Americans spent more than $35 billion on illegal drugs last year, despite an investment of nearly twice that much by federal, state, and local governments fighting a decades-long War on Drugs.

Indeed, for most of this century, the United States has tried to eliminate drug use by criminalizing the manufacture, distribution, and use of certain non-medical, addictive, and otherwise harmful narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. In the mid-1980s, the drug laws were bolstered by the introduction of mandatory sentencing and asset forfeiture for drug law violators. Thus, in fighting its War on Drugs, the nation has increasingly relied on law enforcement and supply interdiction efforts. The primary battleground: the streets and our borders, the courts, and the nation’s prisons and jails. Treatment and education, deterrence, and other non-punitive efforts have played a secondary role.

Until recently, those on the front lines of this war seemed united in consensus on the rightness of this strategy. In the last decade, however, a small but politically diverse and growing chorus of public officials, law enforcement officers, policy experts, and other prominent citizens has begun to question whether the strategy is doing more harm than good and to explore alternative approaches to the drug problem. From William Buckley, Jr. to Walter Cronkite, from George Schultz to George Soros, and from former Attorney General Edwin Meese to Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, many are asking whether we can win this war by relying so singularly on the criminal justice system and whether the costs of the war have begun to outweigh its benefits. Joining in this debate, participants in the Vail Valley Institute’s 7th annual Seminar and Forum reviewed the record and examined the case for and against the current strategy, exploring the many dimensions and complexities of the issue.

Are we winning this war? What would “winning the drug war” look like? Would it mean reducing casual use among members of the middle class or reducing hard core addiction? Would victory mean the country had eliminated illicit drug sales and drug use? Or would it mean that we had minimized the personal and societal harm caused by drug abuse: the loss of individual self-control and reliance, the neglect of families, the destruction of communities, and the growth of violent crime?

If we are not winning, is it because the nation is not sufficiently committed to drug prohibition? Or is it because, as with alcohol prohibition, the criminal sanctions against drug users have created more crime and harm than they have prevented? Can alternatives to our current policy be more effective? If so, what are the risks of these alternatives and what unforeseen consequences might they produce?

We considered the current, prohibition-based anti-drug policy, whose advocates believe that drug dependency and addiction destroy the very fiber of democracy by undermining the ability of adults to function as informed and responsible citizens. It holds that all drug use, therefore, must be stopped. Only criminalization, with its threat of incarceration and other legal sanctions against individuals who violate the societal proscription against drugs, can prevent the use of undesired drugs.

And we examined the progress of this policy. What has last year’s roughly $70 billion investment in the War on Drugs—let alone the nearly $300 billion invested since 1982—produced for the country? The results, most agreed, are mixed. In 1995, 11% of American youths aged 12 to 17 had used illicit drugs, including marijuana. This marks a significant improvement from 1977, when 34% of 12 to 17 year-olds and 70% of young adults had used illicit drugs. But it also marks a setback from 1992, when only 5.3% of 12 to 17 year olds used illicit drugs. Even worse, a growing number of children younger than 12 have begun to experiment with drugs. And the comparison with illicit drug use in 1962 is sobering. At that time, less than 1% of adolescents and less than 2% of adults had ever tried illicit drugs. Perhaps most troubling of all is that the estimated number of hard-core addicts—between 7 and 8 million—has remained unchanged for over twenty years.

Some of our speakers argued that the disappointing results are the product of a growing tolerance of illicit drug use and a lack of consistent moral leadership against all forms of drug use at the local, state, and federal levels. They pointed to recent referenda in California and Arizona that—in contradiction of federal laws—have decriminalized the use of marijuana and other prohibited substances for medical purposes, as indicative of a climate that is flirting with drug use normalization.

Other speakers suggested that fundamental flaws in current policy doom it to failure. Criminalization itself, they argue, creates the enormous profits that ensure the drug lords and local gangs a constant supply of dealers and soldiers to staff their illegal enterprises. The struggle over these illicit profits generates most of the violence associated with drug use, not drug use per se.

We also examined whether current policy has produced other unintended yet harmful consequences that threaten the fabric of our society as much as does drug abuse itself. What about current drug laws, which by prohibiting distribution of sterile syringes to anyone other than a diabetic, even by medical doctors, are contributing to the spread of AIDS? On the other hand, while the growing number of experimental needle exchanges reduce the spread of AIDS, do they inadvertently lead to more widespread use of heroin?

Is current policy eroding certain of our treasured civil liberties? Are local and federal law enforcement agencies abusing the asset forfeiture laws by impounding “drug-contaminated” property—homes, cars, and other assets—from innocent relatives of drug law violators, as Henry Hyde and the House Judiciary Committee have concluded? Are local police departments being corrupted by pressures to conduct and cover-up illegal searches, so they can meet unofficial drug-arrest quotas doled out by politicians?

Mandatory sentences have simultaneously contributed to the tripling of the nation’s prison population in the last twenty years while eliminating the ability of judges to offer sentencing-based incentives to addicts and dealers to clean up their acts. Yet, this growing drug-involved prison population receives virtually no treatment for its addictions. Not surprisingly, repeat offenders are more likely to be drug-involved and to have engaged in more violent crime as a result. Is this a desired outcome?

Our speakers and seminar participants proffered various solutions. Some argued for stronger enforcement of current laws, with greater moral leadership at all levels. Others suggested we temper the current strategy by eliminating the worst abuses (e.g., unchecked asset forfeiture) and investing far more resources in treatment, particularly in our prisons and jails, where the need is greatest and where new approaches that balance threatened sanctions and promised rewards are showing highly promising results.

Some of our speakers proposed strategies that make more of a clean break with the past and look to strategies adopted by other countries, including Canada, Holland, and Germany. “Targeted harm reduction” would introduce broadened treatment strategies that include proven protocols such as methadone maintenance. Its advocates also recommend following European examples of decriminalizing marijuana use among adults, particularly in light of findings of many United States government commissions and scientific agencies promoting such action.

Medicalization of drugs would decriminalize use of all prohibited substances and transfer primary responsibility for ending drug abuse and addiction from law enforcement to the public health and medical communities, with a greater emphasis on treatment and reintegration of addicts.

And finally, we considered complete decriminalization of drugs in conjunction with government-controlled distribution, not unlike the state-controlled sale of alcoholic beverages practiced in many states. This strategy, it was suggested, would eliminate profits from illegal drug distribution, while simultaneously generating ample funds for treatment, massive anti-drug advertising, support of proven deterrence programs, and international crop substitution and development efforts to help current drug producing nations.

And now we invite you to read our speakers’ comments on the pages that follow and to consider these complex and challenging issues for yourself.

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The topic of this conference is “The War on Drugs: Can It be Won?” As a kick-off for the conference, I’d like to discuss how we might analyze some of the issues, provide some historical perspective, give you some personal observations and suggestions, and raise some questions to provoke discussion over the next few days.

I don’t like the phraseology of the “War on Drugs.” The war analogy is inaccurate, unrealistic, and unproductive. To me, war means an intense, violent, and generally limited series of battles with a definitive end-point, a cessation of hostilities. It also connotes the use of military, or quasi-military, skills, resources, strategies, and tactics. And in a war, there’s a definable battlefield, a line between combatants and non-combatants.

In fact, most things indicative of a war are not indicative of the effort to deal with drug trafficking and drug abuse. First, illicit drugs are a societal problem and they involve ordinary citizens. There’s no division, really, between combatants and non-combatants, because we’re all affected, in one way or another.

Secondly, drugs are an on-going problem, with no cessation point. There’s no surrender and there’s no cease fire. We have to deal with drugs, like any other form of anti-social behavior, on a continuing basis. And each new generation has to be taught about drugs and be prepared to deal with the problem.
Third, it’s a multi-faceted problem. Wars are left to the Pentagon and to those leaders who have war as their primary responsibility. But, the drug problem—trafficking and abuse—can not be dealt with by a single war plan. The drug problem is a complex matter. It involves issues of health, education, crime control and public safety, and social policy. It involves constitutional and legal values, as well as basic human values.

Too frequently people come to the drug issue with a one-dimensional approach; either, “If we’d only increase the penalties, the problems would go away,” or, “If we just legalize illicit drugs, the situation would improve.” I will posit that this complex problem requires a comprehensive solution, an integrated, interdisciplinary effort that includes at least four major components: the health field, the education field, the law enforcement and criminal justice system, and the leadership of communities throughout our country.

Some historical perspective should help illustrate some of these points. In the 1950s and the early 1960s, there was concern about illicit drugs, particularly heroin and marijuana. But only a relatively small and isolated segment of society was involved with drugs. Most citizens were affected only by occasional crimes—burglary and theft—committed by drug users to support their habits.

During the 1960s and the early 70s, however—the “days of rebellion”—the illegal use of drugs spread to virtually every segment of society. Drug abuse, primarily of marijuana and psychedelic substances like LSD, grew during the 1970s. This growing use was accompanied by a societal complacency towards the use of drugs. Previously, drugs had been shunned by most people. Instead, many people, even opinion leaders in high circles, gave credence to the idea that drug use was OK, that drugs did little harm. This use of drugs in our country peaked in the early 1980s.

In 1982, President Reagan issued his national drug strategy, initiating a major change in national policy. The President’s strategy recognized that crime control was the responsibility of state and local governments. It had five major components: international cooperation; strengthened law enforcement; prevention and education; treatment and rehabilitation; and research. There was increased coordination of federal agencies, particularly agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department. There was much greater cooperation in law enforcement between the federal government and state and local governments.

And there was an enlistment of the private sector. Groups such as advertising agencies or organizations formed to deal with prevention and treatment. Churches and volunteer organizations were brought into this effort. There was a fairly widespread mobilization of different resources—both public and private—throughout the country.

The drug problem, and these efforts to solve the problem, were recognized by the news media. In 1986, in one week, the drug problem was the cover story on Time, on Newsweek, and on U.S. News and World Report.

Probably the most effective of the five components of President Reagan’s drug strategy was the relatively new effort at prevention and education, the effort to reduce demand through programs in the schools and workplaces. The result of the new strategy was that between 1982 and 1992, there was a 50% reduction in drug use in the United States. That was tremendous progress over a ten year period.

Where are we today? First, the decline has ended. Since 1992, drug use has begun to rise again, particularly among high school and middle school students. And, we are seeing a trend that was not even as extensive during the 1970s, that children as young as 8th graders are becoming increasingly involved.

Why is this, that an increase in drug use has followed a decade of decline?

One reason is that the public and the media have limited attention spans. What was big news in the 80s is not big news today. The continued, intense focus and comprehensive national effort that we had in the 1980s have worn off and complacency has set in. I suspect that school boards, principals, school officials and teachers are not making the same effort they made in the 1980s, coordinating with police and drug counselors.

Next, we have a new generation of children. They have not had the kind of experiences that children had in the 1980s, when they saw their older brothers’ and sisters’ lives wrecked through the abuse of illicit drugs.

The second major reason is that we did not succeed in reducing hard core drug addiction. The 50% reduction in drug use was primarily among people who had taken up drugs in a casual way. They were employed or were in college or high school. When confronted with drug-free workplaces or with employers requiring drug testing as a condition of employment, they stopped using drugs.

The hard core addicts, however, for the most part were not reachable by these work or school programs. Most hard core drug addicts are high school drop-outs, are chronically unemployed, are pregnant teenage girls, or are people who are more on the fringes of society.

A third aspect of the drug situation currently is the advocacy of drug legalization. This is a question that is open for honest debate. My good friend Milton Friedman and I are absolutely on opposite sides of this issue. But in one sense, the debate has undermined legitimate efforts to reduce drug abuse in the United States, by presenting a confusing message, particularly to young people.

Fourth, we don’t really know what works. We need to review every component of our counter-drug strategy with an honest, objective view to ask, “What works and what doesn’t? What has inadvertently turned out to be detrimental?” We need to face up to approaches that have caused more problems than they were worth. We have to examine the costs and the benefits of the things we have done in dealing with drugs.

Specifically, we need to modify or discard those programs which have not been effective or have been detrimental. For example, I have some real concerns about our asset forfeiture programs and how they have been often misused. Those laws need to be modified.

We need to improve programs that work, based on our experience. We need to look at what worked and why between 1982 and 1992. We also need to look at how conditions are different today and if that means that some programs that worked then won’t work now.

And based upon this analysis, we need to reallocate our resources, guided by the following proposition: our purpose and goal as a nation and our public policy should be to reduce the use of illegal drugs in the United States, and with it the associated health, economic, social, and public safety problems which are caused by such use.

Some people have talked about trying to achieve a drug-free society. We’re never going to achieve a drug-free society, just as we’re never going to achieve a crime-free society. But at least if we target that kind of goal, we will be moving in the proper direction.

With a focus on the forthcoming sessions, I offer a few suggestions. First, we need much greater emphasis than we have ever given on treatment and rehabilitation. We have not at any time given enough attention to effective treatment and prevention. We have to look at the results on the people who are undergoing treatment, particularly hard core drug users.

Now, the most hard core drug users come in contact with the criminal justice system. Because of this, the criminal justice system can be involved in assisting them out of their drug habituation. Evidence is mounting from psychiatrists around the country that the incentives—or coercions—of the criminal justice system help people get out of their drug habit. These “incentives” help people into constructive citizenship, off welfare, and into generally improved situations. One landmark program in the Washington, D.C. area deals with court-supported sanctions against drug users assigned to treatment. It has cut the number of people dropping out of treatment from 60% to 10%. “Clients” testing positive for drug use has gone from 100% to 13%. And recidivism—resorting back to drug use—has gone from 50% to 12%.

Another area where treatment is badly needed is in prisons, particularly for inmates in jails, where terms can be up to one year. Most jails and prisons offer little or no treatment. We need a tremendous investment in drug programs in prisons, with those programs continuing when convicts are released on parole or other post-incarceration supervision.

Another success is the drug courts in many areas of our country. A specific judge is responsible for anyone arrested on drug charges. These judges can put non-violent, non-dealing first offenders into drug treatment. These judges can follow-up and provide sanctions necessary to keep people in treatment. This combination of judges working with police, probation officers, and treatment facilities has been very successful.

The criminal justice system can also do a much better job in the prisons themselves. There are very few prisons—particularly state prisons—where drugs are not present among the inmates. Most prisons haven’t changed how they are managed since the early 1900s. If there is any place where we ought to be able to control the flow of drugs, it’s in our prisons.

The third thing that we need is improved research. We need to know how to direct prevention and education programs and treatment and rehabilitation programs more effectively. We need longitudinal studies on individual cases, so we know what really happens when drug users leave a program. Do they stay free of drugs? Are they able to gain a constructive life?

We also need valid scientific data on new experiments, such as needle exchanges. There is a considerable controversy in Canada over whether these programs have been successful or not. We need more information about Baltimore, whose needle exchange program is touted as successful, but which also has the largest number of drug-related emergency room admissions per hundred thousand population of any large city in the country.

Not all of you will agree with the ideas I have put forth tonight. But I hope I have raised questions, provoked some discussion, and provided the basis for a good deal of lively activity during the next two days. It is important as we begin this dialogue that we start something and keep it going. We should strive to provide some answers to the recognized and unrecognized questions and dilemmas that the complex issue of the drug problem raises. If we do that, we will have made a major contribution towards a better America.

In describing how we have been conducting ourselves in opposing illegal drugs, I must call it a war. Unlike the fight against cancer and other diseases, we use police and we lock people up. And I think this is a war we can’t win this way.

One reason we can’t win is that the current policies have created huge illicit profits. There is evidence of profits from the drug trade of as much as $400 billion a year. For example, if you could manufacture this pen for $1 and retail it for $17,000, that’s what the illegal drug mark-up is, if you buy drugs in the source country and compare them to what they’re worth on the streets of Denver or Los Angeles or San Francisco. And so, all the cops and armies and prisons in the world, in my opinion, can’t stop something with that kind of profit motive. And it works all the way down the chain, from corrupt officials to the inner city kids who drop out of school because someone’s willing to give them one-hundred bucks to play look-out for the cops or to carry small amounts of drugs or something like that.

There’s another reason. I’ll try to illustrate it by telling you a story of my young rookie days in Harlem. I spent ten years of my life in Harlem arresting many drug users. In fact, we started our own war on drugs in the NYPD. And I have to say, we got skeptical pretty quickly, despite making more and more arrests. We didn’t lower drug use or drug selling and, I think, in actuality we increased them. Most drug transactions are consensual crimes, consensual transactions. The only ways police can penetrate consensual criminal action is by doing things that are otherwise questionable.

Let me give you an example. One day my partner and I made an arrest on the top floor landing of a building, in what we used to call a shooting gallery because the addicts would gather there and they could run down to an adjoining roof, so there was a pretty good escape route. And unfortunately, both then and now, they would share needles, so they were quite dangerous. Not violent—heroin is not a drug that makes people violent, in fact the opposite is true—but dangerous in the sense that when you searched them, if you pricked your finger, they had every disease imaginable. In these galleries, heroin users would take the old metal top of a bottle cap, take the cork out, and use the cap as a cooker. They’d mix the heroin and a little water, heat the drug mixture over a candle, load their hypodermic needle, wrap a rubber stripper around their arm, and inject themselves. In one particular case, we arrested a guy who was by himself and had just shot up. We knew from experience that if we seized the cooker and sent it to the police lab, it would come back with a residue of heroin on it and we’d have evidence of possession of heroin, calling for a six-month jail term. Now, this might seem like a real petty arrest to you, but these were valued arrests; sometimes the captain would give you the day off.

Well, this was a particularly pathetic guy, and he said, “Officer, I’m just a junkie. If you let me go, I’ll give you a pusher.” I wasn’t inclined to do this kind of dealing, but my partner—who was senior and ordinarily more mature than I was—made a deal with this addict. The deal was that we would follow him on the street, and when he met his pusher and made his deal, he and his dealer would go into a hallway. Then we would “accidentally” walk in, arrest the pusher, and let the addict “escape.”

It was a warm day, we were in uniform, in a marked police car, and we were following him down Lenox Avenue. Lenox Avenue is a major thoroughfare and there were hundreds and hundreds of people on the street. We were never more than a few feet a way, so in case he tried to run away, we could catch him. But he didn’t; he went along and talked to one person after another on the street. And it suddenly struck me as quite humiliating for us. There we were in our police uniforms with all the paraphernalia, the handcuffs, our guns, and everything. And these guys were doing drugs just a few feet away. The only way we knew this was because of our agreement. Otherwise, we’d be driving along thinking about the weather.

This is a very profound issue, because drug crimes are different from other crimes, what a judge would call “mala in se” crimes, e.g., murder or robbery. With those crimes, there is a consensus in every culture that they are bad. In those crimes, there’s a victim. There are witnesses. There is evidence. The police can present evidence to the court. But drug crimes are consensual. So just as we didn’t know what was really happening on Lenox Avenue, a million such crimes go on every day and no one knows, including the police.
And that’s the other reason the police can never win a criminal justice war against drugs. There’s an enormous profit mark-up; these are consensual transactions; and the only way the police can penetrate this is by doing questionable, even illegal things. For example, in essence, we let someone go who committed a crime because he enticed someone else to commit a more serious crime. That is the standard operating procedure in the drug war.
A case is unfolding in La Brea, California, where the police caught a seventeen year old using drugs and dealing small amounts to finance his own drug use. They gave him a choice: work with us or go to jail. Incredibly, they virtually made him an undercover narc; they used him not only to get information, but to make buys and recordings, as well. This is highly dangerous work, even for professionally trained police officers. The drug dealers learned about what he was doing and literally tortured this kid to death. A seventeen year old boy. The DA of Orange County defended his actions, saying, “Well, the boy was almost eighteen, almost an adult.”

This is the mentality that creeps in with a war mentality. And it is a war.

As I mentioned, one of the things that happens is that the police, in order to enforce the drug law, have to do very questionable things. I wrote in a column a couple of years ago that the police had made one-million-three-hundred thousand drug arrests, and one-million-one-hundred thousand of those were for possession of drugs. Ordinarily, under the fourth amendment, you need evidence to issue a search warrant to arrest someone for possession of an illegal substance. There are a few exceptions to the exclusionary rule, like if the evidence is in clear view, if it is on the dash board, if the police are given consent to open the trunk, or if the search is incident to another arrest. These “exceptions” occur once in a while, but nowhere near one million times a year. So, I wrote in this column that we have to face the fact that we have created an ethical dilemma where hundreds of thousands of times a year, police commit illegal searches and then perjure themselves about those searches—and feel justified. These are not rogue cops who are robbing people, although we have plenty of those. These are good cops who feel justified because, they say, how the hell else can we enforce these laws? It’s so prevalent that there’s are terms used in the police world to define these actions. One is “testa-lying.” Not testifying, testa-lying. There’s another term, “dropsy-testimony.” Dropsy-testimony refers to a specific pattern of highly unlikely behavior. Dropsy-testimony reads, “As I approached the suspect, he dropped this substance from his right hand and I retrieved it and I had a reasonable suspicion that this was heroin.”

When I wrote a column about these problems, my girlfriend was friends with a woman whose husband was a wonderful police officer. He was the kind of officer I’d have been proud to have on my police force. Very professional, totally honest, a straight arrow. After the column appeared, his wife called and said, “ We can’t believe Joe wrote that column.” “But why not,” my girlfriend said, “it’s true what he wrote, we know the cops are doing what he said.” “Yes,” she said,” but the people they’re doing it to are such scum.”

So, that’s what it’s come to. We’re not really talking about one-million-seven-hundred-thousand arrests. That’s just a statistic. We’re talking about people. In the street, you might be prone down at the face of a cop’s shotgun, you’re handcuffed, you’re stripped naked, your body is searched. You may go to jail for a mandatory sentence for a small amount of drugs, and your life is destroyed. The question is, “Is this what we want of criminal justice in America? Is this what the mission of the police should be?”

My dad and my brother and my many cousins were police officers. I was attracted to the profession because I thought the police officer was the ultimate decentralization of American government. The police officer is the one official who’s in the community 24 hours a day. The symbol is terrifying to many people in this country today, largely because the drug war mentality has replaced what used to be a service mentality, a public service mentality.

I think we have not succeeded in reducing drug use. We have, however, succeeded in causing enormous corruption, enormous violence, and racial discrimination that will haunt this country for years ahead. And we have to ask, if this is the cost of the current drug policy, how does it balance against what the policy has achieved? As a police officer, I am sorry to see many years of progress made after the Civil Rights movement being eroded because of the mentality that has developed, where so many officers see an enemy out there—the “scum,” as this woman referred to them. It’s a sad day when police officers have that attitude and when in the police service there has become institutionalized a contempt for the very citizens they took an oath to serve.

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For the last 10 years, I’ve been working to advance a new paradigm for thinking about drugs, drug users, and drug policy. That’s what I’d like to talk about today.

The new paradigm suggests that we shouldn’t be striving to live in a drug-free society. Instead, we should be trying to learn to live with drugs such that they cause the least possible harm, and, ideally, provide the greatest possible benefit, for some of these drugs are medicines, as well.

The conventional American paradigm is that we have to reduce demand and reduce supply. We attempt to reduce supply through a combination of interdiction methods: keep peasants from growing these crops; keep drugs from coming into the country using Customs and the Coast Guard and with the police and prosecutors. We attempt to reduce demand through a combination of drug prevention, education, of sanctions against people who use drugs, and drug testing. The current paradigm says we’ll somehow achieve our objective of reducing drug use in this society through a focus on both of these factors.

This paradigm is flawed. One reason we have the really serious drug problem we have in the United States today is that we have been stuck on that focus, with little change—other than in tone—from Reagan to Clinton.

This paradigm was affirmed in the Presidential debates between Dole and Clinton in 1996. Dole accused President Clinton of not knowing how to deal with drugs. He argued that in 1980, the last year of the Carter administration, 40 million people used drugs, an all-time high. By 1992, at the end the Reagan and Bush administrations, the number had been cut in half, to less than 20 million people. But after 1992 it went back up. Teen-age use, in particular, has gone back up. Bill Clinton did not have a good response, because he has implicitly accepted that the criteria to measure an effective drug policy is the number of Americans who admitted to a pollster that they broke a drug law last year.

But I would argue that the vast majority of those people who had stopped using drugs in the eighties and early nineties were high school kids smoking marijuana, the vast majority of whom never got in trouble using drugs, or were yuppies using cocaine who never landed in trouble. This is not to say that there were not minorities of high school marijuana smokers and yuppie cocaine users who ended up in devastating situations or that those problems were insignificant. But from 1980 to 1992 and from 1992 until now, the hard core drug user population—the number of addicts—has not gotten smaller.

So, I look at this time period from a different perspective. In 1980, the Federal Government spent $1 billion on drug control and state and local governments spent two to three times that. Now the Feds are spending $17 billion a year, two-thirds of it on law enforcement. State and local governments are spending more than that, with 80% going to law enforcement. We are spending a total of nearly $35 billion on direct enforcement of the drug laws, not counting all peripheral spending.

In 1980, nobody had ever heard of crack cocaine, nobody had ever heard of drug related HIV or AIDS. This year, 200,000 Americans are dead or dying of this dreaded disease. And now we have Hepatitis spreading like wildfire, as well. In 1980, 50,000 people were behind bars in the United States for breaking the drug laws; this year 400,000 people are behind bars for this reason.

I look at the two periods and think that if we could somehow go back to 1980 and stop Congress and state legislatures from passing more laws supporting drug prohibition, we would have far less of drug problem in 1998 than we do now. The anti-drug laws themselves are generating a lot of harm.

U.S. drug policy is remarkably free of any systematic analysis of costs and benefits. Normally, policy analysts want to assess our performance objectively. For example, we look at unintended consequences in military and welfare policy, as well as benefits. But with our current drug prohibition policies, you’ll never see a serious analysis of costs and benefits. We seem to be afraid of what we’ll find.

Let me explain. In 1980, Congress passed a resolution declaring that America should be drug-free by 1995. And just a few weeks ago at the United Nations, the U.N. drug chief proclaimed that he has a plan to eradicate opium and coca from the face of the earth in the next ten years. I argue that this is reckless, foolish rhetoric.

What are the criteria I would propose to evaluate success or failure? Criteria based on the concept of harm reduction. At its broadest, harm reduction asks, “How effective is any drug policy in reducing the death, the disease, the crime, the suffering, and the taxpayer expenditures devoted to dealing with drugs and the consequences of our policies?” The ideal drug policy is one that most successfully reduces the death and disease and crime associated with both drug abuse and our drug control policies and one that intelligently uses those resources.

The harm reduction position accepts that we have to learn to live with drugs and manage them. If some people are overweight, we don’t think about a food-free society, we think about reducing the harms associated with food. Well it should be the same with drugs. Drugs have been with us forever. There has never been a drug-free society in the history of human civilization.

There is a bottom line: the reduction of death, disease, crime and suffering. Harm reduction is not the same as drug legalization. The vast majority of my energies and the resources of George Soros and the other leading business people who have begun to emerge in this area, have nothing to do with drug legalization. If you look where resources are going, it’s to pay for harm reduction activities. The Soros Foundation is now the major funder of needle exchanges, because the United States is the only country in the West where the national government won’t spend any money for a sterile syringe for a junkie as part of the national HIV prevention efforts.

We also need to support the use of methadone. Methadone is to street heroin something not unlike like a nicotine patch is to cigarettes. It eliminates the underlying danger. A nicotine patch takes away the inherent danger by taking the smoker away from the tar and the other carcinogens in cigarettes. It’s the same thing with methadone and opiate drugs. Methadone won’t hurt your body. And there is strong evidence that people can be on methadone for 20, 30, even 50 years with no harm to their bodies, that people can even drive heavy vehicles and be responsible citizens while on methadone. So, pharmacological maintenance is not the same as giving whiskey to an addict. It does not contribute to on-going physical harm.

Harm reduction views prohibition as a source of greater harm than the problem it is supposed to eliminate. In the 1920s, we passed Prohibition in the hope that it would eradicate alcohol use from our society. It failed to do that. In its early years, it did reduce alcohol use. There was a period between 1916 and 1922, the three years before alcohol prohibition actually started, when alcohol use in this country dropped like a rock. The Temperance Movement was at its peak. During World War I, Americans boycotted German breweries. We used our wheat for bread for the soldiers instead of for rye whiskey. States passed laws.

And then we went to national Prohibition in 1920. Something unexpected happened. From 1922 to 1933, alcohol use rose steadily. Not so much beer drinking, because beer was only 4% alcohol and 96% water and Al Capone and friends preferred to field trucks with liquor that was 96% alcohol and 4% water. By 1933, more hard liquor was consumed than at the beginning of Prohibition. America had Al Capone and rising levels of organized crime and violence. And tens of millions of Americans were being labeled as criminals and were identifying themselves as criminals. And bootleggers became role models for kids. The speak-easy culture was developing.

And tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of people were being killed by bad bootleg liquor. Liquor was more dangerous when it was illegally produced. These deaths were not the consequence of alcohol consumption per se, but were the consequences of alcohol Prohibition policies that we had implemented on a legislative basis.

That’s why in 1933, Americans did something we’ve only done once in our history: we repealed a constitutional amendment. The public instituted in its place not radical legalization, but a variety of policies of local and state options for control. Some states established state monopolies and some states remained dry; some towns in wet states remained dry. Some states allowed alcohol to be sold in regular markets, while others restricted sales.

Towards the end of Prohibition, in 1931 or 1932, John D. Rockefeller, one of the most prominent supporters of alcohol prohibition and a funder of the temperance movement, changed his mind. He said, “I hate alcohol. I have been a teetotaler all my life. I gladly and generously helped to fund the temperance movement and the movement to prohibit alcohol consumption in this country. But I have now come to believe that the cure I advocated is worse than the harms that it was intended to eradicate.” The time had come to move towards a new policy. Rockefeller didn’t want to go back to the days of the saloons and reckless alcohol consumption. He wanted to move forward to a new and more responsible policy relying on intelligent regulatory measures

The key insight about Prohibition is that the country came to understand that the crime, violence, corruption, the overdoses, the loss of morals in society were not necessarily about alcohol, but were the result of the anti-alcohol policies. Similarly, we need to reduce the harms of drug prohibition.

Unlike alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition is here to stay for the foreseeable future. The objective of harm reduction not to legalize drugs, because many of us don’t support that and many fear that. Instead, the objective is to make drug prohibition work better. That’s the challenge. Drug prohibition needs to operate according to criteria that focus on reducing of death and disease and on limiting the waste of our resources on futile policies, rather than according to criteria that obsess on the number of people who broke the drug law last year. That’s the broad definition of harm reduction.

Finally, I’ll address the narrow definition of harm reduction: the proposition that drug abuse is an area where public health forces should be dominant and criminal justice forces should be on the sidelines. Drug abuse is not an appropriate area for law enforcement authorities to be in charge.

In the last few years, the challenge to move away from an emphasis on the criminalization of drug use has grown. The heavy dominance of an almost knee-jerk preference for criminal justice or punitive approaches remains. At the same time, we’ve taken the notion of abstinence, of drug free-ness, and put it on such a high pedestal in our society that it often times exceeds the value of life itself. There is no other way to explain the relentless opposition in the United States, but in no other advanced industrial society, to acknowledging the evidence on needle exchange as a positive public health initiative.

In the workplace, we pursue studies that don’t really test for performance or test for impairment on the job, but that penetrate people’s bodily fluids to find out whether or not they smoked a joint a week or a month ago.

Abstinence is so deeply embedded an ideology that even many people who say, “Let’s take some of the criminal law out of this, let’s get people out of the criminal justice system and into the public health system,” stumble over their commitment to abstinence and the need to use punitive sanctions to promote abstinence.

So that’s the challenge regarding the narrow definition of harm reduction—to shift the focus in drug policies to the public health arena and away from the criminal side.

RETURN TO TOP

I have been involved with the national drug problem since 1977. At that time, we organized National Families in Action in Atlanta, Georgia, a parents’ movement that evolved into a broader prevention movement that has continued working throughout the United States until the present.

What motivated us in 1977? Surging drug use among children. In 1977, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) estimated that 34% of our adolescents 12 - 17 years old, 65% of high school seniors, and 70% of young adults, had used illicit drugs. That was a change from 1962, when (also according to NIDA) less than 2% of the entire population in the United States had ever used an illicit drug, and less than 1% of adolescents. That got the attention of a lot of parents.

It seemed that this growth was driven in part by some of the measures that the harm reductionists now propose today. From 1972 - 1978, 11 states decriminalized marijuana. That gave way to a drug paraphernalia industry that by the late 1970s produced some 30,000 head shops to lure kids into the drug culture. The overwhelming message of the materials that were available to children in school suggested that they could use drugs responsibly—drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin.

Let me describe some of the paraphernalia available in head shops for kids to purchase. Some of it was to enhance marijuana use, such as a bong or a power hitter, both of which intensify the high. And there were stash cans, like a Coca Cola can with a false bottom that unscrewed, creating a place where you could hide drugs from your parents and police. There were even refitted benzadrex inhalers used to snort cocaine in school or on the job.

There were thousands of pamphlets you could purchase in head shops. “The Cocaine Users Handbook,” “The Pleasures of Cocaine.” Most of these pamphlets suggested that drugs were harmless. Fundamentally, the harm reduction messages of the 70s and to some extent of the 60s were “drugs can not hurt you, drugs are fun, and you can use drugs responsibly.”

By the end of the 1970’s, so many adolescents were dying drug- and alcohol-related deaths that the life span of this age group was decreasing, while every other age group was living longer. And we felt that a country that was willing to have that happen to its adolescents was a country that needed to have its butt kicked. So, we organized and started kicking some butt.

Our prevention goals were and are as follows: first, to prevent any use before it starts; second, to persuade those who have started using to stop; and third, to find abstinence-based treatment for those who cannot stop.

The prevention movement did a number of things. First, during the 1970s and 1980s, our organization and two others helped organize 3,000 to 4,000 parent groups across the United States. We stopped the decriminalization of marijuana; no state has decriminalized since 1978. We went after head shops and got them banned on the theory that if drugs are illegal to possess and consume, then gadgets that enhance their consumption should also be illegal.

We also insisted that “responsible use messages” in drug education materials that kids got in school be flipped in to “no use” messages. And we used clever advertisements, such as one that quoted William Shakespeare, “It provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.” This ad is a favorite of teenage boys.
We began to see results. Between 19779 and 1992, the U.S. enjoyed a two-thirds reduction in the regular, that is monthly, use of drugs among adolescents and young adults. There was an even more startling reduction in daily use. In 1979, 11% of high school seniors were using marijuana on a daily basis. One in nine seniors in the United States was stoned on a daily basis. Parents were getting second mortgages on their homes to put their kids into residential treatment centers, because their kids were so addicted that they could not stay in school and do what they needed to do as adolescents. Between 1979 and 1992, the daily use of marijuana was cut from 11% to 1.9%.

Keeping drugs illegal holds use down and saves lives. The number of Americans who regularly use alcohol is 109 million people. The number who regularly use tobacco is 62 million. The number of Americans who regularly use illicit drugs is 13 million. Alcohol and tobacco combined kill half a million people a year. All illicit drugs combined, with much lower usage, kill approximately 14,000 people. We believe that this is incontrovertible evidence for saying that while we might modify some of our laws, let’s certainly not get rid of them.

National Families in Action learned a lot about what happens when an addictive drug is legal in this country when we worked to raise the drinking age in Georgia to 21. We ran into a lobby so powerful—i.e., the alcohol lobby—that for several years we could not get a drinking age bill out of the Georgia Legislature’s Temperance Committee, let alone get a vote of either house. That experience was repeated throughout the United States, until Mothers Against Drunk Driving got a federal bill tied to the highway funds to raise the drinking age to 21.

If we contemplate doing something as radical as legalizing drugs, we need to be very cognizant of what we will turn loose. Yes, we will take care of rampant illicit profits, but we will create rampant licit profits and powerful legal lobbies. So we need to be very careful and think a great deal about that before we even consider taking such a step.

The laws that drug reformers—or drug legalizers, depending upon whom you talk to—are trying to change involve four sets of laws. These include the Federal food and drug laws which regulate how we allow new medications to come to market and the federal drug controls, which we use to control the availability of certain drugs.

Federal food and drug laws and drug control laws originated through public pressure in the early 1900s. A number of medications that were prescribed contained opiates and cocaine and alcohol. But they weren’t labeled. As a result, we had rising rates of addiction among people who were taking medication. There were also snake oil salesmen who went around selling elixirs—“magic potions”—that would put hair on your head or do whatever you needed, but were really nothing other than sugar water. So Congress developed one set of laws governing how we approve medications and a second set of laws covering how we control illicit drugs.

One of the ways the drug legalization movement has hit upon to try to soften the drug laws is this notion that marijuana cigarettes are safe and effective medication. The question I want to raise with you and discuss briefly is whether marijuana is medication. The answer is yes and no.

Yes, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug Dronabinol as safe and effective to treat nausea in cancer patients and wasting in AIDS patients. Dronabinol is synthetic THC, which is one of the 400 chemicals in marijuana.

The answer is also No. The FDA has not approved marijuana plant material for medical use. The criteria for approving a new drug are this: scientists want to make a drug that is safe (that is, it is non-toxic), that won’t hurt anybody, and that is effective, that is, it cures the specific problem for which the manufacturer of the drug claims. In addition, the drug must be specific and have no or few unwanted side effects. It must also be stable; if your doctor prescribes 300 milligrams of penicillin, he wants to know that every four hours you are going to get 300 milligrams and not 100 or 50 or a decreasing amount each time you take the drug.

Marijuana plant material has met none of these tests. It has not been proven safe. And in fact, some of the research shows that it has levels of toxicity that are worrisome to cancer and AIDS patients. There is some toxicity to the lung’s tissues and to the immune system.

Marijuana plant material has not been proven effective to cure any disease. It is not specific—it has some intolerable side effects. Many people do not like the high that it makes you have. And it is not stable; it cannot deliver a consistent and reliable dose.

Under the guise of medical use of marijuana, California’s Proposition 215 approved marijuana plant material as both safe and effective. It legalizes the possession for anyone whose doctor recommends—but does not prescribe—smoking for: a) nausea; b) AIDS wasting; c) glaucoma; d) arthritis; e) spasticity; f) migraines; or g) any other illness for which marijuana provides relief. Proposition 215 also legalizes the cultivation of marijuana, by default, and the distribution of marijuana. And it permits activity that violates the federal food and drug laws, the federal drug control laws, and international treaties.

Arizona’s Proposition 200 approves all Schedule I drugs as medically safe and effective. More than 100 drugs are covered by Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, including heroin and methamphetamines, drugs that have no accepted use in medicine and are defined as having a high potential for abuse. In addition, Arizona’s Proposition 200 legalizes possession for anyone with prescriptions from two doctors and it legalizes the distribution of drugs. Proposition 200 released from prison all non-violent prisoners convicted of simple possession of any drug. Proposition 200 also prohibits the imprisonment of any drug offender until he has been convicted in a court of law three times. It also established a Parents Council and a Fund for Prevention and Treatment.

Who funded these propositions? The people who financed the gathering of signatures and the commercials to “educate” voters about these propositions were mostly people from outside California or Arizona. The legalizers or harm reductionists raised nearly 85% of the money to finance these initiatives, while people from these states raised only 15%.

Finally, we must ask whether legalizing marijuana is an attempt to help sick people or an attempt to legalize drugs. I think the latter, but let’s ask some of the people who are leading the medical marijuana effort. Richard Cowen is the director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). He said, “The key to it—that is full legalization of marijuana—is medical access. Because once you have hundreds of people using marijuana medically, the whole scam is going to be blown. Medical Marijuana is our strongest suit. It is our point of leverage which will move us towards the legalization of marijuana for personal use.”

And writing in Reason Magazine just a few months ago, David Fritella, the communications director for Americans for Medical Rights—the group that sponsored the California and Arizona initiatives—said, “In addition to being a compassionate step in itself, changing state laws on medical marijuana tends to put the right issues into play. And it puts the right people on the defensive. It raises questions about the nature of drug prohibition and the rationality of its enforcers. And attracts allies who ultimately may be persuaded to support more radical change.”

RETURN TO TOP

I want to use my time to focus on my own experiences as a former federal prosecutor, as local DA and Baltimore State’s Attorney for two terms, and as mayor of Baltimore since 1987. This will explain why I’m a critic of the current approach.

To answer the bottom line question of whether we can win the War on Drugs, I would say we can win a war on drugs. But I don’t think we can win this War on Drugs. I was pleased to hear from Ms. Rusche that she thought that while we shouldn’t eliminate the drug laws, she thought some laws could be modified, that we could change some of our approaches. It’s on that ground that we can find some common understanding. I’ll try to show you how we, in Baltimore, have been able to do that.

There are two things about me that are important to note. Besides my public credentials, I am a husband and a father. I have two children and I don’t want my children to become drug addicts. I want my children to grow up healthy, so I don’t align myself with anyone who is trying to make it easier for kids to get drugs. But, it’s very easy for kids to get drugs right now. Access is not the issue. In 1990 or 1991, I gave a speech at to a group of small businessmen at a Rotary Club meeting in a Baltimore suburb. We were discussing the modification of drug laws. I told them that right now, their children were within five phone calls of being able to get any illegal drug they wanted. And that if they didn’t believe me, they should go ask their kids. I got letters back, expressing their shock that in their suburb, with all the efforts of the Drug War, their children had such easy access to drugs.

So let me start my story of how I came to my current thinking. I was elected State’s Attorney back in 1982. I was a front line soldier in the War on Drugs, fighting hard day in and day out. My people were putting people in jail, seizing vehicles; I was probably one of the biggest used car dealers in the area. And we were doing all the right things, with the police and prosecutors and U.S. Attorneys and lots of others working together. But I was frustrated about our inability to make meaningful progress.

Then something happened. In the late 1980s, a friend of mine, Marcellas Ward, a police officer, got killed. He was working under cover in an effort, along with the DEA, trying to get some drug dealers out of our community. Marty had a body wire on him at the time when he died, so we listened to him die on the tape. We listened to the conversations they were having when he got shot. What came out of that experience for me, over and over, was a question: What was it that kept motivating these dealers? Why would they so indiscriminately take this guy’s life? The answer kept coming back to money. The real issue here was money and profits. The crime on our streets was not people ingesting drugs and going crazy. It was war over turf, it was war over distribution rights.

Based on that experience, I decided our country needs a national policy that takes the profits out of distributing drugs on the street level. And that until we had that policy, we were going to have this revolving door. We were going to arrest one group and as soon as they went to jail some other guys would come back on the street, because the big money was there. And if you didn’t change the incentives, as long as there are big profits, we aren’t going to succeed.

After Marty’s death, I started reading about the War on Drugs and how it got started. I read about how the Harrison Act, when it was passed in 1914, was supposed to be regulatory, not a Volstead-like prohibition measure. So, I learned we’d been fighting a War on Drugs since 1914. I thought, maybe there could be a different way and maybe we could learn a little bit from alcohol prohibition and consider the possibility of changing the law.

Back in the late 1980s, when I started thinking differently about the drug issue, those who raised questions about our tactics in the War on Drugs were condemned the way early critics of the Vietnam War were. You weren’t patriotic if you didn’t believe in this war. If you didn’t just follow what the generals and others of our national leaders had to say. The War on Drugs had become—and still is—our domestic Vietnam. We’ve lost sight of the goals. We’re not willing to stand back and ask, “Where are we, what are we trying to achieve, and what are the consequences of what we’re doing?”

When I was elected Mayor in 1987, people said to me, “We don’t like this idea of decriminalization. It’s the wrong message to send to our children.” And when they asked, “What would life look like in a decriminalized environment?” I realized I didn’t have enough answers.

So, I worked to get beyond labels, such as “legalizers” and “criminalizers.” One night I spoke with a group of parents who were associated with Ms. Rusche’s organization. They were very concerned about their kids and drugs. I approached them by saying, “I’d like to propose to you three questions: “First, do you think that we have won the War on Drugs? Second, do you think that we are winning the War on Drugs? Third, do you think that doing more of the same for the next decade would win the War on Drugs?”

The parents answered, “No” to number one, “I’m not sure that we’re winning. And doing the exact same thing over and over again won’t win it.” So they stood back and said, “OK if we’re not winning and we’re not going to win this way in the future, are there alternatives?” Once they were open to the question of discussing alternatives, then we could proceed to analyze what we were doing and have a discussion of the consequences of the War on Drugs. By getting a real dialogue going, we found an area of common ground for our city.

In Baltimore, we have a problem of heroin use that goes back to the 1940s and has grown over time. We also have a growing AIDS problem. In Baltimore, AIDS is not related to the gay community. Our problem comes from intravenous drug users sharing dirty needles with one another, having sex with different partners, and having babies who are born infected with HIV. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drug-related AIDS was becoming an epidemic in Baltimore.

The only way I knew to stop the epidemic was to authorize our public health department to offer a sterile needle exchange program, to try to modify the behavior of drug addicts and slow the spread of AIDS. So three years or so after getting involved in this larger discussion, I proposed that we set up a needle exchange. Fortunately, by this point, we had had the discussion among our citizens and they generally were ready to go in a different direction.

But, in order to operate a syringe exchange program, you deal with syringes. And distributing a syringe has a criminal penalty associated with it. Doctors can distribute needles only to a diabetics. Otherwise, it is generally against the law to distribute sterile syringes. So we had to decriminalize possession and exchange of syringes.

We needed to do that through state law. Three years in a row, we went to the state, explaining that we would save lives through a needle exchange. But, we couldn’t get enabling legislation passed. Finally, the state Public Health Secretary joined a group of public health professionals from Johns Hopkins and me and together we made the case. Finally, by one vote, the legislature gave us three years to test a needle exchange program.

Baltimore’s needle exchange program was studied by Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the American Medical Association. The studies showed tremendous success in reducing the spread of AIDS in the community, making an overwhelming case that the needle exchange program had saved lives, had not increased drug use, and had given addicts opportunities to go into treatment.

We were able to go back to the legislature and show them a positive cost-benefit picture. The needle exchange program cost Baltimore $300,000 a year. Treating one AIDS patient from diagnosis until death costs the State $102,000. By saving just three addicts from being infected in one year, the program paid back. This time, when we requested authorization to continue the needle exchange program, it passed with all but one vote in the legislature.

We demonstrated a new approach, one in which public health has a very important role to play in the drug war. To go in this direction, however, we have to modify criminal laws.

We need to modify some others things about the current approach, as well, because this approach is dividing our society, instead of healing it. Dr. McNamara described how some police are calling drug addicts scum. And I have found in talking to people back since 1988 that the drug war is about “Us” against “Them.” Drug addicts were “those people.”

But, the numbers that Ms. Rusche showed us earlier indicate that drug users aren’t just people in the inner city, they are all over. When I talk to parent groups, I ask them, “If you came home tonight and found out that your child was addicted to cocaine, would you call a medical professional to get him treatment or would you call the police to have him incarcerated?” To a person, they all answer, “Well, of course, we would want that child treated.” But, that’s not what our system does for whole populations. The response of the current War on Drugs is to criminalize the children, to lock them up.

This response has serious consequences. For example in my city, one year almost one half of our black young men between the ages of 18 and 24 were under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system. Either they had an outstanding charge, were incarcerated, or were on probation. That hobbles a generation of young people. The future consequences to our community are devastating: Will these kids be able to get jobs, to be productive citizens? Why don’t we let the system respond to inner city kids the same way you would have responded to your kids?

Figuring out how to win against drugs is a very difficult issue. We don’t advance the issue by demonizing one another.

I’ll leave you with the words of a rational and realistic thinker from another era, named August Volner. August Volner was an outstanding police officer and Police Chief in Berkeley, California in the 1930s. He was a professor of Police Administration at the University of Chicago and the University of California, the author of a leading textbook on police science, and the President of the International Association of the Chiefs of Police.

Volner wrote the following about drugs and law enforcement. “A stringent law, spectacular police drives, vigorous prosecution and imprisonment of addicts and peddlers, have proven useless and enormously expensive as a means of correcting this evil. But they are also unjustifiably unbelievably cruel in their application to the unfortunate victims.

“Repression has driven this vice underground and produced the narcotics smugglers and supply agents who have grown wealthy out of this evil practice. Drug addiction is not a police problem. It never has and never can be solved by police. It is first and last a medical problem. And if there is a solution, it will be discovered not by policemen, but by scientific and competently trained medical experts whose sole objective will be the reduction and possible eradication of this devastating appetite.”

August Volner wrote those words in 1936, 22 years after the Harrison Act. Today, 62 years later, Volner’s words have lost none of their humanity, persuasiveness, or truth. We need to carry the essence of his message to our national political leaders. We need to tell them that the War on Drugs can be won, but only if it is based primarily on a public health approach.

RETURN TO TOP

Now that you’ve heard from all of my colleagues, I’d like to be more provocative. I’d like to challenge some of the views as I’ve heard them.

I’m going to break my presentation into two parts, first looking at policy with some clarity, using data, examining what works and what doesn’t work. And second, briefly at the end, I’ll talk about the moral dimension.

I also want to suggest a different paradigm from what you heard this morning. I’m a drug war hawk and I like the war metaphor as it was originally designed, which was to mobilize the nation behind a purpose, not to suggest the use of helicopters and gunships. While the metaphor has certain problems, it makes political leaders accountable for their stewardship on this issue.

I agree that our goal is to learn to live with the drug problem. The idea of a drug free society and the attendant rhetoric exceeds what we can be accountable for. Like crime and racism and violence against women, it’s never going to be eliminated. The question is, how best to limit drug use? And shouldn’t we exercise the moral will to maintain values we care about as a society? So, we ought to be able once again to reduce drug use.

Using the war metaphor to mobilize the nation has been shown to work. Between 1979 and 1992, we achieved a drop of 50% in drug use. And, with cocaine, we achieved a drop of 80% between 1985 and 1992. If you compare this to our experience with other social problems in the United States—educational performance, drop-out rates, HIV, teenage pregnancy and out of wedlock birth—a drop of 50% would be a remarkable success, not a failure.

Let’s look at some of the usage data for kids aged 12 to 17 for 1985, 1992, and 1996, for alcohol, cigarettes, illicit drugs, marijuana and cocaine. It is illegal for citizens of this age group to use and consume any of these substances. Between 1985 and 1992, thirty-day use dropped considerably for all. Between 1992 and 1996, alcohol went down slightly and cigarettes remained about the same. But overall drug use went up and marijuana use went up the most.

I address this for two reasons. First, I have been one of the people who have testified and written and criticized the Clinton Administration’s stewardship of the drug war and the results under its watch. But, notably, his administration has been very active on the prevention side, promoting the moral message against cigarettes. Yet, cigarette use has not gone down substantially in the last few years. The prevention message, the increasing effort to legislate areas where people can use cigarettes, and the attempt to stigmatize cigarette use in society, and by young people particularly, has not been very effective. This suggests that prevention efforts are not enough.

Now let’s look at people’s “entry” into drugs. Between 1974 and 1984, we increased the mean age at which people started using any drugs—licit or illicit—and reduced the number of people starting. What is disturbing is that in more recent years, we have initiation at earlier and earlier ages. At present, the mean age for initiation to marijuana is very close to that for alcohol. And the number of young kids starting has never been higher.

We need to focus on the age at which kids start. If you want to inoculate people from drug use—and the same is true of cigarettes and alcohol—keep kids off these substances. If they haven’t tried by the time they’re 20, they’re unlikely to have a problem later on. It’s the closest we have to inoculation.

We have an experiment. We have begun to “normalize drug use,” both de facto and de jure legalization with the California and Arizona referenda. We have record low prices and record high purities for most drugs. There is less stigma and we have more young people at younger and younger ages using these substances.

Many people are more comfortable with marijuana than other drugs. In talking about decriminalizing marijuana, let’s examine whether there is a contributory effect of using marijuana. Retrospective surveys exploring the relationship between marijuana use and later use of cocaine show a clear relationship. In fact, correlations between these two drugs are stronger than those between smoking and lung cancer.

Now, let’s consider what I call urban myths about drugs and drug policy. First, how much do Americans spend purchasing drugs? It has been said that the proceeds of drug lords equal the U.S. military budget. Insofar as we can measure from street price data (not including, for example, trading prostitution for drugs), we spend $32 billion in constant dollars, with the largest single amount going to cocaine. It does matter whether the annual revenue of Colombian drug lords is equal to the defense budget of the United States or whether it is considerably less. Now, $32 billion is a lot of money, but it is a lot less than $300 billion.

Next, let’s look at crime. Close to 60% of arrestees test positive for drugs at the time of arrest, according to a composite analysis. Does this mean the individual committed a crime because of drugs in his or her system? Maybe, maybe not. We know that drugs impair judgment, they make people agitated, paranoid. But there does seem to be a high correlation between drug use and crime. I submit to you it’s not just the wars among dealers, which certainly does create violence. But it’s also violence due to the psychoactive tendency of drugs and their impact on the people who use them.

And how about the notion that crime is down? Crime is not down that much—only 10.5% between 1991 and 1995. And, at 5,278 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, it is still near historic highs of 5,950 per 100,000, experienced in 1980. This is more than five times the rate in the 1960s. In addition, the crime rate increases whenever drug use increases.

Another myth about crime and the criminal justice system: “Everyone’s getting locked up because of drugs.” Indeed, the number of crimes where drug use was the primary offense has gone up, from 9.9% in 1986 to 23.2% in 1995. But the single biggest increase in people in custody is due to violence. A lot of people may have drugs in their systems when they’re arrested, but the single greatest increase of people in custody is violent crime. In our total U.S. prison population, roughly 50,000 are in for public order violations, roughly 175,000 are in for property violations, and almost 500,000 are in for violent crime.

Let’s look at the myth that we’ve gone on an incarceration binge. The prison population number has risen substantially, by approximately 800,000 people since 1980. Now one wants to put this many people in prison, but, if this is a prison binge, we’ve had a probation orgy. The probation population has increased by close to 2 million in the same period. Thus, the most common outcome of committing a crime is going back on the street. In the last five years, 25% to 30% of murders in this country were committed by people who were “under court supervision” when they committed the murder, either probation, parole, or pre-trial release.

Finally, what is the connection between violence and incarceration? Of individuals currently incarcerated for a violent crime, 94% are violent or repeat offenders. I suggest to you that the system is doing a reasonably good job of putting people in jail who deserve to be in jail.

There’s another important dimension of drug-related violence: child abuse. Crack has spawned an enormous growth in the number of cases and the heinous forms of child abuse that were simply not common years ago, particularly neglect and both physical and sexual assaults.

Many people working in the child welfare area believe that the view that hard-core crack addicts can be rehabilitated is one of the single biggest reasons why the system fails to protect children. The actual treatment and rehabilitation record for crack addicts is horrible. So, once the addiction has been identified, the only thing to do is to put these kids up for adoption or permanent foster care, to protect their lives. But the system has repeatedly put children back in danger out of the mistaken belief in crack treatment.

More myths. Are we spending excessively on drug control? In 1995/96, we spent between $10 billion and $12 billion on drug control. At the same time, we spent $20 billion on job training. That’s not so bad. This is a big country; numbers that might be shocking to your personal budget may not reflect inappropriate allocations in national priorities or federal budget expenditures.

How is this drug control money being spent? Bill Clinton spent more in both demand reduction and domestic law enforcement than Reagan and Bush, but he spent less in international efforts and interdiction than Bush. There has been a change in policy. We’ve had an experiment—not radical, but enough to test a reduction in interdiction and international programs and an increase domestic law enforcement and demand reduction. And, as we’ve seen, drug use has climbed during this period.

Demand reduction includes treatment. We heard a lot yesterday about cuts in treatment. But the Clinton administration has spent one-third more, $4 billion more in 4 years, on treatment than his predecessors.

The argument is often made that if only we spent more money on treatment for the people that need it, we’d be better off. I agree that treatment is important. But the treatment system, as it is currently operating, does not exactly inspire confidence. According to a federal report on how treatment resources are being utilized, they are at somewhere between 50% and 80% of capacity. Are there waiting lists in some places? Sure, but we’re not doing a good job of distributing resources against the need.

Secondly, most people now believe that the real problem is the hard-core 6 or 7 or 8 million users. They need long-term residential treatment. But, long-term residential beds are even less utilized. Why? Because addicts control how much treatment they get. We will need to use the strong arm of the law to keep them in treatment. And why not? The evidence from professionals is that, in most cases, forced treatment works as effectively as voluntary treatment.

There’s also a problem of quality. Inner city, homeless, hard-core crack addicts referred for treatment in the criminal justice system don’t get access to the same facilities as our family and friends. If we want to talk about realistically making treatment a higher priority, how much are we willing to spend?

Treatment works, but not all the time. The famous Rand Study found that one dollar invested in treatment saves seven dollars in law enforcement. That same study said the results depend on what category of addict and how one measures the cost-benefit. Only 13% of heavy cocaine users were light users or non-users by the end of the first year, and 20% continue using drugs while they were in treatment. Among hard-core cocaine users, only 6% desisted in heavy cocaine use. Four percent, or 2/3, desisted while in treatment; 2% desisted on their own. Thus, treatment increased the likelihood that hard-core cocaine users would desist by only 2 percentage points compared to those who did not have treatment. The system isn’t meeting that need very well.

Now, let’s talk about the moral dimension. This will be brief, but I do not mean to minimize its importance. I gathered from yesterday’s conversation that many of you don’t like imposing morality by legislation and wonder if drug use isn’t about personal morality. I’d argue that the question is not whether we like imposing morality by public or government institutions, but what morality some of us are willing to impose. We don’t seem to mind imposing morality by legislating about racism, about bigotry in religion, about sex discrimination. We don’t mind legislating morality about environmental matters.

By the same token, most Americans don’t mind legislating morality about drugs, either. Why? Because they think drugs are not good for our society. They hold a view that a free society depends upon people who can govern themselves. They believe that drugs that have no social use other than intoxication (and even alcohol, which causes a terrible toll in society), drugs that make people less able to make rational and free judgments, rightfully are of concern to a free society.

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