Pubdate: Wed, 23 May 2001
Source: St. Petersburg Times (FL)
Copyright: 2001 St. Petersburg Times
Page: 18A
Contact:  http://www.sptimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Author: Ethan A. Nadelmann
Note: Ethan A. Nadelmann is executive director of the Lindesmith 
Center-Drug Policy Foundation.

THE CHANGE OF TUNE ON DRUG POLICY

Is there any chance that President Bush could pull a "Nixon goes to China" 
on drug policy? Don't laugh.  It's possible.

On May 14th, when the Supreme Court ruled against the medical marijuana 
buyers' clubs, Justice John Paul Stevens noted that candidate Bush had 
supported state self-determination on medical marijuana use. And last 
January, Bush said: "I think a lot of people are coming to the realization 
that maybe long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best 
way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease."

Admittedly, for those who think the war on drugs is doing more harm than 
good, Bush's appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general was a 
disaster.  "I want to escalate the war on drugs," he said shortly after 
being appointed.  "I want to renew it.  I want to refresh it, relaunch it 
if you will."

Ditto for John P.  Walters, Bush's choice for drug czar.  It's hard to find 
someone more bellicose when it comes to the war on drugs. Walters is 
enamored of costly international control efforts, notwithstanding the 
absence of evidence indicating that they have any impact on drug abuse 
problems in this country.  Forget about science and public health.  He 
prefers to lock people up.

Ashcroft and Walters are the temperance warriors of today, intent on 
punishing people for the "sin" of using drugs.

But not everyone with influence in the Bush White House shares that 
view.  GOP governors who once rode the drug war bandwagon are beginning to 
sing a different song for any number of reasons.

Connecticut Gov.  John Rowland has started telling fellow Republicans that 
the best way to bring African Americans into the party is to address the 
unfairness of the criminal justice system.  He's now supporting efforts in 
his own state to divert drug offenders into treatment.

Similarly, New York Gov.  George Pataki surprised everyone earlier this 
year by calling for significant reform of the draconian Rockefeller drug 
laws ( although Pataki's actual proposal fell far short of his rhetoric ).

Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor who now heads the Department 
of Health and Human Services, has also changed his tune.  A major prison 
builder for most of his gubernatorial tenure, Thompson said last year that 
enough is enough.  More recently, Thompson's hand was apparent in the 
appointment of fellow Wisconsinite Scott H. Evertz, who supports needle 
exchange, as the new "AIDS czar."

And then there's New Mexico Gov.  Gary Johnson, a libertarian Republican 
who's dared say what few other politicians will say but many Republicans 
believe: that our biggest drug problems have more to do with drug 
prohibition than drug use.

Johnson was not the first prominent Republican to utter such sentiments out 
loud; former Secretary of State George Shultz has been saying much the same 
since 1989, and Tom Campbell, the former California congressman who ran for 
U.S.  Senate last year, articulated a similar message.  Ditto for William 
F.  Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman and other prominent conservative 
intellectuals.

The fact is, there's a libertarian streak that runs deep in the Republican 
Party that understands the futility of trying to prohibit what are 
essentially global commodities markets.  Many of these libertarians 
recoil--just as do many Democrats--at the drug war's assault on personal 
freedoms. Look for some of them to speak their minds.

As for other voices:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress in January that illicit 
drug use is "overwhelmingly a demand problem." At the Republican National 
Convention last summer, Colin Powell, now Bush's secretary of State, 
condemned the wholesale incarceration of "2 million Americans who, while 
paying for their crimes, are not paying taxes, are not there for their 
children and are not raising families." Too many, he noted, are young black 
men--a large percentage of whom are in prison on drug charges.

As for all those 30-, 40- 50-something Republicans now filling top White 
House slots and senior positions in federal agencies, can anyone doubt that 
a fair share smoked the occasional marijuana joint or broke a few other 
drug laws in days past?

And then there's John J.  DiIulio Jr., Bush's "faith czar." True, in the 
mid-'90s, he wrote a book ( with William Bennett and John Walters ) 
defending the "lock 'em up" approach to drug crimes and just about 
everything else.  But DiIulio changed his tune a few years ago, moved in 
part by his own empirical studies of who was being incarcerated and in part 
by his own personal religious transformation.

Now DiIulio says that mandatory minimum drug laws need to be repealed, that 
drug-only offenders should be released and that drug treatment should be 
available both behind bars and in the community. One would hope that this 
strikes a chord with Bush.  Don't hold your breath, but just maybe Bush 
will "go to China" on this one.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager