HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/conference.report

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 18KB | 353 lines

   Hanging with the Drug Policy Reformers in Washington, D.C.
                          by Paul Hager

"We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
         -- Ben Franklin, 4 July, 1776.


     The 6th International Conference on Drug Policy Reform took
place in Washington, D.C. recently.  The conference was sponsored
by the Drug Policy Foundation (DPF), an organization founded 5
years ago to seek alternatives to the drug war.  These alternatives
include legalization of marijuana and decriminalization of other
illegal drugs, expanded treatment for substance abuse focusing on
a medical rather than a criminal justice approach, and education --
as opposed to D.A.R.E. and Partnership for a Drug-Free America
propaganda and hysteria which is about all we have now.  The most
well known members of the DPF are probably Mayor Kurt Schmoke of
Baltimore and Dr. Carl Sagan, the noted astrophysicist and writer.
As a member myself (perhaps less renowned) I attended numerous
panels and other events at the Conference.  A full report would
more than fill the pages of the Voice -- so here are a few of my
experiences and impressions.

The Clinton Conundrum

     Speculation about the future drug policies of President-elect
Clinton was rampant.  Clinton's public pronouncements have not
suggested that he would embrace any kind of reform; on the
contrary, he has said that he is "adamantly opposed to drug
legalization" and believes that the criminal justice system "saved"
his brother.

     I had a conversation about Clinton with Kevin Zeese, the VP
and general counsel of the DPF.  He noted that Kurt Schmoke is a
friend and close political ally of Clinton's.  According to Zeese,
Schmoke was of the opinion that Clinton was "flexible" on the issue
of reform.  Zeese said that he had spoken to "Kurt" within the past
couple of weeks and had no reason to doubt his assessment.

     Zeese's is the optimistic view.  Others saw little cause for
celebration.  There is no mandate for change and Clinton's own
words leave little room for maneuver.  The person touted for drug
czar in the Clinton administration is Mathea Falco, author of the
just-published The Making of a Drug-Free America.  Falco was in the
Carter administration as an assistant to Dr. Peter Bourne.  The
only reforms she would be likely to put in place are permitting
needle exchange and expanding methadone treatment.  Throwing
nonviolent drug offenders in concentration camps euphemistically
called "boot camps" and putting 100,000 more police on the streets,
as is called for in the proposed Clinton program, do not qualify as
reform.  Per this view, it is possible that some of the more
egregious excesses of the forfeiture mill will be curbed but that's
about it.  The pessimistic view of the future under Clinton is a
kinder, gentler drug war.

"We've won the war"

     Dr. Dale Gieringer is a lanky, bearded Californian from the
Bay area.  I had encountered Dale a year or so earlier but that was
electronically -- call it a virtual meeting.  Dale and I are both
on computer networks and subscribe to the same drug policy
discussion groups.  We had exchanged e-mail (i.e., electronic mail)
on a few occasions and I had read several of his journal articles,
so I was hoping that he would be at the conference.  When I finally
did meet him, we took a brief moment to scan each other's physical
forms -- as if to vouchsafe that we were flesh and blood creatures
and not holographic projections.

     Dale had an interesting take on the future under Clinton.
"We've won the war," he said.  He explained that the twelve years
of Reagan/Bush had been dominated by ideologues and zealots who had
stifled legitimate science and rational discourse.  Whatever
Clinton himself thought about drug policy, science would become
possible again in a Clinton administration and in such an
environment reason and the truth would eventually prevail.

     Dale was certainly right in his assessment of science under
Reagan/Bush.  One need only recall the Meese Commission on
pornography or the decision to ban fetal tissue research to see how
ideologically driven everything was.  From the Laffer Curve to Star
Wars, it was all fantasy and pseudo-science designed to justify
corporate rapacity, political corruption, and cultural warfare.  On
Dale's assessment of science under Clinton/Gore, there is less
certitude.  However, it was asserted by a number of people at the
conference that rank-and-file bureaucrats involved in drug
enforcement know that the current system can't work and are ready
to embrace alternatives.  Thus far, the alternatives have been
blocked by the upper level political appointees.

"Say goodnight, George"

     Another e-mail correspondent of mine is Eric Sterling, a
Washington attorney.  Eric was a counsel for the House Judiciary
Committee until 1989 when he left to found the National Drug
Strategy Network.  Naturally, when I saw that he was conducting a
discussion on "grass-roots" organizing, I sought him out.

     Eric had brought his laptop 486 computer with him and he
demonstrated how to access activist computer bulletin boards and
news groups.  I was glad to see that someone at the conference was
alerting people to the enormous potential of digital communications
as an organizing tool.

     Eric related the story of election night in D.C.  Parties were
going on all over the district.  Sometime after midnight, Eric
drove by the White House with the sunroof on his "beemer" (i.e.,
BMW) open and holding a sign he had made.  It had written on it,
"Say goodnight, George."  As he described the scene in front of the
White House, passing cars were honking and parties of revelers
danced and threw broccoli.

Caucusing with the Arkansas Delegation

     The conference attracted a diverse collection of individuals
and groups.  Perhaps one of the most colorful groups was Arkansas
NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).
They quickly earned the sobriquet, "the Arkansas Delegation."  They
were easy to spot:  most sported buttons bearing Clinton's picture
with the words, "Inhale Bill, Inhale."

     I went to a "caucus" of the Arkansas Delegation at the end of
the first day's events.  One of the people on hand was Richard
Cowan, the new executive director of NORML.  Cowan is the
antithesis of the stereotype of a marijuana legalizer.  A Texan who
made his money in the oil business, Cowan looks to be the kind of
man who would attend power lunches at Houston's Petroleum Club,
give $100,000 to the Bush Campaign, and fret over the vagaries of
the Amsterdam spot market -- in fact, he probably has done two of
the three.  The only thing that suggests that Cowan may not be a
stolid Republican is the small pin he sports in his left lapel: a
marijuana leaf.

     Cowan has long been active in the Libertarian Party and is
part of the Libertarian "right wing" (yes, even Libertarians have
a left and a right wing).  When it comes to espousing Reagan-type
small government rhetoric, Cowan is without peer.  This makes him
particularly effective in dealing with the archetypal conservative
prohibitionist.  Cowan recounted a recent debate he had with Orange
County (California) prosecutor, Dan Lundberg.  "I had him flanked
on the right," said Cowan, who got a favorable response from the
stolid burghers in Southern California.

     One item he used to good effect was the story of Donald Scott,
the multi-millionaire and Scott Paper heir who was shot dead by
police looking for marijuana on his 200 acre estate.  The evidence
is that the motivation for the raid was forfeiture -- the police
had the forfeiture papers on them when they busted down Scott's
door in the middle of the night.  The sleepy Scott reacted in a way
perfectly understandable to Cowan's audience: Scott heard crashing
sounds in his house and thought that gang members had broken in,
bent on mayhem.  He got his gun and headed toward the sounds only
to be blown away when he was spotted.  Exit Mr. Scott.  Of course,
no marijuana was found.  Scott, in fact, was rabidly anti-drug.

     It's one thing to hear "liberals" crying over ghetto dwellers
who have been victimized by the police but when it's one of your
own describing the same thing happening to a member of the white
upper class, the effect can be galvanizing.  Cowan summed up this
example of how the forfeiture laws are corrupting law enforcement
by the following formulation:  "If you think the forfeiture laws
can't apply to you, you probably think the RICO laws (i.e., the
Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act) only apply to
people with names like Rico."

"Yeast shit"

     There were panels at the conference covering just about every
imaginable topic of interest to drug law reformers.  In talks I've
given, I've discussed marijuana toxicity, so when I saw that a
panel had been set up that would present the latest information on
that subject, I went for it.  I was also attracted by the fact that
one of the panelists was yet another computer net contact, Dr. Tod
Mikuriya, a California M.D. who was instrumental in the passage of
San Francisco's medical marijuana ordinance.  (But more about
medical marijuana later.)

     Much of the content of the presentations was fairly technical
but interspersed were such pithy observations as, a lethal dose is
"... a bale of marijuana hitting someone on the head."  Art
Lecesse, a psychologist on the faculty of Kenyon College, drew some
interesting comparisons between legal alcohol and illegal
marijuana.  "Alcohol," he said, "is a neurotoxin -- it's yeast
shit.  It achieves its effect by irritating neural membranes -- it
is an organic solvent.  It's associated with organic brain damage
like Korsakov-Warneke syndrome."  [Note: a good case study of the
effect of alcoholic Korsakov's syndrome is to be found in Oliver
Sacks' excellent book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in
the chapter titled, "The Lost Mariner".]  In contrast, he noted,
there is no evidence that marijuana has any deleterious effect on
brain function.  In fact, the recent discovery of cannabinoid
receptors indicates that the human brain actually requires
endogenous cannabinoid-like (i.e., marijuana-like) substances in
order to function.

     I must suppress a natural desire to recapitulate the entire
discussion.  For example, there was a whole discussion of
considerations surrounding prescription of marijuana -- were it
available for medical purposes.  Fortunately, an amateur video was
made of this panel.  I intend to get a copy and have it aired on
BCAT, Bloomington's community access channel.  The official title
of the panel is "Marijuana and Toxicity" -- look for it to appear
in about a month.

The Neo-Temperance Movement

     Dr. Bruce Alexander, a social psychologist on the faculty of
Simon Fraser University in Canada, has been a student of the
recrudescent prohibitionist movement in North America --
particularly the U.S.  Alexander was an advisor on a two part
episode of the popular, "The Nature of Things" science show that
airs on the Discovery Channel.  The episode was called "Dealing
with Drugs" and presented an objective view of alternative drug
policy approaches being followed by the U.S., Canada, and the
Netherlands.  Alexander has also researched cocaine's association
with violence, attempting to isolate the effect of the drug -- its
pharmacology -- from the brutalizing and corrupting influence of
the criminal black market that arises from prohibition.  (His
conclusion is that it is prohibition of cocaine and not cocaine
itself that is responsible for most of the so-called "drug-related
violence.")

     Alexander and a fellow researcher, Bryan Nadeau, have
coauthored a forthcoming paper that examines how the attitudes,
myths, and rhetoric that animated the 19th Century Temperance
movement have been adopted, almost without change, by the modern
drug prohibition movement.  This paper was the basis of a
presentation at the conference.

     What Alexander and Nadeau observed was that one had only to
make a few substitutions in 19th Century prohibitionist rhetoric to
bring it up to date.  For example, for "alcohol" and "alcoholism",
substitute "substance" and "substance abuse".  A lengthy list of
adverse consequences is asserted in the rhetoric -- past and
present -- ranging from "addiction" to "the fall of civilization."
To illustrate this, Alexander and Nadeau made an interesting
choice: they looked at the how society's attitudes about anabolic
steroids have changed in the past decade.

     As a frequent weight lifter, I've had more than a passing
interest in how steroids came to be demonized in the 1980s.  One
popular assertion was that steroids promoted aggressive behavior --
that users "roided out" and committed unspeakable acts of violence.
A drug inducing someone to be violent or antisocial is a central
element of drug prohibition mythology -- thus "reefer madness" or
the claim by King James that coffee and coffee houses led people to
lese majeste and sedition.  In the case of steroids, evidence of
violence induction is at best anecdotal.

     Most interesting was a look at the side effects associated
with steroids and the extent they have been exaggerated to serve
the prohibition mythos.  One of the most serious alleged side
effects is liver cancer.  While this is often mentioned, the
incidence of liver cancer never is -- an omission which prevents
the supposed harm from being quantified and compared with other
societally accepted risks.  According to Alexander and Nadeau, the
rate of liver cancer is around 3 per 1,000,000 users per year.  In
contrast, the mortality rate for cigarette users is about 6500 per
1,000,000 users per year, most of the deaths coming from lung
cancer.

     Alexander and Nadeau concluded by asserting that pharmacology
-- the true action of the drug on the human body -- offered no
insight into steroid prohibition.  Rather, they said, it was only
in the context of a "drug war" being driven by 19th Century
attitudes that an explanation could be found.

"Surrogate Issue"

     On the marijuana front, one of the hottest issues for
reformers is forcing the DEA to move the drug from Schedule I to
Schedule II in its classification scheme.  A drug that is Schedule
I is deemed to have no medical uses and have a high potential for
abuse.  Schedule II differs in that such drugs have medical uses
and can be prescribed by doctors.  For a point of comparison,
cocaine is Schedule II.

     As is often the case when government bureaucrats and know-
nothing political appointees start mucking around in scientific or
technical areas, the assigning of marijuana to Schedule I has no
rational basis.  Over 150 years of scientific research and medical
experience demonstrate the usefulness of marijuana in treating a
wide variety of maladies.  The AMA opposed marijuana prohibition in
1937, but their objections were overridden.

     To the benefits known to doctors in the 1930s can now be added
two more:  marijuana is very effective is suppressing the nausea
that often accompanies cancer chemotherapy and it also stimulates
the appetites of AIDS sufferers.  Because of drug war ideology, the
limited and grossly inadequate medical marijuana program that had
been grudgingly run by the government was recently discontinued.
This action did, however, receive national media scrutiny and was
accompanied by a widely quoted survey of clinical oncologists that
found that half would prescribe marijuana to their cancer patients
if they could legally do so.

     Here, then, is a ready-made issue for reformers.  Force
government to reverse its position on medical marijuana which,
incidentally, compels government to admit that it has been
systematically lying about the drug since it was initially
prohibited.  At the conference, medical marijuana was deemed a
"surrogate issue" -- it can be promoted without advocating
legalization yet has the result that the cause of legalization is
advanced.

     A diverse group of activists has been involved in this issue.
Dr. Tod Mikuriya and his supporters in the California Medical
Association were very successful in getting the Association to
endorse medical marijuana.  Likewise, the Massachusetts ACLU drug
task force lobbied that state's legislature to pass a resolution
endorsing medical marijuana.  And ACT UP, the AIDS advocacy group,
has added medical marijuana to its list of demands.

     This seems like a good place to plug our own efforts locally.
A number of Bloomington-based reformers are embarking on a campaign
to get Monroe County government to endorse medical marijuana.  We
intend this to be a broad coalition -- there is no litmus test on
marijuana legalization.

Final Thoughts

     I could easily devote an entire article to any of a number of
issues discussed at the conference.  One was a presentation on the
growing use of the National Guard in drug enforcement, a de facto
if not de jure violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and the common
law tradition of not using the military for civilian law
enforcement.  Another dealt with the growing number of prosecutions
of physicians for their prescribing practices.

     Whether it's peeing in a bottle, agents pawing through
people's garbage, low-flying helicopters using infrared scanners,
the increasing brutality of the police, or the forfeiture epidemic,
the indications are all around us that the drug war is spinning out
of control.  The drug war is domestic policy conducted on the
Vietnam model.  It would be ironic if the President-elect, so
ardent an opponent of that war, continued our home grown-one.

     I believe that reason eventually prevails.  Galileo who ended
his days under house arrest was just this year exonerated by the
Pope, which cautions us that reason sometimes takes over 300 years.
Still, there is no substitute for patiently putting the facts out
and attritioning the opposition with the truth.  That is the
commitment of groups like the DPF and I'm proud to be a part of
that effort.
--
paul hager        [e-mail]

"I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake."
                       --from _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt