Pubdate: Mon, 16 Apr 2001
Source: In These Times Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2001 In These Times
Contact:  2040 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60647
Website: http://www.inthesetimes.com/
Author: Steven Wishnia
Note: Steven Wishnia Is A Senior Editor At High Times And The Author Of Exit
25 Utopia (The Imaginary Press).

WHAT'S YOUR ANTI-DRUG?

National Drug Policy Will Be More Conservative Than Compassionate

In his first interviews as attorney general, John Ashcroft pledged to
"reinvigorate," "renew," "refresh" and "re-launch" the war on drugs, arguing
that the Clinton administration had been lax in fighting narcotics.

It's difficult to imagine how Bill Clinton could have been much harsher,
short of public executions of drug dealers.

Under his administration, federal prisons opened at a rate of almost one a
month, confining a population that is now 58 percent drug offenders--almost
three times the percentage in state prisons, according to figures from the
Washington-based Sentencing Project. The Clinton administration also refused
to fund needle-exchange programs, prosecuted medical-marijuana patients, and
began to take sides in the Colombian civil war in the name of fighting
cocaine.

A devout prohibitionist, Ashcroft is now the top-ranking federal official
dealing with drugs.

As of early March, President George W. Bush had not yet appointed anyone to
head the White House drug-policy office. (Candidates mentioned include
former Florida Rep. Bill McCollum, a militant prohibitionist, and Elizabeth
Dole, who has backed both more drug treatment and more drug testing.)
"Ashcroft is the only person in the country who thinks that drug treatment
doesn't make sense," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project.

Yet, facing a diverse and growing movement to ameliorate or end prohibition,
Bush's drug policy may turn out to be less fanatically hardline than his
father's. "He's made some good noises in some good directions," says Jerry
Epstein, president of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. Last year, Bush
suggested that medical marijuana was a states' rights issue.

More recently, he has dropped hints about increasing spending for drug
treatment and reducing the 100-to-1 disparity between federal sentences for
crack and powder cocaine. (For his part, Ashcroft has advocated reducing the
crack/coke sentencing disparity by increasing penalties for powder cocaine.)

Whether Bush means it is another story.

After a Bush aide met with medical-marijuana patient Tiffany Landreth in
Austin last September, his office issued a statement that "current federal
law bans all marijuana use, and the governor does not support changing those
laws." As governor, Bush signed a law in 1997 increasing the minimum for
possession of less than a gram of cocaine--barely enough for one night of
"youthful indiscretion"--from probation to six months in a state jail. About
3,000 people are now incarcerated under that law. And Bush also "adamantly
supported" school districts that wanted to test all students for drugs,
according to William Harrell, head of the Texas branch of the American Civil
Liberties Union. "We should all collectively shiver," Harrell says. Bush's
record, he adds, was one of "total militarized policing and total disregard
for constitutional rights."

Harrell points out that in 1999 the Bush administration named undercover cop
Tom Coleman "Lawman of the Year." Coleman's accomplishment was setting up
the arrests of 43 people in the small Panhandle town of Tulia on cocaine
charges.

Forty of the people arrested were black, and the ACLU has filed a civil
rights lawsuit charging that many of them were framed--in two separate
trials, Coleman testified to being in different places at the same time (see
"Easy Targets," page 23). Harrell says the drug task force program that
assigned Coleman to Tulia was "designed and directed" by Bush's office, and
specifically targets users and small-time dealers in areas where convictions
are easy to get.

Texas now has more people in prison than any state.

According to state figures, its 107 prisons, 17 state jails and nine
"substance abuse felony punishment" facilities hold 151,000 inmates.

A 2000 study by the Washington-based Criminal Justice Institute found that
Texas had 1 percent of its entire population (and 3.9 percent of its black
population) in prisons or local jails, the second-highest rate in the nation
after Louisiana. One-fifth of them were imprisoned on drug charges. Between
1988 and 1998, according to the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, the state opened
77 new prisons--but just one new state university campus. "Nothing that he
did as governor indicated a willingness to move away from prohibition,"
Epstein says.

However, unlike his father, who reigned at the height of the '80s crack
scare (and also looked the other way at the Nicaraguan contras' fundraising
deliveries from Colombia to California), George W. Bush faces a growing
anti-drug war movement that includes significant numbers of conservatives.
The orthodoxy of prohibition--that illegal drugs breed violence and
depravity and must be stamped out by any means necessary--is being
challenged on numerous fronts.

Nine states and the District of Columbia have passed laws legalizing medical
marijuana, despite a 1970 federal law that declares marijuana to have "no
accepted medical use."

One strain in what is awkwardly called the "drug-law-reform movement"
focuses on "harm reduction" policies such as needle exchange.

It is more realistic to expect addicts to take small steps toward
self-preservation than one giant leap to abstinence, the argument goes, and
it's better for them to shoot two bags of heroin with a clean needle than to
shoot 10 bags with a virus-infested set of "gimmicks." Another strain, more
libertarian and marijuana-oriented, asserts that the government has no right
to jail people for private behavior comparable to drinking or home-brewing.
Others question the length and inflexibility of drug sentences, the numbers
of people in prison, and the racial disparities among those behind bars.

New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican with libertarian sensibilities,
advocates legalizing marijuana.

While he believes that employers have the right to drug-test workers, and
personally opposes drug use, Johnson is one of the few politicians who
doesn't say he "experimented" with marijuana. "I smoked it," he emphasizes.
Another Republican, New York Gov. George Pataki, has proposed some easing of
the state's draconian "Rockefeller laws," which mandate 15 years to life for
possession of four ounces of heroin or cocaine, regardless of the
defendant's role in the deal.

And with three-fourths of the nation's drug prisoners being black or Latino
(that figure is more than 90 percent in New York, Maryland and Illinois),
African-Americans, whose neighborhoods bore the worst of the crack-trade
wars, are increasingly weary of seeing multitudes of their young men locked
up. Black-community pressure got President Clinton to free Kemba Smith, who
served six years of a 24-year sentence essentially for being a crack
wholesaler's ex-girlfriend. "I don't think the law was intentionally
designed to oppress one group of people over another.

But in its implementation, it certainly has had a disproportionate effect on
people of color," former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke told High Times last
year.

Some of this dissent may reach into the Bush administration. Epstein
speculates that policy ultimately will be determined by whoever wins the
power struggle between committed drug warriors, advocates of more treatment
and a handful of libertarians. One possibility that may emerge would be a
"compassionate conservative" model: continued prohibition coupled with a few
token statements and programs to give it a veneer of humanity. "Status quo
with a little sugar on top," says Allen St. Pierre of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

"I'm more hopeful than I expected to be," says Kevin Zeese of Common Sense
for Drug Policy. He sees possible movement in five areas: increased
treatment, easing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing racial profiling,
eliminating the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity, and maybe legalizing
needle exchanges.

Ashcroft is an ardent foe of needle-exchange programs, Zeese notes, but
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson funded them while he was
governor of Wisconsin.

Drug courts, in which defendants are sentenced to mandatory treatment
instead of jail, would fit the "compassionate conservative" model perfectly.
They are the centerpiece of Pataki's proposal in New York, which he released
in January. It would allow judges to send some people charged with
possession of cocaine or heroin to a court-run rehabilitation program, with
probation if they complete it, and prison if they don't. However, most of
the state's drug prisoners are low-level dealers with prior felony
convictions and would not be eligible. (Democratic legislators have
introduced a counterproposal that includes them.)

But compulsory treatment brings up several caveats.

First, there's little funding for voluntary treatment, so focusing resources
on compulsory treatment means that poorer addicts would have to to be
arrested before they could get help. Second, if it is crossed with Bush's
plans to turn social services over to "faith-based" groups, the result could
be forcing drug users into programs telling them the only way to conquer
their addiction is to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

Third, treatment costs money.

Bush has promised to add $1 billion in federal funding, a small fraction of
the amount spent on drug enforcement. It is generally estimated that about
30 percent of total government drug spending goes to treatment and
education. President Clinton vowed to increase that proportion, St. Pierre
recalls, but never did.

Whatever hopes people have about Bush, they do appear to contain at least
some wishful thinking, largely stemming from the "Nixon going to China"
theory: that it will take a Republican to end the war on drugs, someone free
of any hippie-liberal "soft on crime" stigma.

Gary Johnson might fit that bill, but it is extremely difficult to imagine
George W. Bush legalizing marijuana.

For one, a significant part of his political base comes from the culture
warriors of the Christian right, for whom marijuana and drugs are a central
moral issue.

The Family Research Council opposes legalizing industrial hemp, the
minimal-THC strain of cannabis grown for fiber.

FRC drug-policy specialist Robert Maginnis writes that "hemp is clearly
identified with the counterculture" (not exactly untrue) and that legalizing
it "sends the wrong message" about marijuana. The FRC also opposes medical
marijuana.

In a pending Supreme Court case, it filed one of only two amicus briefs
supporting the government's appeal of a lower-court ruling that "medical
necessity" may exempt an Oakland "cannabis buyers' club" from federal
prosecution.

Bush also has to face a potential quagmire in Colombia. While U.S.
intervention there clearly fails the "Powell Doctrine" tests of a clear
objective and an easy victory, Bush seems unlikely to abandon a military
mission in progress, especially one supposedly against the twin demons of
drug cartels and leftist guerrillas. (Plan Colombia conveniently ignores the
right-wing paramilitaries' involvement in the drug trade.)

Bush's delay in picking a drug czar could be a sign that he wants to avoid
drug issues as much as possible.

It is hard to argue that prohibition is not an awful flop. It can't stop
what it's meant to stop: The nation's prison and jail population has
quadrupled since Ronald Reagan took office 20 years ago, but cocaine and
heroin prices have plummeted.

Most Americans under 55 have either smoked marijuana themselves or know
people who have, yet pot busts now average 700,000 a year, with 70,000 in
New York City alone last year. And the excesses of the war on drugs, from
search-and-seizure abuses to the racial disparities in who goes to prison,
are increasingly obvious.

On issues such as racial profiling, Epstein says, "They have to do damage
control.

They can't avoid addressing it." But does Bush have the desire to make
significant changes, or the courage to face the furious opposition that
would come if he did? If you can't arrest your way out of the problem, but
don't want to consider legalization, what do you do?

"He couldn't even tell his kids that he'd been arrested for drunk driving,"
notes NORML's St. Pierre. "Considering his inability to talk about drugs
during the campaign, and his evasiveness about his own drug use, I hope lack
of communication doesn't become national policy."
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