find drug policy-related questions and vote them up. You can also submit your own. This time, the questions are broken into categories, so I assume the top question in each will get a response. Currently, thereâs a drug war question in 2nd place in the "national security" section, so please start by voting for that (itâs our best chance). The "additional issues" section has several good ones as well and I'm sure there are questions in other categories that I've missed.Keep in mind that you can vote against questions as well, so feel free to use the down-vote in a way that reflects your personal political priorities. Finally, please send your friends the link and encourage them to participate as well. Seeing consistent support for drug policy reform on his own site might give Obama exactly the cover he needs to maybe actually do something.
guilty till proven?....???
Without going into great deal of detail about anything. resently pulled over doing nothing wrong other than driving around on a friday afternoon.
The Chronicle will be back next year, er, next week.
Your ink-stained wretch of a Chronicle editor spent this past week relocating from the frigid steppes of the Dakotas to the friendlier clime of Northern California's Sonoma County, the land of milk and honey. Once I made it over Donner Pass on I-80 with the help of tire chains, it was all downhill from there... Next week, in honor of the coming of the new year, I will put on my best Janus face(s), and the Chronicle will look back at the big news of '08, as well as looking forward at what should be/could be the big news of '09, so stay tuned for that pair of features a week from today. I've also got a pile of drug policy-related books that are begging to be read and reviewed. I'll be working on that in the next few days as well, so you can expect to see some reviews dribbling out in the coming weeks. Now, it's the day after Christmas, and I have to venture out to the shopping malls in search of a router for my new Internet set up. See you next year, and next week.
Bush Endorses Harm Reduction Groupâ¦Sort Of
President Bush did a photo-op today in which he delivered used coats at the headquarters of Pathways to Housing and praised the organizationâs efforts to help the homeless. Of course, thereâs nothing surprising about the President doing charitable appearances during the Christmas season. Whatâs interesting is that Pathways to Housing offers a quite unique and forward-thinking approach to the problem of homelessness:Founded in 1992, Pathways to Housing, a not-for-profit organization, works with individuals who have been turned away from other programs because of active substance use/abuse, refusal to participate in psychiatric treatment, histories of violence or incarceration, or other behavioral problems.â¦Pathways to Housing separates housing from treatment. It treats homelessness by providing people with individual apartments, and then treats mental illness by intensive and individualized programs that seek out and actively work with clients as long as they need, in order to address their emotional, psychiatric, medical, and human needs, on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.This is basically a harm reduction approach to homelessness, in that active drug users receive services (including an apartment) in order to stabilize their situation and connect them to opportunities for treatment and health care. Itâs a fantastic program that is achieving remarkable success, which is exactly why Iâm surprised to see the President associate himself with it.Bushâs White House has vehemently pushed an abstinence-first approach to drug treatment, even going so far as to oppose overdose prevention kits on the theory that overdosing would teach users a lesson. Pathways to Housingâs approach to drug addiction is just the complete opposite of everything Bushâs drug policy has stood for. Thus todayâs appearance illustrates once again the gaping disparity between what actually works and what his priorities have been for the last 8 years.
Harm Reduction and Allan's Diplomatic Faux Pas, on the Final Day of the U.N. Drug Treatment Conference, Vienna
At last, my final day in Vienna attending the United Nations' "Technical Seminar on Drug Addiction Prevention and Treatment: From Research to Practice" conference. (To read my scene-setting preamble from earlier this week, click here. Day 1 is here and day 2 is here.) It's a wind-down day for a conference that never wound up â the day when harm reduction was finally allowed to rear its head â so often unwelcome at any conference dominated, as this one is, by the United States, whose official governmental representatives are highly and categorically opposed to harm reduction. Harm Reduction appeared in that very earnest fashion whereby presenters say, "Here is the science. We need no more evidence. However, I can tell that you're not listening, so I'm going to tell you again that this all works, folks." It was also the day that I made a diplomatic faux pas (as we say in the language of diplomacy). More about that later. I missed the first couple of presenters as I was grappling with the sudden disappearance of Internet connectivity and was hoping that the coffee would kick in. The Viennese make good coffee although it's more of a utility tool than anything pleasurable, kind of like putting socks on in the morning. As I arrived, Dr. Shanti Ranganathan from TTK Ranganathan Treatment Centre in India had just finished her talk. I gather that she covered home detoxification and a camp for drug injectors (it could be fun to speculate how that camp would work). Speaking to a colleague later in the day, I learned that due to the rural nature of India, the approach to drug treatment there is very different from the way it's done in the northern hemisphere. It's very community oriented, and villages have a say-so in the process. I wish I'd caught more of Ranganathan's presentation, which was more along the lines of what I'd been hoping to get information about. How do you deliver drug services in resource poor countries? A gentleman behind me asked, "Haven't we overspecialized drug addiction treatment and shouldn't it be mainstreamed to take advantage of existing resources?" At last, a cri de coeur from the audience! Drug services including treatment, harm reduction, and diversion programs have all sprouted like varieties of weeds. They're somehow related, but the root system and the genetic coding are different. So how could countries and governments differentiate and choose among them? Or figure out how to construct the best array of services based upon what was on show? They couldn't, to my mind. After all, how could anyone possibly make sense of the patchwork quilt of treatment systems and social services in the north given that they don't necessarily make sense â or work â for drug users in their country of origin to begin with? It's as if we're displaying the leaning tower of Pisa or parading the Venus de Milo as models that they should aspire to, and then wondering why the resource poor world makes buildings that lean and statues that have no arms. One place I would not want to live is Sweden, where a random study of the kids at the youth program being trumpeted revealed that each youth suffered from an average of four mental disorders; the majority of parents had one. It must be good to have sane parents. Nothing like pathologizing the young, is there? The Dutch rolled into town with their admirably well-developed harm reduction knowledge and advocacy models. Dr. Wim van den Brink from the Academic Medical Centre at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands ran through the continuum of the stages of a drug user's drug taking career and discussed where, when, and which type of a wide range of interventions can and should occur. He included heroin maintenance in this list. (It is widely accepted that heroin maintenance is the fallback option for users who seek treatment but for whom methadone or buprenorphine has not worked. It's not usually a first line option. Outcomes are comparable to all other maintenance programs.) In van den Brink's view, drug-using patients should be able to talk over what their expectations are with their doctors and then negotiate their options. Fancy that. He was pretty much the first speaker who identified drug users as having a role in their own treatment. And he identified abstinence, maintenance, a safe high, and chaotic use as markers on a scale. That may be the first time in 20 years I've heard a clinician identify pleasure as part of the range of options. The legendary Dr. Franz Trautmann from the Netherlands Institute on Mental Health and Addiction ran through the evidence supporting harm reduction interventions including outreach, drop-in centers, and "drug consumption rooms" â the Dutch term for what we in the United States call safer injection facilities or medically supervised injection centers. (The panel facilitator, Gilberto Gerra, Chief of Health and Human Development Section of UNODC, chimed in to reassure everyone that drug consumption rooms do not violate international conventions). It was kind of a relief to hear Dr. Evgeny Krupitsky, head of a laboratory that conducts research on drug addiction at St. Petersburg State Pavlov Medical University, give a convoluted and amusingly wrong-headed talk about the desperate need for the Russians to make naltrexone the first-line response to drug addiction in Russia. (US rejection of harm reduction has its parallel in Russia's refusal to allow methadone.) Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist, which means you can't get high after you've taken it. The opioid receptors in the brain get too blocked up to let any more opioid in. However, as a form of treatment, it's just not very effective. So the Russians keep adding medications to the basic naltrexone dose, unwittingly creating an out of control medication pharmacopoeia for their patients. Monica Beg of UNODC had the task of informing everyone again that syringe exchange is effective in stopping the spread of HIV. Her PowerPoint showed the global distribution of exchange programs (probably limited to the UN-influenced world, to be fair) and did not cover the United States. "The science is clear. Syringe exchange works. The debate is over." Within UNODC there is no debate on the science but as mentioned in my original preamble, UNODC acts as the secretariat for the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) and so when the member States of CND produce Political Declaration, those member states can completely ignore the science as is the case with the US and Russia. In fact, the HIV Prevention Unit deserve a medal for its work in pushing for support from within UNODC. And that's when I just had to speak. I pointed out that despite all of the evidence that needle exchange has been effective in the US (there are 200+ programs, with some of the larger ones federally funded; needle exchange has reversed the HIV epidemic in NYC, once the global epicenter of injection drug use and HIV; scientists at NIDA, NIH, CDC, NIAID are all on record as saying syringe exchange works), an article still appeared on CNN.com just this last July with David Murray, a supposed scientist for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, saying needle-exchange programs "do not succeed in its effort to control the contagion of disease." My point being that while the scientific debate may be over, the political debate continues in the US â not least in the way the US government has been disrupting the process leading up to this March's United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs. (While representatives to the UNGASS, plus numerous non-governmental agencies around the world have been calling for harm reduction to be recognized as an important part of demand reduction, US representatives have continued their war against it.) The chair responded to me by saying that there couldn't be a response to my point as it was a political question and inappropriate for this forum. And that science would win out. Stymied at not having a planned end point, I emotionally said that I was glad that this administration was now out. (Apparently it's taken as bad form to name names.) The interaction was filmed by an Iranian television crew that's covering the Iranian involvement in this meeting, which included Azarahksh Mokri of the Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies, who gave a wonderful presentation on how to introduce a methadone program into a country like Iran. He is a brilliant, charismatic speaker who was succint and on point throughout his talk. Christian Kroll of the UNODC HIV Unit, the last speaker before the closing, had that second returned from a UNAIDS Prgramme Coordinating Board meeting and was fired up from saying farewell to Peter Piot, the UNAIDS Executive Director and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. Kroll ran through the history of the AIDS movement (accidently conflating Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT-UP) and the importance of civil society input into the UN process. I kept waiting and waiting for the punch line. "Are you asking for more civil society input into UNODC?", I asked. Kroll's response: "Yes I am." Being practically the only representative from "civil society" at the meeting and definitely the only person that spoke, I can see his point. We then sang the Internationale and Mr. Kroll and I caught the subway home together. Allan Clear is executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition.
H. CON. RES. 415
This congressional resolution celebrating the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition shows the hypocrisy of the legislature continuing to support the drug war.
A whole new way to rat
The state of Washington has come up with a youth angle on it's ever popular "rat for cash" program.You may now text message the crimestopper line and rat out the felon of your choice.Rewards for a con
The Bush and Obama Campaigns Were Financed with Drug Money
This will probably get me labelled as a conspiracy nut, but it is a really interesting and well-documented subject.
Am I a Hippie Who Doesnât Understand Politics?
Check out this blog post calling me a hippie and accusing me of overreacting to Obamaâs rejection of marijuana legalization. This dude is cool though, I think, so itâs all good. But the whole thing misses the point of my post. I never thought Obama was going to legalize marijuana. I was commenting on the absurdity of creating a whole Change.gov campaign and then using it to uphold the status quo. Obviously, Obama isnât going to go change-crazy from day one, but this is a massively controversial issue, as evidenced by its #1 ranking on his site. Using Change.gov to reject popular and much-needed changes is ironic, and while I never expected anything more, Iâm certainly not going to give him a pass just because his political posturing is painfully predictable.
The Profit Motive for Arresting Marijuana Users
Hereâs a fun article interviewing college students in Massachusetts about their opinions on the new marijuana decriminalization policy. Unsurprisingly, most of them are all for it, but check out this remarkably candid response from an opponent:Ed Finch, a 20-year-old sophomore from Franklin, voted against decriminalization for a couple of reasons. One was "purely financial," he said. His father is a Boston police officer who gets a lot of overtime when he has to go to court after a marijuana arrest, Finch said.Yeah, I guess thatâs pretty cool if the drug war is paying your tuition, bro. Imagine my surprise that none of the police officers who campaigned bitterly against decrim ever mentioned how much overtime the new law would cost them. It took a college student to concede the rank selfishness that drives police to defend marijuana prohibition.Of course, itâs not just about money. Itâs also about spite:But his other reason is based on his own experience."I was frustrated with my stoner friends. Theyâre obnoxious, but I put up with them," Finch said.Well, maybe we should pass a law that says Ed Finchâs friends watch too much Family Guy and never introduce him to any cute chicks.
Vienna U.N. Drug Treatment Meeting Day Two: The Clockwork Orange Brainwashing Day
Ah, the Clockwork Orange brainwashing day. (For my preamble, click here. For coverage of day 1, click here.) There's nothing in my cranium. I've blocked it all out. A windowless auditorium and a set of presentations where the direction from the organizers to the presenters was "keep it tedious and repeat the information from the day before." Allan Clear, after the nine hours took its toll I sat for 9 hours or so waiting for some kind of stimulation that was not arriving. Supplied with powerpoint presentations of the most unimaginative kind, graphs and pie charts and tables, presenters made a great show of their learning and authority, but speakers had a complete inability to talk in either a compelling or dynamic fashion. Did no one on the organizing committee check to see if presentations would overlap? John Strang, National Addiction Center, United Kingdom, talked about methadone as Herb Kleber, Columbia University, USA, did the day before; a panel on brief interventions on which presenters both used the same WHO tool as a discussion point. You can't blame the presenters. The organizers clearly had a concept in mind and that's where it stayed â in someone's mind or in a folder in a cabinet hidden behind cleaning supplies that had been pilfered from the commissary. The conference is presenters from university settings and addiction centers from the USA, Canada and the UK who have failed to adapt their presentations for their audience. I cannot imagine that Herb Kleber actually put any thought into what he presented. His secretary pulled a canned presentation from his presentation file in 'My Documents' and handed it to him at 4:00 pm on Friday afternoon. How does science on methadone translate into practice for someone who is dealing with an emerged heroin epidemic in Dar es Salaam? Yes methadone and buprenorphine is very effective but how do you deliver it to drug users in a country that has no history of addiction medicine, where methadone is not currently in the country, where users are not going to pay for medication and where the government is going to be looking over their shoulders for a reaction from the International Narcotics Control Board if they deviate from a clinic based system? I might be the only person who really cared. Three quarters of the audience didn't show up today. After all, there is Christmas shopping to be gathered up and taken home. "From research to practice" is the tag after the colon in the description of the conference. The absent audience didn't get that on day 2 and maybe they knew it wasn't going to be delivered anyway. Perhaps, however, none of this is the point. As Gilberto Gerra, Chief of Health and Human Development Section of UNODC indicated on the first day, UNODC is gathering steam to launch a big demand reduction initiative. However, to make it work, UNODC needs US buy-in. Therefore a US dominated event is a perfect sop to butter them up. It's a solid way of branding drug treatment as the demand reduction approach. The estimable John Strang choked nervously during his presentation when he mentioned 'harm reduction', lamely explaining that it's not a controversial term in Europe. European governments do see harm reduction as part of a health care continuum for drug users and hopefully can ensure that not only can they continue to fight for it through the UNGASS process but can see it assimilated into the new UNODC demand reduction initiative. Thomas Barbor from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine delivered a fairly decent albeit guarded presentation on brief interventions. It would have been nice if he could have stretched out a little and talked in more detail about applications. Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) fits snugly into the harm reduction fold. It's aimed at non-problematic users in settings that are generally not used to discuss alcohol and drug use. Essentially, workers at needle exchange programs deliver brief interventions everyday but SBIRT takes it to emergency rooms and other venues and approaches a different audience. It's not a technique aimed at cessation of drug use and it's not necessarily targeted at people with problematic use although if those individuals are ferreted out, then they get the treatment referral. It was interesting watching Herb Kleber grapple with the concept (although it can't be new to him). He wanted to know what the sustained effect was on keeping use down after the intervention. However that's not the point. If use remains down, that's cool. But if the user can be more conscious of their use and not drink and drive for instance, then that's great. Kleber wasn't the only one confused. I had dinner with a confused David Joranson from the University of Wisconsin. He's working with Scott Burris from Temple University and Dave Burrows from aidsprojects.com from the Land of Oz on providing access to pain medication to people in need. "So why are we lumped in with harm reduction?" was his plaintive cry. No reason that makes any sense, David, except when you get involved with providing pain medication to people who are suffering you come up against control mechanisms and fear. And when you provoke those feelings in authorities you get lumped in with all the other transgressors â the queers and the junkies and the sex workers â and life becomes a series of negotiations and compromises. Good people get hurt and great projects get unreasonably scrutinized because ideologues cannot get over their dogma and paranoia. Methadone and buprenorphine are essential medicines according to the WHO. However, some funding for the pain medication issue has been applied to a short film that covers the health-oriented side (as opposed to the deviant side!) of opiate use. Called "The Two Faces of Opium" it shows the need for pain medicine and shows methadone as an addiction medicine. Unfortunately only about 25 people got to see this film as it was shown as an evening side event. I think the daytime audience would have benefited a great deal more from the film than the anything else on view today. Allan Clear is executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition.
Symphony in A#
I wanted to clarify something in my blog 'Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.' Some person seems to think I was upset that Obama did not answer my mail personally, but I am not naïve enough to t
Shooting Down Innocent People in Airplanes Wonât Win the Drug War
When the average person forms an opinion regarding the efficacy of our drug policy, are they taking into account the totality of brutal unforeseen disasters that regularly occur in the course of our international anti-drug crusade? Alas, the reality of the actual drug war (not the one the drug czar talks about) is considerably uglier than many among us realize.Thatâs why this Wall Street Journal piece from Mary Anastasia OâGrady stands out as an example of what drug war reporting in the mainstream press ought to look like.Innocents Die in the Drug WarOf all the casualties claimed by the U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America, perhaps none so fully captures its senselessness and injustice as the 2001 CIA-directed killing of Christian missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in Peru.  â¦On that day the Bowers family was flying in a single-engine plane over the Amazon toward their home in Iquitos. Mrs. Bowers was holding the infant on her lap when a bullet fired by the Peruvian Air Force, under direction of the CIA, hit the aircraft, traveled through her back and into Charity's skull. The plane crash-landed on the Amazon River. Mr. Bowers, his young son and the pilot survived. Neither the plane nor its passengers were found to be involved in any way in the drug business and initial reports said that the mistaken attack was a tragic one-time error.Yet, as OâGrady explains, this was in fact the perfectly predictable consequence of an out-of-control drug interdiction program that basically shot planes out of the sky with no investigation and no oversight. The problem isnât just that they killed innocent people, but that they created and maintained a policy that they must have known would produce that result. Itâs the perfect exhibit in the total disregard for innocent human life that is central to the drug war itself.To her credit, OâGrady is willing to make the connection between violence and prohibition:Consider the fact that Mr. Clinton's justification for the Airbridge Denial Program was that drug trafficking was a threat to Peruvian national security. Of course it was: Prohibition naturally produces powerful criminal networks that undermine the rule of law.â¦Since then, U.S. interdiction has put the pressure on Colombia and the problem is now resurging in Peru. The latest reports are that Mexican cartels are teaming up with remnants of the Shining Path terror network to rebuild the business, proving once again the futility of the supply-side attack as a way of minimizing drug use in the U.S.In other words, we get nothing in exchange for the death and destruction weâve subsidized and sustained for all these years. Nothing, that is, except a bunch of dead innocents, a smoldering civil war below our border, a world-record prison population, and a shameless political culture that still swears this is the only way to deal with drugs.
Day One at the U.N. Drug Treatment Meeting -- Slightly More Interesting Than Predicted
More than 200 people from around the globe have shown up for the first day of this drug treatment meeting at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna. (If you're just tuning it, it may be helpful to read my first post, from yesterday, where I set the stage for what's to come.) Tantalizingly titled "Technical Seminar on Drug Addiction Prevention and Treatment: from Research to Practice," the tag line at the bottom of the conference program awkwardly hawks "NOTHING LESS than a qualified, systematic, science-based approach such as that used to treat other health conditions" â a fair enough goal. I tell you, the crowd was on tenterhooks for the event to begin. In truth it was the most subdued, dead crowd ever gathered. Perhaps the most exciting event of the day was kangaroo hotpot on the canteen menu. To be clear, I have less interest in the science on show than on the subtexts of the dialogue and what is said and not said â all with an eye on the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting occurring next March. At that convening, countries will gather to review the last decade of UN-approved international drug policy, set forth at the first United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs in 1998, and issue a new UN Political Declaration. I suspect that the goings on at this prior conference may offer hints of what's to come. Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of the UNODC, was in fine fettle opening the event. True to his pompous, unapologetic manner he was disrespectfully late, but his opening remarks were good. He wants the CND/UNGASS process to put increased money into demand reduction in order to put health at the center of the equation and reduce drug related crime. Consequently, Costa called for the rebalancing of drug control (by putting a greater emphasis on health), expressed concern that too little is spent on treating drug addiction, and acknowledged that law enforcement should not be used as an alternative to treatment. Costa also rejects the over-incarceration of drug users (he's been consistent about this). I'd like to think that Costa's comment re: over incarceration was an unsubtle dig at the US, where 1 in 31 US citizens live under the auspices of the criminal justice system. However, I suspect he's directing his remarks at the world below the equator or at Central Asia. In so many words, he admonished member states for not protecting their drug users and respecting their human rights. The day went downhill from then on in, as the conference morphed into a showcase for the disconnect between the science around drugs and addiction and the current reality re: which research-based policy recommendations are ever actually applied or funded or prioritized by governmental bodies. Consider the presentation of the keynote speaker, Dr. Nora Volkow, who heads the United States' National Institutes on Drug Abuse. I like Volkow. She cares about people who use drugs, and exudes compassion and even fire when she defends them. Before her presentation, we had a conversation about the federal ban on the funding of syringe exchange, and she expressed real excitement about working for Barack Obama. Ingo Michels, representative of Germany's Ministry of Health Certainly Dr. Volkow's presentation on the science of addiction was well done, and it affirmed much of what has been said for years by those of us who are involved in harm reduction. She ran through her Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan studies (they show the effect of drugs on the brain) and noted that there is hope of our someday being able to know in advance who is vulnerable to problematic drug use. In stating that abstinence is 'magical thinking' and addiction has a smorgasbord of serious medical consequences, including hiv/hcv, cancer, and mental illness, associated with it, she laid out a fine argument for embracing harm reduction without connecting the dots of course. She noted that people are people are at risk due to environmental factors. But looking at the blues, reds and yellows in the dissected brains on show, one would be hard pressed not to consider the color of the person who possessed this brain to begin with and then the hard, cold facts re: the skin color of who actually gets locked up for long periods of time in the US for having what Dr. Volkow was describes as a brain disease. The drug war in the US has disproportionately affected people and communities of color. Looking at the science of addiction doesn't dispel the effects of institutionalized racism. Nor does it reunite families, deliver education, or prevent HIV transmission. Scientific discovery is only the first step; it won't do us much good unless and until it's translated into real world policies and services. Hopefully that's Dr. Nora Volkow's dream under Obama (and Obama's dream as President): to put the theories that come out of what she and her colleagues are learning in the lab into practice. Most of the rest of the presentations were equally predictable. Drug treatment works. Drug prevention is cost effective. Drug treatment is cost effective. Addiction is a brain disease. Methadone works. Buprenorphine works. And that's all to the good. But will any of the policy recommendations that come out of this research ever actually be applied or funded or prioritized by governmental bodies? Anywhere? Vladimir Poznyak, from the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at the World Health Organization (WHO), was the first person to bring up harm reduction. Clearly there is some tension between WHO and this UNODC meeting. Given the consistent commitment WHO has expressed for harm reduction, Poznyak pointedly highlighted needle exchange and harm reduction as HIV prevention in a WHO technical manual during his talk. But for my money the Man of the Day was Ingo Michels from the Ministry of Health in Germany. Michels' presentation, which detailed Germany's comprehensive drug treatment system and included information on safer injection sites, heroin prescription, and drug user organizations, clearly rejected the extent to which harm reduction had remained hidden and unspoken during the first day. It was also the first indication that harm reduction is more than just a means of HIV prevention. Your intrepid reporter then got the first question in. Prattling on in my usual fashion that is never succinct and always more about making a point rather than asking a simple question, and bearing in mind what I said in yesterday's post about the way in which US governmental representatives at these UN meetings always suppress the extent of harm reduction and needle exchange programs in the US and their success, I went at it. I detailed out the number of needle exchange programs in the US; noted out that the larger programs are federally funded (except for needles); and pointed out that they represent a continuum of care for drug users, act as a safety net for drug users who are "out of treatment," and make referrals to drug treatment. In short, I argued that the UN is cornering itself by limiting harm reduction programs as just an HIV intervention. Well, that set Michels off. He slammed the US representatives for blocking the UNGASS process and said he hoped the Obama Presidency would mean that there would be a new UNGASS delegation at this March's meeting. (Being fairly new to this process, I think he probably overstepped his bounds. Excellent stuff.) Surprisingly, the conservative panel facilitator, Gilberto Gerra, Chief of Health and Human Development Section of UNODC, also animatedly joined the discussion by saying that UNODC believes that harm reduction should be part of the "comprehensive package." I'll be damned. More battle to be joined tomorrow. Allan Clear is executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition.
When it Comes to Marijuana Laws, Obamaâs Website Should be Called Same.gov
Did anyone notice how the marijuana legalization question was ranked #1 on Obamaâs Change.gov site, but he answered the question 4th? Not only did Obamaâs team fail to explain the "no" answer, but they didnât even honor the 1st place popularity rank the question earned when it drew the most votes from the public.Thereâs nothing surprising about any of this, but it is indeed perfectly emblematic of the profound lack of seriousness with which this issue is treated in our political culture. The marijuana question was answered second to last and received the shortest response of all the questions. Itâs just not something our political leadership wants to talk about. There is scarcely anything less important to them than this and theyâd really appreciate it if we stopped asking about it.But we wonât stop. Certainly not now. Perhaps we appreciate the symbolism behind Obamaâs Change.gov campaign even more than its authors do. Yes, we surged at the opportunity to push forward ideas long relegated arbitrarily to the political fringe. We seized upon this new venue for unfiltered political dialogue, an entirely unclaimed territory in which we had yet to be told we were unwelcome. We clutched it in our collective fist, squeezed it with all our might, and recoiled in disgust when it squirted us in the eye. Sure, we got burned, but we saw it coming. They didnât see us coming. They never could have imagined that this experiment with online democracy would find us standing at the front of the line. They shook their heads, sighed and joked that this is what you get when you let the frickinâ internet dictate political priorities. Well, itâs fine with me if they think that, because theyâre the ones kissing the internetâs ass in the first place. Will they now retreat to the editorial pages and go back to letting the pundits tell them what the people want?
High School Seniors Are Using Lots of LSD This Year
Jacob Sullum pokes numerous holes in the drug czarâs recent claims of dramatic drug war progress. This in particular jumped out at me:â¦if Walters wants to take credit for every drop in drug use that occurs on his watch, he'll have to take the blame for the enormous increases in past-month LSD use among high school seniors and past-month methamphetamine use among sophomores, both of which nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008 (hitting a whopping 1.1 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively).Be careful out there, kids! Thanks to the total failure of the war on drugs, you are up to your asses in acid and meth, but seriously, do not mix them. It will suck. Youâll get arrested (and probably tasered, too). See, contrary to the drug czarâs wild accusations, those of us who want to end the drug war have no interest in seeing young people make poor choices. And the fact that Americaâs high schools are overflowing with acid and speed ought to help illustrate why closing the black market is actually a perfectly rational approach to keeping powerful drugs away from our kids.
More on the Ryan Frederick Case
Radley Balko has new details in the case of Ryan Frederick, the Virginia man who was charged with murder for killing a police officer who he mistook for a burglar during a questionable drug raid.The story just gets more complicated all the time, but if one thing remains clear, itâs that the entire case against Frederick is a sham. The loss of life is regrettable indeed, but it is the result of shoddy drug war policing, not premeditated cop-killing by Frederick.
New Jersey Medical Marijuana Bill Gets Favorable Committee Vote
As a native New Jerseyan, I'm pleased to report that a committee of the state senate gave its approval yesterday to the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act. One of the cosponsors of the bill, Sen. Loretta Weinberg, even represents my hometown. The upcoming Drug War Chronicle will have a feature story on the vote, and Phil actually got a preliminary version of that to me last night, so I thought I would make it available here on the blog. The article will be finalized sometime Thursday, but in the meanwhile you can read it here.
Why Should You or Anyone Care About This Week's U.N. Anti-Drug Meeting?
What's on in Vienna this week? Oh it's the "The Technical Seminar on Drug Addiction Prevention and Treatment: From Research to Practice." What on earth can be the reason for holding a drug treatment meeting at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna right before the holidays? Alas, I'm not familiar enough with local tradition to know whether it's as customary as a carol service or just another of the Bush Administration's dying groans â a last-ditch effort to spend down its budget or influence UN drug policy. There's plenty of reason to believe that it might be both. The US is the prime instigator of this conference, charmingly titled (in classic UN-speak) "The Technical Seminar on Drug Addiction Prevention and Treatment: From Research to Practice." Don't let the exciting title fool you. What happens here under the auspices of the US, in league with its dear friend Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of UNODC â who is capable of saying very sensible things, but is also on record as having said that "One song, one picture, one quote that makes cocaine look cool can undo millions of pounds' worth of anti-drug education and prevention" â may well set the tone of future international drug policy. Although not directly connected to this conference, we'll know for sure in March. That's when the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), which serves as the UN's governing body on these issues (the UNODC is the CND's administrative wing), will be having its 52nd Annual Meeting here in Vienna. The business at hand will include a Ministerial segment which will sign off on and release a new UN Political Declaration. This follows a year-long review and evaluation of the performance of the policies set forth during the 1998 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs, which was the first of its kind. And why should you or anyone care about these meetings or UN Declarations? Because they have genuine implications in the national, international, and local level. The policies set during that first 1998 UNGASS on Drugs came down firmly on the side of the criminalization of illicit drugs and their users. Its goal was "eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008." Translation: it rubber stamped the ongoing War on Drugs. In the US, this disastrous, expensive, and ineffective strategy costs taxpayers a cool 12 billion in 2004 alone, and swelled the ranks of non-violent first-time drug offenders in US prisons, many of them low-income or working-class people of color. It has been equally disastrous internationally, from Mexico to Afghanistan. Now the future of international drug policy rests on what this new UNGASS Declaration will say. And at this very moment, out of your sight and away from the news media, there's a pitched battle being waged in the Demand Reduction Working Group â one of many working on that document. Representatives from the meetings' participating nations and from outside community-based organizations are arguing amongst and between themselves about the strategies for reducing illicit drug use. Are the collected nations going to sign on to yet another tour of duty with the War on Drugs? Or will this Declaration finally shift the focus of international drug policy towards a human rights, public health-based approach that will serve rather than merely criminalize and punish drug users? The answer to that question will be particularly important to countries that are in the process of developing their own drug plans. Certainly they should be able to turn to a science and public health-based document. Even 11 years ago, when the first UNGASS Political Declaration and action plans were being written, the science was clear re: the importance of harm reduction and syringe exchange as a mean of preventing HIV among people who use drugs. Even then, there was murmuring about the importance of developing drug policies that intersected with a human rights framework, and of "evidence based" solutions. Times have changed and our thinking has become more sophisticated. Drug treatment has to have a bigger role now; the interplay between drugs and infectious disease is more apparent. The world of drug policy has the opportunity to learn some towering lessons learned from the world of HIV, which long ago learned to include People Living with AIDS in policy discussions. In short, now is the moment for an evidence based, health oriented, human rights based international drug policy. But will the US stand aside and let that happen? Or will countries developing their own drug policies be denied access to evidence-based drug strategies? Will they be forced instead to rely on the existing official drug plans of countries like the US, which is notorious for exporting the same bad drug policy as it reserves for us at home and for acting out in a belligerent, bullying style at most international forums? At meetings held here in Vienna, the US delegation and the US mission are infamous for having apoplectic fits every time the term "harm reduction" is raised. They do so despite the considerable amount of harm reduction work that takes place in the States and its proven effectiveness in curbing HIV; despite the amount of federal funding that supports some of the larger programs around the country; despite the promotion of Safety Counts as an HIV prevention intervention; despite widely available methadone; and despite the great work that has curbed overdose and viral hepatitis, and made possible housing and mental health care for people who use drugs. Still, the State Department and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have happily and successfully ignored these vast accomplishments, and never breathed a word of them to fellow governments at these meetings. The rest of the international community believes that no harm reduction occurs in the States. And for so long as they believe that, they will be less well equipped to counter the resistance of their US counterparts. Which brings us to the issue of why I'm here and why we need to show up to meetings such this "technical seminar" â even in mid-December. Because back in July 2008, over 300 community-based organizations from around the world came together under the auspices of UNODC to prepare our own Political Declaration. And while not perfect, our Declaration is inclusive of people who use drugs, human rights, and harm reduction. http://www.harmreduction.org/article.php?id=782. Still, the work we put into that document will go unheeded and unused if countries like the US (and its allies in the War on Drugs, Russia and Japan) remain resolutely opposed to good policy reform. Someone has to challenge our government or we'll stay stuck in our rut and produce the same tired, regressive UN document no matter who has been elected to the White House. Anyway that's the scene setting for the next couple of days. There could be some cloak and dagger goings on â hints of the meeting to come in March. Or it's quite possible that this drug treatment conference is going to unfurl as, well, a very boring drug treatment conference in which case I'll report back on the hairstyles of the US Government delegation. Manana â¦â¦. Allan Clear is executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition.