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Ethan Nadelmann
Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: What punishment should drug dealers receive other than jail? How does this country stop the violence associated with drug dealing and use?
A: Are they referring to the people who run the liquor stores, people who sell cigarettes, the large pharmaceutical companies - or those other people who often end up in jail?
Q: I believe this is referring to people who would be hiding in the corners and selling drugs.
A: So long as the laws are what they are, they need to be enforced - but with sensible discretion. During alcohol prohibition, a lot of people got involved in selling booze. Al Capone was fairly liberal about killing people, making huge fortunes. There were violent criminal gangs. Then you had grandma making wine in the bathtub and grandpa out back making a little bit of stuff in that still - for family and maybe to sell to friends. Al Capone deserved what he got: to go to prison on tax evasion and die of syphilis. I don't know that that would have been the right punishment for grandma and grandpa.
I draw a fundamental distinction between drug sellers who not just make money from dealing drugs but also engage in violent and predatory behavior; are involved in other criminality; take over neighborhoods, housing projects, street corners and intimidate. I also know drug dealers who buy a pound, sell three-fourths of it to their friends and keep the last quarter for themselves. I know of drug dealers who sell heroin to people who live in their community and sell good product - reliable quality, reasonable prices - to a stable clientele who live in the immediate neighborhood, and whose function in that community is essentially no different from the person who runs a liquor store or the corner store selling cigarettes. In fact, the product that they're selling is oftentimes less dangerous than the product being provided in the liquor store.
We live in a world in which the drug kingpins have the information to trade and end up getting little or no sentences, whereas the poor schnooks manning the door, selling a little bit, doing runners, often go to prison for five, ten, 20 years. This is not a just or decent approach.
Q: How do you view pharmaceutical companies who seemingly wish to get people hooked on legal drugs? Are they as culpable as illegal drug pushers?
A: Morally, I would argue that they are at least as, if not more, culpable because we allow them to profit from their activities. I'm also concerned about the role the pharmaceutical industry has played in the propaganda campaigns involving marijuana and some other drugs. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America was founded in good part with money from pharmaceutical companies. Initially the Partnership also took money from alcohol and cigarette companies but was eventually shamed into no longer taking funds from those sources.
Many illicit drugs actually are far less dangerous and have far fewer negative side effects than prescription drugs. We have smoked marijuana, marijuana mixed up into brownies or cakes - a powerful agent in reducing people's nausea, muscle spasticity. Yet the government and the pharmaceutical companies insist the only form the drug should be made available in is a pill that's less effective for most people than pure marijuana - that is hard to hold down if you're nauseous, and that costs a lot more money.
Q: Recent Commonwealth Club guest Joel Siegel, the movie critic from "Good Morning America," talked about his several bouts with cancer and his nausea from chemotherapy. He said that to him food was a demon, he lost weight, was unable to be effective in taking his chemotherapy, so he called a friend; the friend brought over some marijuana, and marijuana helped him instantly. He said he wished he could have taken a pill; he would have done it, but he did, and it didn't help.
A: They had the debate in Congress over the bill to tell the DEA and the Justice Department not to go after medical marijuana. The bill was co-sponsored by Dana Rohrbacker, a Republican. He started talking about when his mother was dying a few years ago, and who was going to tell him or his mother what medicine she could take when she was in that condition? He started crying on the floor of Congress. We did some polling and found over 30 percent of Americans know somebody personally who uses marijuana for medical purposes.
Q: Barry McCaffrey was here in '97 to announce his war on drugs overseas. In 2002 Asa Hutchinson was here and talked about enforcing federal anti-drug statutes. Compare their job as drug czars.
A: Of the public, roughly 80 percent support medical marijuana; 60-65 percent say, Make it legal right now; 15 percent say, If the evidence is there, yes. Twenty percent say, No way will I ever allow it to be legal for anybody to use marijuana for any purposes whatsoever. These folks look at marijuana use the way fundamentalist religious people look at homosexuality: it's simply sinful, forbidden. I would describe that 20 percent as the John Birchers of the drug war. The Clinton administration and Barry McCaffrey operated in fear of the John Birchers of the drug war. The Bush administration are the John Birchers of the drug war.
Q: What drugs should be illegal, if any?
A: When it comes to production and sale of drugs, the case of marijuana is very clear: The only policy that makes sense is one that makes it legal; taxing and controlling it, regulating it. When we repealed alcohol prohibition, there wasn't one model, there were hundreds of models around the country.
When it comes to the other drugs, I'm not sure how we should best regulate their production and sale. Our view is we should merge the DEA into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But we're not so sure that we want crack being sold over the counter without controls. Does it make sense to follow the lead of the Swiss, Dutch, Germans and British - and soon the Canadians and others - and allow heroin addicts to get legal pharmaceutical-grade heroin from a legal clinic when they're unable to quit by other means? Of course. There's overwhelming evidence that works. Does it make sense to take the coca plant that's produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia and to allow its lower potency forms to be sold in tonics, in teas and colas as was done 1,500 years ago, as is done today in Latin America? Of course. They're probably less dangerous than coffee. But do I feel comfortable saying that we should take barbiturates and start marketing them in grocery stores? I'm not there.
Q: What is our total cost on the war on drugs?
?A: The best estimate on direct cost is $40 billion a year. That does not include lost income of the half a million people behind bars today on a drug offense; it does not include the cost of throwing people into the social welfare system, child welfare system. If you want to combine direct and indirect cost, we have to be talking at least $100 billion a year.
Q: Where does the law now stand that allows for prosecution of doctors for helping patients acquire illegal drugs? Can doctors be prosecuted if they just give medical advice that tells patients that they can use these drugs?
A: In late 1996 and early 1997, shortly after California voters endorsed Prop 215, the federal government, led by the drug czar, decided they were going to go after doctors and threaten to take away their licenses if they recommended marijuana for medicinal purposes. We joined with the ACLU and sued the federal government for violating the First Amendment rights of doctors and patients. We won a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction; we won in federal court, then in federal appeals court. The Bush administration decided they wanted to appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court. We hope the Supreme Court will protect the First Amendment rights of doctors and patients. If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against us, it could mean a death knell to medical marijuana in this state and around the country.
Q: When Asa Hutchinson was here, it was the day that the DEA shut down local pot clubs. What is the best way to solve the jurisdictional dispute in drug enforcement between the federal government and the various states?
A: In the case of medical marijuana, make marijuana legal for all adults in this country. We've realized that alcohol has extraordinary medicinal properties, that a few drinks a day has fantastic cardiovascular benefits. Recent studies show it compares favorably to certain types of exercise, so long as you do it in moderation. An over-the-counter drug like aspirin seems to be something like a miracle drug. The Lancet, Britain's leading medical magazine, recently concluded that marijuana may be emerging as the new aspirin of the 21st century.
The second way: There are a number of bills in Congress, in particular those proposed by Barney Frank and by Sam Farr from California, that would address this issue. The third way, the fallback way: Congress says that the federal government, its criminal justice branches, cannot spend money to go after medical marijuana patients, providers and growers.
Q: What about the government's claims of a connection between illegal drug sales and financing of terrorist activities? Has the role of the DEA been changed since September 11?
A: Is money from the illicit sale of drugs involved in helping to fund terrorists? Yes. Pervasively, yes. Around the world, yes. There is a $400 billion a year underground economy involving sale of illicit drugs, a black market from which all sorts of criminal offenders, politically minded and apolitically minded, can readily earn revenue. We see it from official terrorist governments like North Korea; in Afghanistan; we saw it in Vietnam; we see it in Albania and Kosovo; in Latin America. It's an easily accessed source of revenue.
A powerful argument says, if you really want to take steps to de-fund terrorists, end drug prohibition. Drug prohibition is funding terrorism today the same way it funded Al Capone years ago.
What's the impact on the DEA and other agencies? Other federal agencies are being forced to focus on terrorism, because it does constitute a serious threat to our welfare, and spend less time going after drug offenders. The FBI looked silly when it was reported that their agents in Arizona failed to focus on some people who ended up on those planes on September 11 because they were focusing on drugs. Now the FBI is making clear that drug enforcement is no longer one of their priorities. The same is coming true for the Coast Guard and Customs. The DEA's being asked to do this.
But I'm afraid of the potential for morphing the war on terrorism and the war on drugs: seeing an ever expanding criminal justice system become increasingly merged with an ever expanding homeland security system. I'm worried about the military industrial complex transformed into the criminal justice prison complex transformed into what will surely become a homeland security industrial complex during the course of the next ten years. I'm worried about the growth of a maximum surveillance society, in which increasingly sophisticated technologies are used for ever increasing internal surveillance and external surveillance; for the internal surveillance of our bodily fluids, for drug testing becoming ever more invasive, pervasive, proactive; and at the same time, external surveillance: the use of GPS devices eventually being attached to the bodies of every single individual in our society. And all of those systems being merged into one great big database, one unified intelligence system. This sounds like a sort of 1984-ish vision, but after the next major terrorist episode in this country, or the one after that, when people once again start to grasp onto whatever the government offers in the way of security, when they become fearful for the welfare of themselves and their children…
There are people who want to establish levels of control that aren't ultimately just about making us safer; they're about propagating and encouraging a vision of society, or a more efficient way of imposing a certain set of morals. Even if we have to concede some of our traditional freedoms in order to make ourselves and our children safer, at the same time we have to be fighting to carve out new areas, new areas of freedom.
Q: Do you believe the ACLU or others will ever challenge many of the drug testing laws?
A: The ACLU is challenging many of the drug testing laws, sometimes together with the Legal Affairs Office and the Drug Policy Alliance. Unfortunately, last year, in the case of Earls v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court voted five-to-four to allow drug testing of any student who chooses to join a competitive club, including the chess club or glee club. Justice Breyer, who gave the decisive vote in favor of that decision, said that he did so because he believed it would help reduce drug abuse in schools. A day after he was quoted saying that, the leading national study of drug testing in schools was reported on the front page of The New York Times and revealed that drug testing has absolutely no impact on drug use or abuse levels in the schools. The tragedy is when the Supreme Court operates from misinformed judgments and fundamental ignorance.
When they push, as the administration said it will, to drug test all young people going to schools, will the Supreme Court draw the line? What we see is the administration pushing, essentially, for the universal drug testing of all citizens in this society. That's not a direction that we should be headed.
