Small
but Forceful Coalition
Works
to Counter U.S. War on
Drugs
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
When
voters in Maine went to the polls in
November and endorsed the use of marijuana as
a medicine, it was more
than a victory for cancer
patients and others who
say marijuana will help relieve
their pain.
For a small coalition of
libertarians, liberals,
humanitarians and hedonists,
the vote was another step
forward in a low-profile
but sophisticated crusade to
end the nation's criminal
laws against marijuana and
other psychoactive drugs.
Using polls, focus groups
and advertising, the coalition
has selected and promoted
causes that might arouse
sympathy among Americans,
like giving clean syringes
to heroin users to prevent
the spread of AIDS, or
softening tough penalties
for drug use. The most
successful has been medicinal
marijuana, which has
been endorsed by the District
of Columbia and seven
states.
What brought together the
disparate elements of the
coalition, however, is a
far broader cause: changing the
critical way that Americans
think about drugs.
Proponents say they want
to end a war on drugs that has
packed prisons, offered
addicts little treatment and
contributed to the spread
of AIDS. Some want to go
further and drop criminal
penalties for personal drug
use, or even make drugs
legal.
The term they have carefully
crafted for their goal is
"harm reduction": reducing
the harm caused by those
people who cannot or will
not stop using drugs.
"We accept drugs are here
to stay," said Ethan A.
Nadelmann, director of the
Lindesmith Center, a drug
policy center set up in
New York with money donated
by the billionaire George
Soros. "There never has been
a drug-free society," Mr.
Nadelmann said. "We must
learn how to live with drugs
so they cause the least
possible harm and the best
possible good."
Critics say the agenda is
more ominous: the legalization
of marijuana and other drugs.
At a Congressional
hearing in June, the White
House director of national
drug policy, Gen. Barry
R. McCaffrey, warned of "a
carefully camouflaged, well-funded,
tightly knit core of
people whose goal is to
legalize drug use in the United
States."
Sue Rusche, director of Families
in Action, a coalition
in Atlanta working to help
parents prevent children
from using drugs, accused
Mr. Nadelmann and his
supporters of systematically
distorting the picture of
what drugs do.
"Yes, we're concerned about
children, but we're
concerned about everybody,"
said Ms. Rusche, who
likened Mr. Nadelmann to
the tobacco industry. "He
denies that drugs have the
capacity to hurt people, and
takes no responsibility
for the consequences."
Mr. Nadelmann describes his
position differently.
"Drugs are not bad," he
said. "Drugs are good, bad or
indifferent, depending on
how you use them."
The movement's supporters
range beyond the
Lindesmith Center and other
efforts financed by Mr.
Soros. Supporters include
marijuana-smokers
represented by the National
Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws,
or Norml, libertarians who
argue that personal drug
use is nobody else's business,
and old-fashioned liberals
who castigate the
government's campaign against
drugs as worse than the
problem.
"The core is the people who
to my mind get it, the
people who connect the dots,"
Mr. Nadelmann said.
"We believe that the war
on drugs is a fundamental evil
in our society."
The crusade to make drugs
socially respectable has no
precedent in the United
States, said Dr. David F.
Musto, a medical historian
at the Yale School of
Medicine and the author
of "The American Disease:
Origins of Narcotics Control"
(Oxford University
Press).
"You have these groups funded
by wealthy individuals
that are a constant critic
of drug policy, and these
groups use very sophisticated
marketing techniques," he
said.
Surveys show that most Americans
still oppose making
illicit drugs legal. While
voters have been tolerant of
letting ill people smoke
marijuana, a Gallup poll this
year reported that 69 percent
of respondents opposed
making marijuana legal for
everyone.
Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor
of public policy at the
University of California
at Los Angeles, said, "When
you look at all these medical
marijuana initiatives, they
pass by big margins, but
the governors and legislators
go the other way."
Because constituents expect
their politicians to be
hard-nosed, Professor Kleiman
said, "a legislator who
votes for medical marijuana
could lose votes from
people who voted for medical
marijuana."
Mr. Nadelmann said he commissioned
a poll to learn
whether voters would support
personal cultivation of
marijuana; 65 percent of
those sampled thought that
growing marijuana should
remain a crime.
The result of this research
into public attitudes has been
the deliberately vague idea
of harm reduction. By
casting the issue in friendlier
terms that resonate across
the political spectrum,
crusaders like Mr. Nadelmann
say, they hope to induce
Americans to tolerate, if not
embrace, the elimination
of criminal penalties against
marijuana -- and as a few
see it, the eventual
legalization of all psychoactive
drugs.
Critics call the medicinal
marijuana issue a
stalking-horse for drug
legalization. "My guess is the
real agenda is to promulgate
marijuana as a benign
substance outside the boundaries
of conventional
medicine," General McCaffrey
said.
Mr. Nadelmann did not contradict
him. "Will it help
lead toward marijuana legalization?"
he said. "I hope
so." But he said that reports
of his support for harder
drugs have quoted him out
of context.
Mr. Nadelmann has advised
the campaign putting
medicinal marijuana on state
ballots, which is
spearheaded by a group calling
itself Americans for
Medical Rights, with no
mention of marijuana. The
campaign's director, Bill
Zimmerman, explained, "You
pick the name with a view
toward winning support for
the organization." Not all
critics of government drug
policy want to make illicit
drugs legal.
Some assert that prohibition
has not stopped drug use.
Others say that money would
be better spent treating
addicts who commit crimes
rather than locking them up.
Mr. Nadelmann wants to enlist
such people in his cause
of repealing all penalties
for drug use. "What we
reformers do is to use these
coalitions on one issue to
educate our allies about
the broader implications of the
drug war," he said.
Rob Stewart, a senior policy
analyst for the Drug
Policy Foundation, another
group in Washington
supported by Mr. Soros,
said that lifting criminal
penalties for marijuana
use would be sufficient. Writing
in the group's newsletter,
he explained,
"decriminalization makes
the point that adults should
not be arrested for using
marijuana as they would use a
martini."
Mr. Stewart described the
Drug Policy Foundation as
"agnostic" about other illicit
drugs. But its founder,
Arnold S. Trebach, told
journalists in 1997 that
everything from cocaine
and heroin to steroids should
be freely available.
Mr. Nadelmann objects to
stigmatizing recreational
drug use. "People shall
not be discriminated against
based on the substances
they consume," he said. "The
extension of the notion
of equality is going to have to
include drug users."
The American Civil Liberties
Union also endorses the
right to consume drugs.
Ira Glasser, its director, said
this year, "The A.C.L.U.'s
position is basically that
criminal prohibition is
inappropriate in matters that
involve a person's own behavior."
Mr. Glasser is also chairman
of the Drug Policy
Foundation. Holding both
posts, he said, poses no
conflict of interest.
Mr. Nadelmann said that a
fresh initiative on medicinal
marijuana would be voted
on next year in Colorado,
where an earlier referendum
was declared illegal, and
in Nevada, where the proposal
must be approved
twice. Other states that
have passed such initiatives, he
said, would be encouraged
to get involved in producing
and distributing marijuana
for medicinal purposes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NYT August 22, 1999
A
Governor Who Once Dabbled in
Drugs
Says War on Them Is
Misguided
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
ALBUQUERQUE,
N.M. -- Long before he became
Governor of New Mexico, Gary E. Johnson was
an athlete. Almost every
morning at 5, he takes off on a
long run, a swim or a bicycle
ride, training for a
marathon or a triathlon.
As Governor, he has ridden his
bike five times across the
state, run 25 miles in Army
gear and jumped off a 10,000-foot-high
mountain on a
hang-glider.
Those activities alone make
him a rarity among the 50
governors.
But Johnson, 46, a second-term
Republican, is also
unusual in another respect.
He unflinchingly admits he
used marijuana and cocaine
in college and now wants
the nation to consider
alternatives to the so-called
war on drugs, which he
contends is failing through
an overemphasis on
prosecution and incarceration.
He goes so far as to
suggest that the Federal
Government should consider
the decriminalization of
drugs, or perhaps even
legalization, which would
mean they could be sold for
profit.
And he contends that the
costly campaign against drugs
has left courts and prisons
overwhelmed with people
arrested for possessing
only small amounts of drugs.
Drugs, he says, could be
regulated like alcohol and
people could be held accountable
for what they did
under their influence.
These ideas make him the
highest ranking elected
official in the United States
to offer what are
considered wildly unpopular
alternatives to current
drug policies. But they
come at a time when questions
of past drug use have become
commonplace for
aspiring and sitting Presidents.
Just this week, Gov.
George W. Bush of Texas,
the Republican front-runner
in the 2000 Presidential
race, reluctantly answered
questions about drug use
in his past, saying he could
have passed the challenge
of a Federal Bureau of
Investigation background
check in his father's
Presidency. And while President
Clinton has admitted
he once tried marijuana,
he said he did not inhale.
Governor Johnson, a former
businessman who
considers himself as much
a libertarian as a
Republican, said he regarded
politicians as
"disingenuous" if they tried
to hide what the public had
a right to know.
"I smoked marijuana in college;
that was something I
did," he said this week
in an interview at the Capitol in
Santa Fe. "I used cocaine
on a couple of occasions. It
was not something that anybody
would have ever
known. But I knew if I was
going to run for office, I
should 'fess up. And if
I didn't win, so be it."
Residents of New Mexico have
long accepted their
Governor's past, which he
revealed in his first
campaign. He won re-election
in 1998 with 55 percent
of the vote, compared with
50 percent four years
before, when a candidate
from the Green Party
siphoned votes from Gov.
Bruce King, a Democrat. In
winning last year, Johnson
became the first Governor of
New Mexico to win a second
consecutive four-year
term.
But his crusade for alternatives
to drug prohibition,
which he began several weeks
ago, has drawn wide
criticism, even from leading
state Republicans, like
Senator Pete V. Domenici
and Representative Heather
A. Wilson.
They generally disagree with
Johnson's contention that
the drug war has failed
and cost the nation hundreds of
billions of dollars annually
that could otherwise be
spent on education and other
necessities.
It is an argument Johnson
makes often, traveling in New
Mexico and beyond, emboldened
by his promise to
seek no other political
office once his term ends in
2002.
"We are spending incredible
amounts of our resources
on incarceration, law enforcement
and courts," he said.
"As an extension of everything
I've done in office, I
made a cost-benefit analysis,
and this one really
stinks."
Just how the country might
bring drug sales under
Federal control or what
penalties should apply to drug
charges are things Johnson
has not sorted out, he said.
Nor would he want anyone
to assume he is advocating
drug use. His own use ended
after college, at the
University of New Mexico,
he said.
"I would like to see a discussion
on this, A to Z," he
said. "The reality of what
might evolve is that we get
our feet wet, so that we
could learn how to legalize or
decriminalize. Politically,
I can't ascertain if there has
been a positive or negative
reaction. But publicly, I've
found that people overwhelmingly
want to talk about
it."
Around New Mexico, Johnson
has his allies. The
Albuquerque chapter of the
League of Women Voters
has expressed interest in
sponsoring a forum on the
issue. Jacqueline Cooper,
a lawyer who represents
defendants in drug cases
through the state public
defender's office, has begun
speaking to groups around
the state, promoting lighter
prison terms for drug
offenders and treatment
as part of their sentences.
The Governor has also been
invited by the Cato
Institute, a libertarian
research organization in
Washington, to speak at
a conference in October on
alternative drug policies.
But the forces aligned against
him are formidable. They
include the White House's
Office of National Drug
Control Policy, led by Gen.
Barry R. McCaffrey, who
recently testified before
Congress that the advocates of
drug legalization are promoting
drug use through
"deceptive claims, half-truths
and flawed logic to hawk
ill-conceived beliefs."
Citing statistics that show
declines in drug use,
drug-related murders and
spending on illegal drugs,
General McCaffrey insisted
that the drug war was
working. He also told Congress
that legalization would
cost society even more in
medical and prison costs and
increase drug sales rather
than slowly decrease them
through treatment to end
addiction, as Johnson
suggested.
Bob Weiner, a spokesman for
General McCaffrey, said
that General McCaffrey would
not comment on
Johnson's position. Weiner
dismissed the Governor as
a political oddity, saying
he "is not well advised" on
drug issues.
In New Mexico, where drug
problems are fueled by
transit routes from California,
Texas and Mexico, the
opposition is fierce. Ms.
Wilson, a freshman
Representative from Albuquerque
who once served in
Johnson's Cabinet as Health
Secretary, said firmly in an
interview, "This is a subject
we disagree on."
"Even a national forum on
decriminalization sends the
wrong message," Ms. Wilson
added.
A spokesman for Domenici,
Chris Gallegos, said the
Senator agreed with Ms.
Wilson. "Proceeding with this
sends the wrong message,
especially in a state like
New Mexico, which has a
very severe drug problem,"
he said.
Cecil Sena, a police officer
in Santa Fe, said alcohol
caused enough problems without
adding legalized drugs
to the mix.
"We already have one killer
on the streets," he said.
"Why put another out there?"
Johnson said he did not expect
much support from the
law-enforcement community.
Responding to critics like
John J. Kelly, the United
States Attorney for New
Mexico, Johnson said they
were "only looking at the
crime side of the issue,
a knee-jerk response."
In large measure, Johnson's
tenacity evolves from his
lame-duck status, his lack
of interest in seeking another
office and, critics and
Republican colleagues agree, a
governing style that reflects
less reliance on outside
counsel than his own.
"I have no desire to be a
United States senator," he
said, alluding to an obvious
next step, a challenge to
Senator Jeff Bingaman, a
Democrat whose third term
ends next year.
"I've got the job I've always
wanted," he added. "It's a
great opportunity, and I
don't want to squander it. My
greatest fear would be to
leave office, thinking, 'coulda,
shoulda, woulda.' I just
don't want to do that."