Daily Archives: May 11, 2017

David Sheff, USA TODAY Contributor 12:33 p.m. ET May 10, 2017

A heroin user(Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

During the campaign, President Trump committed to addressing Americas drug crisis. He called it a crippling problem and a total epidemic, which it is. An average of 144 people a day die of drug overdoses.

Trump promised increased funding and comprehensive Medicaid coverage for treatment. In March, he said, "This is an epidemic that knows no boundaries and shows no mercy, and we will show great compassion and resolve as we work together on this important issue."

Trumps rhetoric suggested a continuation of President Obamas approach, which was founded on a rejection of the failed 45-year-old war on drugs, which treated drug use and addiction mainly as criminal problems. Obama called that war counterproductive and an utter failure.

His administration emphasized treatment-and-prevention programs based on scientific advances that have demonstrated that addiction is a brain disease with biological, psychological and environmental determinants. Obama championed landmark legislation that funded mental health and addiction treatment programs and research.

He signed the 21st Century Cures Act and the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which provides resources for state and community prevention and treatment efforts. A godsend to sufferers of substance-use disorders, Obamacare mandated that insurance plans cover mental health, including addiction care, in parity with other diseases.

The administration made headway toward ending the war-on-drugs approach. Obamas attorney general, Eric Holder, reversed wartime policies, including draconian mandatory minimum sentencing that filled prisons with people convicted of non-violent drug crimes. His surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, released a historic report as significant as the 1964 surgeon generals report on smoking on alcohol, drugs and health, which made science-based prevention and treatment a national priority.

The report is a progressive set of evidence-based policy recommendations for preventing substance use, intervening early in cases of drug misuse, and improving addiction treatment. The recommendations were the result of a 24-month review of the past 30 years of science and policy in this field. In addition, Obamas recent drug czar, Michael Botticelli, spearheaded a movement that rejected the "failed policies and failed practices" of the past and championed prevention, treatment and harm reduction. For the first time, the drug czar's budget was tipped in favor of prevention and treatment over interdiction and policing.

Trumps initial comments regarding addiction appeared to reflect both a personal passion and a sensible policy. However, the president is systematically abandoning the addicted and their families. Last month, Trump abruptly fired Murthy and announced that the odd couple of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Chris Christie will lead an effort to create policies to combat the opioid epidemic.

Fine, but meanwhile, though Trump promised to fund treatment, he has proposed slashing almost $6 billion from health agencies that, among other priorities, address drug use and addiction. He specifically targeted $100 million in block grants for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Of immediate concern to the 20 million Americans who meet the diagnostic criteria for the disease of addiction, and the 40 million regularly misusing alcohol and other drugs who are at risk and may require some form of treatment, the president has said that one way or another hell end mandates included in the Affordable Care Act.

Trump has said that he'll sign the bill the House passed Thursday that will, if it makes it through the Senate, do just that by allowing states to apply for waivers of ACA-required benefits, including mental health and addiction care. Without that mandated coverage, its likely that millions of Americans will lose coverage for an illness that could kill them.

Meanwhile, Trumps team has begun a re-escalation of the drug war. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an old-school drug warrior, criticized Holders policies and suggested that hell reverse them. You have to able to arrest people and then youre intervening in their destructive habit, Sessions said. Many people never ever recover from addiction except by the grave.

They would recover if they had proper treatment.

Its unsurprising that an administration that has vowed to be tough on crime plans to use battering rams rather than science-based public health efforts ignoring evidence that the former doesnt work and that the latter does. In the past, tough on crime was a boon to the prison system, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated for non-violent drug crimes. Any policy that throws sick people in prison is inhumane, never mind counterproductive.

And how about killing them? Doubts about Trumps compassion toward the addicted were confirmed last weekend when he cozied up to a dictator whose idea of treating drug users is murdering them. According to USA TODAY, his new friend, the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, had at least 6,000 people killed for drug crimes in six months. Duterte doesnt distinguish between users and dealers. He has exhorted Philippine citizens: If you know any addicts, go ahead and kill them.

Its critical that the Trump administration reverse directions and focus on a public health approach. Science has demonstrated that addiction isnt a choice made by people without will power who only care about getting high, no matter the impact on society, their loved ones and themselves. Its a brain disease.

We punish people who make bad choices. But people who are ill dont need censure, stigmatization or jail time. They need quality care for an illness that can, if it isnt treated, kill them.

David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Fathers Journey Through His Sons Addiction, and Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending Americas Greatest Tragedy. Follow him on Twitter: @david_sheff

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Sheff: Trump's war on drug users replays failure - Tallahassee.com

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BanyanChurch v state in the Philippines' war on drugs - The Economist

Many currently illegal drugs, such as marijuana, opium, coca, and psychedelics have been used for thousands of years for both medical and spiritual purposes. So why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal today? The war on drugs is not based on any scientific assessment of the relative risks of these drugs but it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs.

The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws in the early 1900s were directed at black men in the South. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Today, Latino and especially black communities are still subject to wildly disproportionate drug enforcement and sentencing practices.

In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy.

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Im saying. We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.

Between 1973 and 1977, however, eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that included marijuana decriminalization. In October 1977, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use.

Within just a few years, though, the tide had shifted. Proposals to decriminalize marijuana were abandoned as parents became increasingly concerned about high rates of teen marijuana use. Marijuana was ultimately caught up in a broader cultural backlash against the perceived permissiveness of the 1970s.

The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.

Public concern about illicit drug use built throughout the 1980s, largely due to media portrayals of people addicted to the smokeable form of cocaine dubbed crack. Soon after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his wife, Nancy Reagan, began a highly-publicized anti-drug campaign, coining the slogan Just Say No.

This set the stage for the zero tolerance policies implemented in the mid-to-late 1980s. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who believed that casual drug users should be taken out and shot, founded the DARE drug education program, which was quickly adopted nationwide despite the lack of evidence of its effectiveness. The increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS.

In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nations number one problem was just 2-6 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. The draconian policies enacted during the hysteria remained, however, and continued to result in escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.

Although Bill Clinton advocated for treatment instead of incarceration during his 1992 presidential campaign, after his first few months in the White House he reverted to the drug war strategies of his Republican predecessors by continuing to escalate the drug war. Notoriously, Clinton rejected a U.S. Sentencing Commission recommendation to eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences.

He also rejected, with the encouragement of drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, Health Secretary Donna Shalalas advice to end the federal ban on funding for syringe access programs. Yet, a month before leaving office, Clinton asserted in a Rolling Stone interview that we really need a re-examination of our entire policy on imprisonment of people who use drugs, and said that marijuana use should be decriminalized.

At the height of the drug war hysteria in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a movement emerged seeking a new approach to drug policy. In 1987, Arnold Trebach and Kevin Zeese founded the Drug Policy Foundation describing it as the loyal opposition to the war on drugs. Prominent conservatives such as William Buckley and Milton Friedman had long advocated for ending drug prohibition, as had civil libertarians such as longtime ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser. In the late 1980s they were joined by Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Federal Judge Robert Sweet, Princeton professor Ethan Nadelmann, and other activists, scholars and policymakers.

In 1994, Nadelmann founded The Lindesmith Center as the first U.S. project of George Soros Open Society Institute. In 2000, the growing Center merged with the Drug Policy Foundation to create the Drug Policy Alliance.

George W. Bush arrived in the White House as the drug war was running out of steam yet he allocated more money than ever to it. His drug czar, John Walters, zealously focused on marijuana and launched a major campaign to promote student drug testing. While rates of illicit drug use remained constant, overdose fatalities rose rapidly.

The era of George W. Bush also witnessed the rapid escalation of the militarization of domestic drug law enforcement. By the end of Bushs term, there were about 40,000 paramilitary-style SWAT raids on Americans every year mostly for nonviolent drug law offenses, often misdemeanors. While federal reform mostly stalled under Bush, state-level reforms finally began to slow the growth of the drug war.

Politicians now routinely admit to having used marijuana, and even cocaine, when they were younger. When Michael Bloomberg was questioned during his 2001 mayoral campaign about whether he had ever used marijuana, he said, You bet I did and I enjoyed it. Barack Obama also candidly discussed his prior cocaine and marijuana use: When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently that was the point.

Public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of sensible reforms that expand health-based approaches while reducing the role of criminalization in drug policy.

Marijuana reform has gained unprecedented momentum throughout the Americas. Alaska, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Maine, Massachusetts, Washington State, and Washington D.C. have legalized marijuana for adults. In December 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legally regulate marijuana. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans legalize marijuana for adults by 2018.

In response to a worsening overdose epidemic, dozens of U.S. states passed laws to increase access to the overdose antidote, naloxone, as well as 911 Good Samaritan laws to encourage people to seek medical help in the event of an overdose.

Yet the assault on American citizens and others continues, with 700,000 people still arrested for marijuana offenses each year and almost 500,000 people still behind bars for nothing more than a drug law violation.

President Obama, despite supporting several successful policy changes such as reducing the crack/powder sentencing disparity, ending the ban on federal funding for syringe access programs, and ending federal interference with state medical marijuana laws did not shift the majority of drug policy funding to a health-based approach.

Now, the new administration is threatening to take us backward toward a 1980s style drug war. President Trump is calling for a wall to keep drugs out of the country, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it clear that he does not support the sovereignty of states to legalize marijuana, and believes good people dont smoke marijuana.

Progress is inevitably slow, and even with an administration hostile to reform there is still unprecedented momentum behind drug policy reform in states and localities across the country. The Drug Policy Alliance and its allies will continue to advocate for health-based reforms such as marijuana legalization, drug decriminalization, safe consumption sites, naloxone access, bail reform, and more.

We look forward to a future where drug policies are shaped by science and compassion rather than political hysteria.

Original post:

A Brief History Of The War On Drugs And What It Means For ... - The Fresh Toast

Anyone who has heard Ethan Nadelmann speak will remember how passionate he is about the topic of drug reform. His speech at the 2015 International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Arlington, Virginia literally quieted the audience of 2,000 as he recounted some of the terrible drug enforcement policies in the U.S. and other parts of the world, some that still maintain a death penalty for simple possession.

Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a drug reform advocacy organization that also played a significant role in creating the initiative that resulted in the legalization of cannabis in Washington, D.C.

Nadelmann, now 60 years old and looking for more challenges, recently announced that he is stepping down from the DPA in late April. I feel that I have accomplished a lot over my years in a lot of ballot initiatives going back to 1996, he said. What I feel that I am really trying to do now is ensure that the DPA continues to flourish and grow and be effective under the new leadership. But at the same time, I am looking forward to new adventures, and remain in marijuana reform and other drug reform issues, he said. Its an unusual time for me, but one that feels quite right.

The DPA aims to end the war on drugs. But legalization of marijuana has become more challenging as the new administration continues to send mixed signals about what they willor will notdo on a federal level for legalization.

What I think they will do is pull out the Cole memo from 2013 and start interpreting that more strictly, Nadelmann said. They are going to target asset forfeiture actions or do prosecutions of key players in the industry, and look for ways to generally make life difficult for the future of marijuana legalization.

He thinks that its time for the serious players in the industry to become more sophisticated in their advocacy at the federal level, and more effectively align with advocacy organizations like the DPA.

Some of the more aggressive advocacy organizations, such as the DCMJ in D.C., believe that there is a more direct route to legalization law-making and regulation: through acts of civil disobedience. They believe that the DPA and similar advocate organizations move too slowly, and are missing opportunities to push the legalization agenda.

Its not an either-or thing, Nadelmann said. Effective advocacy typically involves [a] combination of sophisticated grass roots and grass tops advocacy in support of a strategic agenda. I think that street theater [civil disobedience] can play a valuable role in advancing that agenda, but can also set it backwards sometimes.

In an op-ed column published by the New York Times in late February, Nadelmann wrote that the new administration has cast a chill over the legal and regulated marijuana industry by challenging the ability of state authorities to regulate the industry.

But a recently formed Congressional Cannabis Caucus, created by two Democrat and two Republican congressmen, gives momentum to legislation efforts by creating an opportunity to embark on more effective bi-partisan action.

Renewing the Earl Blumenauer amendment (to deschedule marijuana and regulate it like alcohol), and then reintroducing the McClintock Polis amendment (to prevent the Department of Justice from interfering in state marijuana laws) and getting that passed by Congress has to be a significant part of the legalization work done in 2017, Nadelmann said.

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ETHAN NADELMANN'S FIGHT AGAINST THE WAR ON DRUGS: New administration, New Challenges - Dope Magazine