Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jun 1999
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center
Contact:  http://www.sjmercury.com/
Author: Christopher Wren, New York Times

LAWMAKERS RESIST REVERSAL OF DRUG POLICY

House: Any Legalization Would Be A 'Surrender' In Drug War, Some Charge.

WASHINGTON -- Congress seldom meets a hearing that it doesn't like, but the
one that Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., convened Wednesday raised quite a few
hackles. Its topic: "The Pros and Cons of Drug Legalization,
Decriminalization and Harm Reduction."

The hearing, the first on the subject since 1988, was motivated by
suspicions on Capitol Hill that legalization of drugs is the ultimate goal
of people who actively promote marijuana as a medicinal palliative or
advocate giving sterile syringes to heroin addicts to prevent them from
contracting AIDS.

The hearing illustrated Congress' reluctance to rethink the "war on drugs,"
on which the federal government spends nearly $18 billion a year. And it
presaged the sort of discourse about drugs bound to surface in next year's
election campaign.

A 'risk-free' position

"It's a politically risk-free area," said Eric E. Sterling, a former counsel
to the House Judiciary Committee who helped draft the Anti-Drug-Abuse Acts
passed in 1986 and 1988. Sterling, who is president of the Criminal Justice
Policy Foundation, attended the hearing.

"No member of Congress is going to lose a vote because they're tough on
drugs," he said. "And it attracts media attention. I suspect pollsters would
tell members of Congress that this is a very good area to be outspoken in."

The hearing drew protests from opposing camps.

"We do not have hearings called 'The Pros and Cons of Rape,'" said Rep. Mark
Souder, R-Ind., who is on the subcommittee.

Ethan A. Nadelmann, the director of the Lindesmith Center, a New York-based
group working to change drug policy, dismissed the hearing as "an effort to
smear the many moderate proposals for drug-policy reform with the broad and
false brush of radical legalization."

The hearing was prompted by voter initiatives to approve medicinal marijuana
in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington and the
District of Columbia.

"There was a feeling that one side was doing all the talking and there
really needed to be a congressional response to this," said Bobby Charles,
the chief counsel for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and
Human Resources, which held the hearing.

Barry McCaffrey, the retired general who is the White House's national
director of drug control policy, put it more bluntly. "We're getting rolled
in the public arena by very clever people," he told the subcommittee.

In his testimony, McCaffrey described a campaign of deception and
half-truths to erode society's disapproval of marijuana and harder drugs, to
which 4.1 million Americans are now addicted. While 82 percent of the public
oppose making illicit drugs legal, he said, there is "a carefully
camouflaged, well-funded, tightly knit core of people whose goal is to
legalize drugs in the United States."

Nadelmann did not attend the hearing, contending that the subcommittee had
disinvited him. "They might have held hearings on whether current federal
drug policies are doing more harm than good," he said. "Instead, they
decided to hold a hearing on the 'drug-legalization movement,' which is
essentially a figment of their imagination."

Charles said none of the subcommittee members wanted to legalize drugs. But
Mica, he said, believed "that an open and honest debate only serves the
cause of truth." Other subcommittee members expressed unhappiness that the
hearing was even taking place.

"Legalization is a surrender to despair," said Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y.
"It cannot and ought not be any topic of serious discussion in our nation's
debate of the challenges of illicit drugs."

'A chilling effect'

Suggesting the depth of hostility toward the notion of legal drugs, Rep. Bob
Barr, R-Ga., asked whether anti-racketeering laws could be used to prosecute
people conspiring to legalize drugs. McCaffrey shot back that doing so
"would have a chilling effect on the right of free speech."

McCaffrey assured the subcommittee that "I am not open-minded about drug
abuse in America." But afterward, he said he wished that there had been a
fuller exposition of the legalization argument. "I want people to come out
and say what they believe, and be subject to cross-examination," he said.

Ira Glasser, who testified before the subcommittee as executive director of
the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "I think they are engaged in an
effort to discredit and attack and intimidate people who disagree with them."

Glasser, who is also president of the Drug Policy Foundation, said in his
testimony, "The government has demonized all drug use without
differentiation, has systematically and hysterically resisted science and
has turned millions of stable and productive citizens into criminals."

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