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2 ----------------------------------------------X
3
THE ASSOCIATION OF THE BAR OF THE CITY OF
4 NEW YORK PUBLIC HEARINGS COMMITTEE ON DRUGS
AND THE LAW
5
6 ----------------------------------------------X
7 42 West 44th Street
New York, New York
8
October 10, 1995
9 2:15 P.M.
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HARRIET BEIZER ASSOCIATES
22 "The Verbatim Reporting Service"
108-18 Queens Boulevard
23 Forest Hills, New York 11375-4252
(718) 544-4199
24
25
2
1
2 A P P E A R A N C E S
3 LEO KAYSER, ESQ.
CHESTER SALOMON, ESQ.
4 KEN BROWN, ESQ.
DAN MARKOWICH, ESQ.
5 NANCY BRESLOW, ESQ.
6
7
8
ALSO PRESENT
9
DAVID CANDLIFF
10 DENICE M. LINNETTE
DR. GABRIEL G. NAHAS
11 ROBERT JESSE
RICK DOBLIN
12 FREDERICK GOLDSTEIN
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3
1
2 MR. SALOMON: This is the
3 second session of the first day of
4 the hearings on Drug Policy
5 sponsored by the Bar Association.
6 My name is Chester Salomon.
7 Seated beside me are four other
8 members on the Committee of the Drug
9 and Law, Leo Kayser, Dan Markowich,
10 Nancy Breslow and Ken Brown.
11 This morning we had testimony
12 of several witnesses and we would
13 like to continue with the testimony
14 this afternoon, perhaps on a
15 slightly tighter time schedule, for
16 fear we may be thrown out of here.
17 The first speaker is David
18 Candliff from the Drug Policy
19 Foundation.
20 Before having Mr. Candliff
21 speak, I would like to simply
22 mention, one of the witnesses whom
23 we all expected to see today is not
24 going to appear.
25 We only recently learned that
4
1
2 Joycelyn Elders is unable to be here
3 today because of a family illness.
4 She has said that she may try to
5 return to testify at some later
6 time, but she will not be here this
7 afternoon.
8 Mr. Candliff, can you tell us
9 something about your personal
10 history and the message that you
11 want to convey?
12 MR. CANDLIFF: I want to let
13 you know I met with Dr. Elders on
14 Saturday about some other issues
15 that the Drug Policy Foundation is
16 working with her on, and she
17 indicated to me what you just said,
18 her mother is quite ill.
19 She called me this morning,
20 knowing at the last moment that I
21 would be testifying.
22 As you know, I was not
23 planning to testify. She wanted me
24 to convey to you her sincere
25 regrets, and if there should be a
5
1
2 second hearing, to indeed attend.
3 It is indeed a personal
4 situation and her commitment to this
5 issue and to the association will be
6 very sincere indeed.
7 MR. SALOMON: Thank you very
8 much.
9 I want to repeat what the
10 procedure shall be. The witness
11 will be given up to 15 minutes to
12 speak. There will then be Q and A
13 for a maximum of 15 minutes.
14 Some of the members of the
15 committee will ask questions first.
16 Not all members will be asking
17 questions to each witness, and then
18 we will take questions from the
19 floor.
20 I would like to acknowledge
21 the presence of the court reporter
22 who is here today on a pro bono
23 basis. The name of the court
24 reporting agency is Harriet Beizer
25 Associates in Forest Hills, New York
6
1
2 and the reporter is Sandy Eskenazi.
3 You may proceed, Mr.
4 Candliff.
5 MR. CANDLIFF: As was
6 indicated, my name is David
7 Candliff.
8 I think you asked me to
9 summarize my background and I will
10 actually do so in the context of the
11 jury that I have had in Drug
12 Policy.
13 My background is a lawyer. I
14 started in the Lindsey
15 Administration, wound up at the
16 Kennedy School, worked for Nick
17 Capetta. That experience actually
18 drove me to law school.
19 It was during the blackout I
20 was assigned to figure out so many
21 kids were arraigned during the
22 looting of the '77 blackout, and we
23 recommended to Mayor Beam that there
24 be restitution instead of
25 incarceration.
7
1
2 Mayor Beam felt he could not
3 be soft. He had to be tough on the
4 looters. I went to law school and I
5 got hooked on the practice of law.
6 I was practicing most of my career
7 in the securities corporate business
8 for one of the large firms in the
9 city.
10 I became vice president,
11 general counsel worrying about
12 children issues, and that is when I
13 entered the Drug Field Policy. I
14 worked on the Drug Fatality Review
15 Panel and I was stunned to learn, as
16 you have no doubt noted, that the
17 city had removed itself from
18 treatment prevention in 1978, when
19 they abolished the Addiction
20 Services Agency, and I discovered
21 how many children were at risk and
22 how many women were unable to get
23 treatment at that time of any kind
24 whatsoever.
25 I started a big fight with
8
1
2 Bill Cricker (phonetic) and Mayor
3 Kosh and they agreed they should
4 change the city policy.
5 They asked me to design
6 programs for the women, children and
7 homeless, which I did, and work with
8 whoever was the mayor.
9 I was asked to direct the
10 city's effort, Dinkin's
11 Administration. It was in that
12 period that my views began to change
13 quite dramatically. We did launch,
14 during that period, I think some
15 programs, which do need to be the
16 elements of any national policy,
17 programs which recognize that kids
18 don't have the opportunities they
19 need in the city right now.
20 We opened Beacon Schools, and
21 you can't talk about these policies
22 without realizing the economic
23 context in which they exist. We
24 need to recognize that.
25 However, I also quickly began
9
1
2 to learn about the harms of our
3 current policies and it was a truly
4 eye opening experience for me.
5 I was concerned I was not
6 getting from Phoenix House the
7 straight scoop on what the story was
8 and what the experience was of users
9 who maybe did not want treatment and
10 so forth.
11 I took my staff to a shooting
12 gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We
13 spent three days there. It was
14 there, frankly, that my views were
15 dramatically transformed.
16 There was a woman. We did not
17 have a car. I walked from the
18 subway to the shooting gallery, and
19 will not forget this woman Brenda,
20 who came to me pregnant, saying she
21 wanted me to get her in treatment.
22 She said, "I will meet you
23 around the corner." She had some
24 crack on her. She had to get rid of
25 the crack or the dealers would give
10
1
2 her trouble.
3 We had it lined up she was
4 going to go into treatment, and she
5 was arrested in a bust operation
6 that was going on at the time. We
7 have her on video tape. If the
8 committee would like to see it, it
9 would be dramatic.
10 The video shows J.J. with 105
11 fever, HIV, pregnant. J.J. was
12 admitted to Woodhull Hospital. Then
13 she encounters a medical resident
14 who said I will not give you
15 Methadone. I am not going to be a
16 drug pusher, it was against his
17 religion. She went into with-
18 drawal.
19 I have her the next morning on
20 the video tape. She had to shoot in
21 her neck, on the video tape. That
22 medical resident could not see that
23 she was a heavy user and needed
24 Methadone for withdrawal. We got
25 her readmitted and she was
11
1
2 prescribed 10 milligrams of
3 Methadone, which is not enough.
4 The point I am trying to make
5 and want to make in this testimony
6 is we do need intermediate steps and
7 I am going to try to suggest some
8 starting places but, fundamentally,
9 this association must go firmly on
10 record in any step it does to see,
11 to make sure we are not - - that we
12 are not deaminizing addicts.
13 Not everybody who uses drugs
14 is an addict. My example of J.J. is
15 meant to illustrate that when she
16 was readmitted, the hospital simply
17 was not in shape to deal with her
18 and instead we wound up with huge
19 costs.
20 We had the Department of
21 Health come down. When I went to
22 the commissioner and the state
23 agency to say we ought to be in
24 there with a public health team, you
25 ought to see this with me, the
12
1
2 response was, was I wearing a mask
3 when I went into that shooting
4 gallery, and she would not go with
5 me under any circumstance.
6 Instead, what happened is,
7 I had to tell the Police Department
8 I was there. They wound up closing
9 that shooting gallery. Let me
10 mention a couple of thoughts.
11 I really do see myself as not
12 the expert like Dr. Cleber and
13 others who are giving full
14 testimony, which I feel needs to be
15 refuted very strongly, and I would
16 like to work with you in bringing in
17 the experts at the next hearing.
18 I don't consider myself that
19 expert.
20 What I do consider myself is a
21 citizen of the City of New York that
22 has made an inquiry and found the
23 policy very, very wrong and there
24 are some things I would like to
25 suggest to you that we ought to
13
1
2 focus on in the immediate future,
3 keeping in mind, the president of
4 our association will be testifying
5 this morning, and give you the big
6 picture of what it looked like
7 before prohibition so you can see
8 it's not what is being described
9 now.
10 However, first and most
11 obviously, the New York Times and
12 others may have talked about the
13 need to legalize needles. It will
14 put in context why the legalization
15 of drugs is so difficult in this
16 country. I want you to know the
17 story of what I feel is the real
18 story.
19 Philly is currently our
20 Assistant Secretary of Health.
21 He wanted to answer the very
22 important questions that, frankly,
23 the mayor that I worked for wanted
24 answers and must be answered, does
25 it increase drug use, number one,
14
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2 and does it prevent the spread of
3 Aids. He was awarded that
4 contract. Clinton appointed him
5 Assistant Secretary of Health.
6 When they reported the results
7 which said there is no evidence
8 of increased drug use and it will
9 prevent the spread of Aids, that
10 report sat on Philly's desk and he
11 took it and sent it to a scientist.
12 I wanted to have a neutral
13 body of scientists look at this and
14 they looked at the findings and
15 unanimously the Public Health
16 Services, every one of these
17 scientists came back and said
18 immediately end the band of funding
19 New York and present the evidence
20 that's been researched.
21 Philly got a call from the
22 White House. He was told you may
23 not release those recommendations
24 from the scientists. A year went
25 by and they asked for an update.
15
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2 The update to the Philly story was
3 that the scientist said now the
4 research is finished in New York
5 City and it confirms what California
6 found nationally.
7 Secondly, they said the
8 epidemic has changed and Gina Colado
9 reported in the New York Times.
10 The Gina story, she reported 30,000
11 out of 40,000 people have become
12 infected. Think about that. To
13 satisfy the defense, we are going to
14 let 30,000 people die in this
15 country. That is not sensible
16 policy. This association should be
17 firmly on record.
18 I want to make sure that we
19 are clear, let's be clear how hard
20 and how divided this country has
21 been. It is so hard to let the
22 doctors be in charge. The leader-
23 ship position the press should take
24 is this is not for lawyers, this is
25 not for politicians, this is not for
16
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2 doctors, this is a deadly disease.
3 Instead, we don't have that result.
4 The American Public Health
5 Association has endorsed it and many
6 others, the National Research
7 Council.
8 The second area I would ask
9 you to focus on is the Rockefeller
10 Drug Laws. The Drug Policy
11 Foundation, in connection with the
12 Correctional Association, is going
13 to be working in the coming months
14 and we would invite the
15 association's committee to designate
16 a member to work with us. We are
17 going to be forming a coalition of
18 groups who want to have a
19 respectable dialogue that can be
20 heard.
21 I believe there is
22 receptivity to a responsible
23 dialogue and I invite you to join
24 us. This needs to have a medical
25 voice, a social voice, a community
17
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2 voice. It needs to have the voice
3 that says our education budgets
4 are getting slashed, we need to look
5 at the budget and see where to get
6 those resources.
7 If you look at California, you
8 can see almost a direct correlation
9 between the reduction in higher
10 education and the increase in prison
11 budgets. We need to be clear in the
12 law being that relationship.
13 The parent group, that is
14 upset that their budgets are being
15 cut, recognize it's a direct result
16 of the kind of incarceration
17 policies we have in this state.
18 I would suggest a course of
19 action that such a coalition can
20 begin to explore. We have found in
21 some of the most conservative
22 western states that there is a true
23 opening of conservatives and
24 liberals that can get together.
25 For example, on western state
18
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2 policies that would do the
3 following, that say no personal
4 possession shall warrant
5 incarceration, period.
6 You have the Probation
7 Department come in with appropriate
8 interventions. Those interventions
9 might include treatment if someone
10 really needs and wants treatment,
11 but it might not. It might be
12 something like community service or
13 house arrest. You can have a series
14 of things put in the Probation
15 Department in charge of personal
16 possession.
17 Second thing I would do with
18 that, to be clear, a lot of people
19 who are arrested as so-called
20 dealers are not dealers, and we need
21 to look carefully at what the
22 classification of the law is of
23 so-called dealers.
24 I sat next to in Little Rock
25 a young kid in high school and I
19
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2 said to him, "How many kids in your
3 class use drugs?" He said, "Not
4 many, but a lot of them are using
5 crack." He was in the eighth
6 grade.
7 Third, I would emphasis, you
8 will hear from others more qualified
9 than me, I hope, tomorrow on the
10 marijuana issues. Right now you
11 have a tremendous Aids epidemic.
12 This state has cut off the
13 research done on marijuana.
14 That research demonstrated how
15 important it is with cancer and
16 other issues. It is urgent that New
17 York State finds ways to let, for
18 example, the model of the Marijuana
19 Buyer's Club where a doctor writes a
20 prescription and that literally gets
21 filled in the Marijuana Buyer's
22 Club. In San Francisco that is
23 being done with the collaboration of
24 the Police Department.
25 That concludes my testimony.
20
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2 I would simply close by asking that
3 the association takes seriously the
4 invitation of the Drug Policy
5 Foundation, to work as closely as
6 you can, to serve as a funding
7 source, a poll research you might
8 want to do.
9 We have a grant program. We
10 think your work is important and we
11 think it is important that this
12 state, city and national government
13 has excluded itself from these
14 hearings and that over an issue as
15 significant as this and in the form
16 as responsible as this, that they
17 will not engage in a serious
18 dialogue with this committee.
19 I think that is truly outrageous.
20 MR. SALOMON: We will take two
21 questions from members of the
22 committee.
23 Do any members have questions
24 for Mr. Candliff?
25 MR. KAYSER: Hi, Mr.
21
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2 Candliff. I am Leo Kayser.
3 Would you have an objection,
4 strong objection, to fashioning of a
5 drug policy that are being based
6 upon legalization, licensing
7 pharmacies to sell, collecting taxes
8 on those sales, keeping some kind of
9 formal record keeping, in terms of
10 the nature of the sales, and then
11 the use of paying those proceeds,
12 taxes, in some dedicated fund for
13 treatment purposes and for other
14 type of policies that you have
15 testified to?
16 MR. CANDLIFF: Yes. Certainly
17 in the long run, I think a model
18 like that is a sensible model.
19 I am not sure necessarily the
20 pharmacies need to be the only way
21 it would be done.
22 I would urge, however, that
23 this country get serious on
24 education and prevention before we
25 do it. That means, in my mind, we
22
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2 did not do that with alcohol.
3 Instead, we let Hollywood glamorize
4 alcohol use.
5 I don't think increased usage
6 is automatic. I don't think we
7 should have police in charge of our
8 drug administration. We ought to
9 have teachers in charge of it.
10 I think there are things we
11 can do that would make that work.
12 MR. MARKOWICH: I must say,
13 what you just said does not bother
14 me in the least, but I want to
15 comment on what you said earlier,
16 and it seems to me that not only I,
17 but also Mr. Doyle would have no
18 quarral whatsoever with the
19 immediate steps that you propose.
20 They seem extremely sensible.
21 MR. SALOMON: You had adverted
22 to Dr. Cleber's testimony.
23 Do you have any information
24 that would refute or challenge his
25 estimate six percent of users
23
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2 eventually become addicts?
3 MR. CANDLIFF: Here is the
4 issue. It seems to me, and I did
5 not comment in detail on his
6 testimony because I have not read it
7 and I was not there.
8 I simply have heard that it
9 was important testimony to be
10 answered and to be genuinely
11 discussed. I think we all want to
12 be responsible as we move forward.
13 The issue for me is this.
14 It's the same issue with New York
15 Exchange. We don't know the answer
16 I suspect is the right answer. Any
17 evidence I would bring you would, as
18 Dr. Cleber, be true guesses I
19 believe and I want to see what
20 Dr. Cleber has said today.
21 It is my conviction, however,
22 that the testimony I received, not
23 testimony, the comment I received
24 from a very responsible physician,
25 may be the governing factor for me,
24
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2 and I will just repeat it briefly.
3 I would encourage the
4 committee to consult a woman named
5 Kathleen Foly. She is a woman who
6 heads the pain service at Sloan and
7 Kettering Cancer Hospital. I
8 mention her for the following
9 reason.
10 We have built our policy on
11 the notion if someone tries a drug,
12 they will become addicted
13 automatically, the addictive
14 qualities are that strong.
15 The argument that I am making
16 is this. Kathey Foly says she is a
17 neuro scientist. She says she has
18 found not everyone to be addicts, as
19 opposed to a more general
20 population, which is a question you
21 have to ask.
22 She said Sloan Keterring over
23 the last 20 years, more than most
24 medical centers, they have been very
25 aggressive in prescriptions of
25
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2 controlled substances for the
3 treatment of cancer and although
4 there is a higher preponderance of
5 cigarette addicts among that
6 population, it parallels that
7 population.
8 You don't get the kind of
9 productive rates that most studies
10 of addiction suggest that you would,
11 in her clinical experience, but I
12 would urge you to talk with her
13 simply because she brings a very
14 different light on perspective that
15 I have ever heard on the subject.
16 MR. SALOMON: Thank you. I
17 will ask, for those who intend to
18 ask questions of the witness, that
19 they come up and take the microphone
20 and speak in the microphone and hand
21 the mike back to me.
22 Do we have any questions from
23 the floor?
24 MR. GODFRIED: Yes. My name
25 is Ted Godfried and I am un-
26
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2 affiliated and my question to you,
3 it seems to me that most people who
4 have thought and read about
5 prohibition, as we know it today,
6 come up with the conclusion that it
7 should end but, as I noticed on the
8 list of speakers, there is no
9 politicians here, which you
10 mentioned.
11 So knowing that no politician
12 or elected official will even get
13 near this subject, how do you
14 propose changing the laws and
15 prohibition?
16 MR. CANLIFF: Let me let you
17 know the experience from which I
18 have drawn to reach the conclusion.
19 Mayor Dinkins ran against
20 needle exchange, as many people in
21 this room know. He changed 180
22 degrees on that subject and did so
23 in the face of Charlie Rango, being
24 very upset with him.
25 When we first went to him to
27
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2 say that we wanted to discuss this,
3 he was extremely upset by it. His
4 thought was the African Community in
5 the city was disinvested in and it
6 would create a truly ambiguous
7 message.
8 He also had some less concern
9 than others might, that people would
10 be attacking him for not being
11 caring of crime, which is a
12 universal concern. What moved him
13 was the research.
14 When we were able to present
15 him with Yale's research, it truly
16 moved him. We said to him, Mr.
17 Mayor, you opposed the death penalty
18 all your life. That was a little
19 unusual. That is not usual that you
20 see a politician move 180 degrees on
21 it.
22 There are two things that need
23 to happen. Police need to have a
24 leadership rule. There were 378
25 chiefs in the room and they came as
28
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2 true drug warriors, but they
3 answered a poll at the end of it.
4 Every one of them, except those who
5 are already with us, every one of
6 them had changed their mind by the
7 end of the meeting. They had
8 different views. Police need to
9 stand next to the politicians.
10 Mayor Schmoke, who is on our
11 board, told us we had to work with
12 the teachers. The truth is that I
13 think we need to work with the
14 morale leaders of the community as
15 well. It's not just enough to make
16 a recommendation.
17 MR. SALOMON: Any more
18 questions?
19 SPEAKER: Let me apologize. I
20 called the Bar Association and tried
21 to find out more details as to the
22 procedures here, but I could not get
23 any information. I hope I am not
24 coming down on a parachute in the
25 the middle of something.
29
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2 Let me ask you people if I
3 can get some ball park figures from
4 you. As far as I know, the
5 statistics I have is that about 75
6 million Americans have used
7 marijuana, something like 18 years
8 of age and over, which would be
9 something like 30 percent of the
10 population.
11 The first question I would ask
12 is, what percentage of lawyers do
13 you think use marijuana? Is there
14 any? Is it 30 percent or less?
15 The second question is, is
16 there anybody in this room that
17 knows lawyers are any more wicked,
18 sinful, hostile than the other
19 lawyers and the third question is,
20 those that do not believe those
21 lawyers are criminals, number one,
22 why aren't they demanding their
23 freedom and, number two, why aren't
24 the rest of you demanding their
25 freedom?
30
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2 MR. CANDLIFF: I hope you will
3 consider joining the Drug Policy
4 Foundation so you can learn what we
5 are doing in that regard.
6 We have a panel called War on
7 Lawyers who want to defend people.
8 I think you have a bigger point,
9 which is a very important point,
10 which is there are many, many people
11 in this city who actively have used
12 marijuana and continue to use
13 marijuana and lead active,
14 professional lives.
15 You will hear from speakers
16 today who will talk about the
17 benefits and harms of drugs, but the
18 benefits don't get talked about
19 because we have deaminized them so
20 much.
21 Our foundation is not in
22 favor of pople using drugs, but we
23 recognize that our policies have
24 deaminized people. The majority of
25 users in America are white and
31
1
2 employed. One out of three young
3 black Americans are incarcerated.
4 SPEAKER: I thought my
5 question was clear.
6 Why are the users who are
7 using drugs and their friends who
8 don't use drugs, why aren't they
9 getting up saying get off my case?
10 MR. CANDLIFF: I think the
11 answer is people need, as they did
12 with the movement on gay rights, to
13 come out of the closet.
14 MR. SALOMON: One last
15 question.
16 SPEAKER: I would like to ask
17 a question about needle exchanges as
18 a case history in changing policy.
19 I did a story for the
20 New Scientist on needle exchange
21 programs and the evidence is
22 overwhelming and the big question
23 is, why has not New York State
24 changed its law to permit drug
25 users to get clean needles the way
32
1
2 Connecticut did, given the fact that
3 New York City has the highest number
4 of HIV infected drug users probably
5 in the world, and there are several
6 proposals in the state legislature
7 to do that and it had gotten
8 nowhere?
9 I was calling a lot of people
10 to get an answer to this question.
11 Why has not New York State changed
12 its drug laws the way Connecticut
13 has, in view of this imminent danger
14 of many - - in view of the
15 overwhelming weight of evidence, to
16 say nothing of the National
17 Academy Science Study which gave
18 unequivocal evidence? What
19 happened?
20 MR. CANDLIFF: There are three
21 things that I would ask this
22 committee to consider on decrimina-
23 lization of needles.
24 The first is to appeal New
25 York State Penal Law 338. Second,
33
1
2 to enact legislation to proceed for
3 the expansion of existing syringe
4 exchange programs in New York State
5 and encourage the establishment of
6 syringe exchanges.
7 Third, and this is something I
8 think that needs to be thought about
9 seriously, that legislation be
10 enacted, they would require all
11 manufactures and distributors of
12 hypodermic needles to include in
13 syringe packaging educational
14 information about the safety and
15 safe use and disposal of syringe
16 needles.
17 SPEAKER: The question is
18 really, what is stopping this bill?
19 Basically this legislation has
20 already been written and it
21 disappears. What is the mechanism
22 going on?
23 MR. CANDLIFF: Why don't we
24 talk about it afterwards? I know
25 the chairman wants to move on.
34
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2 MR. SALOMON: Thank you very
3 much. Our next speaker is Denice
4 Linnette.
5 MS. LINNETTE: Thank you very
6 much. Good afternoon, everyone,
7 panelists.
8 My name is Denise Linnette and
9 I am the Counsel to New York State
10 Senator Joseph L. Galiber. I am
11 here today to speak to you, not on
12 my behalf, but on his behalf,
13 because he is currently recovering
14 from major surgery, but he thought
15 it was imperative that I come down
16 and speak with you today because he
17 is one elected official that for 27
18 years has been very involved in drug
19 policy, in criminal justice and he
20 thought it was important that the
21 comments on this important hearing
22 be put on the record.
23 He commends the Association
24 of the Bar for its recognition of
25 the wide spread effects of drugs on
35
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2 our nation and applauds the
3 committee for having the courage to
4 make the recommendations that it did
5 in the June 1994 record. He
6 believes a course of action based on
7 the report would yield positive
8 results.
9 As most of you or many of you
10 may be aware, the senator's district
11 is comprised of portions of Bronx
12 and Westchester counties. His area
13 of representation, like so many
14 other urban neighborhoods in New
15 York and throughout our country, has
16 been overwrought with drugs and
17 violence it produces.
18 Narcotics wreak havoc in
19 all walkways of our lives. He
20 believes, as most of you should,
21 that we are losing the war on drugs
22 for too many years and that for
23 these years we have seen countless
24 lives wasted.
25 To combat this ever worsening
36
1
2 situation, Senator Galiber advocates
3 that we redirect the vast amount of
4 resources that we currently spend in
5 law enforcement, criminal
6 prosecution and incarceration toward
7 regulation, education and
8 treatment.
9 There were some sobering
10 statistics that we found actually
11 last week that talked about the
12 increase in commitments in our state
13 prisons from 1980 to 1992. Over 49
14 percent of those commitments were
15 drug related offenses.
16 I don't want to go through the
17 various points that specifically
18 talk about the senator's bill
19 regarding legalization of drugs. I
20 think many of you are aware of the
21 provisions.
22 He just wanted to point out
23 that the committee was criticized,
24 it was our understanding that, for
25 its inability to provide a concrete
37
1
2 proposal pertaining to the
3 legalization of drugs, and the
4 senator did draft such a proposal.
5 He believes that his proposal
6 is rational, that while it may be
7 politically unpopular to some, that
8 spirited discourse and a rational
9 approach to policy making, maybe we
10 can enact legislation that is
11 rationally based.
12 His proposal clearly sets
13 forth how that system would work.
14 It does not allow solicitation and
15 advertising. It does have a
16 controlled substance abuse authority
17 and it also requires taxation and
18 funding treatments, funding
19 mechanism for prevention and
20 treatment.
21 He also proposes restrictions
22 on who may obtain licenses to
23 manufacture, distribute and sell the
24 substances and he does not allow any
25 sales based on credit would be
38
1
2 allowed, nor street sales or
3 house-to-house sales, et cetera.
4 While he realizes that this
5 concept, the concept or the policy
6 of legalization, is not an accepted
7 mainstream concept, he did want me
8 to make sure that I point out that
9 decrimialization certainly should
10 be.
11 The 1973 Rockefeller Drug
12 Laws, coupled with the Mandatory
13 Felony Laws, of which he has opposed
14 from enactment, attempted to
15 eradicate the drug epidemic with
16 tough mandatory sentences.
17 When the Rockefeller Drug Laws
18 and Second Felony Laws were passed
19 in 1973, the state prison population
20 stood at 12,500. By 1985, the
21 number of inmates had climbed to
22 31,000. Today, nearly 6,900 inmates
23 are incarcerated in state
24 correctional facilities, 130 percent
25 of the systems designated capacity.
39
1
2 These laws remain relatively
3 ineffective in combatting the
4 worsening drug crisis.
5 During this past budget
6 session, Governor Pataki and the
7 Legislature enacted sentencing
8 reform measures which substantially
9 increased the sentences of violent
10 offenders, while slightly modifying
11 sentences for nonviolent second
12 felony offenders who are
13 predominately low-level drug
14 offenders.
15 At a time when major criminal
16 justice reform was undertaken, the
17 governor and legislature could have
18 implemented meaningful sentencing
19 reform by dismantling both the
20 Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Second
21 Felony Offender Laws.
22 Both of these two laws serve
23 no justifiable penal objective and
24 do not adequately address the root
25 causes of drug-related crimes.
40
1
2 Instead, the governor and the
3 legislature decided to create a drug
4 treatment campus at the Willard
5 Psychiatric Facility for non violent
6 second felony D and E drug
7 offenders, which is a minuscule
8 fraction of the drug population, who
9 will be sentenced to patrol
10 supervision by the court.
11 Placement in this drug
12 treatment program is mandatory and
13 the length of this treatment is only
14 for a period of 90 days.
15 Drug offenders who are
16 currently under DOCS custody, who
17 were convicted of a D or E felony,
18 will also be eligible for
19 conditional release and a parole
20 supervision. These offenders will
21 only have to serve a period of 30 to
22 90 days at Willard, unless the
23 Division of Parole waives this
24 requirement on the grounds that the
25 inmate has satisfactorily completed
41
1
2 treatment in prison.
3 First, 90 days is considered
4 insufficient time to treat the
5 addictive elements of drug abuse and
6 to provide other critical services
7 for a person's complete
8 rehabilitation.
9 The senator is apprehensive
10 over the quality and substance of
11 the treatment services which will be
12 provided to this group.
13 The law does not offer any
14 specific details as to who will be
15 administering the drug treatment
16 program and the nature of the
17 treatment plan.
18 He believes it makes better
19 sense to expend the money
20 appropriated for Willard to support
21 proven drug treatment programs
22 located in or near the inner city
23 communities where most prisoners
24 come from and will return.
25 Community substance abuse
42
1
2 providers such as Phoenix House,
3 Incorporated and the Altamont
4 Program, provide effective treatment
5 services and other support services
6 which assist participants in
7 acquiring employment and an
8 appropriate residence.
9 Other support services include
10 guidance and direction in
11 maintaining family ties, parenting
12 skills, appropriate group and
13 individual behavior, employment and
14 counseling.
15 These community treatment
16 programs are intended to optimize
17 the likelihood of recovery and
18 overall have been successful.
19 The legislature and the
20 governor also failed to increase
21 funds for aftercare community
22 supervision programs for offenders
23 who complete the 90 day treatment at
24 Willard.
25 What is the purpose of
43
1
2 undergoing intensive treatment for
3 90 days when there is no continuity
4 of care and treatment once the
5 offender is released to the
6 community under parole supervision.
7 The end result will obviously be an
8 offender's relapse to drug abuse and
9 return to state prison for a longer
10 time.
11 The governor and the
12 legislature also managed to
13 significantly cut alcohol and
14 substance abuse treatment programs,
15 (ASAT) programs and other critical
16 programs in prisons which will
17 negatively affect an offender's
18 potential to reintegrate and succeed
19 in the community upon release.
20 ASAT services for incarcerated
21 drug offenders was cut six million
22 dollars, which reflects a reduction
23 of 91 positions. ASAT services will
24 currently be available only to
25 inmates who are near their release
44
1
2 date.
3 This means offenders who
4 desire treatment will not be
5 eligible until they are close to
6 patrol eligibility.
7 This is clearly illogical
8 reasoning, since inmates who enter
9 the system with a substance abuse
10 problem are prime candidates for
11 treatment and treatment must be
12 provided as soon as possible so that
13 rehabilitation can begin its
14 course.
15 The senator believes the
16 criminal justice measures enacted
17 this year were ill-conceived, will
18 continue to fuel the growth of our
19 prison population and will
20 necessitate more prison
21 construction.
22 He still remains hopeful that
23 the governor, legislature and the
24 public will soon come to realize
25 that punishing drug offenders for a
45
1
2 crime which stems from an addictive
3 condition is counterproductive.
4 He believes the best approach
5 is to legalize drugs, control their
6 distribution and treat the illness
7 while simultaneously eliminating the
8 crimes associated with the sale and
9 consumption of drugs.
10 The next best approach is to
11 decriminalize all types of non
12 violent drug crimes and provide
13 alternative sanctions to prison,
14 such as community supervision and
15 treatment which keeps the offender
16 close to his family while undergoing
17 intensive treatment and rehabilita-
18 tion. That is his testimony.
19 MR. SALOMON: Thank you very
20 much.
21 Are there any members of the
22 committee that would like to ask
23 questions at this point?
24 MR. KAYSER: Thank you for
25 your testimony. I just have a
46
1
2 couple of questions.
3 It relates to Senator
4 Galiber's bill. I was pleased to
5 hear that the bill calls for some
6 form of taxes to be collected
7 upon the sale of drugs.
8 Is there any estimate as to
9 what the tax collections would be if
10 we were to legalize, under some
11 controlled condition, the sale of
12 drugs, collect taxes which will be
13 commensurate with alcohol, tobacco?
14 MS. LINNETTE: I am sure that
15 it would be millions but,
16 unfortunately, I don't have the data
17 with me today and I will be more
18 than happy to provide that
19 information to you when I get back
20 to the office.
21 MR. SALOMON: If you have that
22 information, that would be helpful
23 to the committee. Thank you.
24 Any other members? How about
25 from the floor? Any questions?
47
1
2 SPEAKER: Earlier versions of
3 Senator Galiber's bill regarding
4 control substance authority
5 specified in the legislation the
6 list of controlled substances.
7 A more recent version I saw of
8 his a couple of years ago empowered
9 the control substance authority
10 itself to alter the list of
11 controlled substances.
12 Apparently, without any
13 criteria in the legislation, I
14 objected, that this could lead to
15 the possibility of controlled
16 substance authority making milk,
17 gasoline, cement a controlled
18 substance, possibly to derive the
19 additional benefit of certain
20 people.
21 Has there been any change in
22 this more recent version of the
23 bill?
24 MS. LINNETTE: It was the
25 creation of the new diary of drugs
48
1
2 and other legal addictive substances
3 and rather than put a list that
4 would require subsequent legislative
5 changes, which takes a considerable
6 length of time, he thought that it
7 was best to delegate that type of
8 authority to someone to help
9 professionals and others who would
10 be able to make those types of
11 determinations.
12 As far as a criteria to limit
13 them, I am not aware of any
14 subsequent changes that would limit
15 that authority. However, it's
16 something that I am sure that I will
17 bring back to him and discuss how it
18 could be done.
19 MR. SALOMON: Any further
20 questions? Thank you very much.
21 Our next speaker is Dr.
22 Gabriele Nahas. Dr. Nahas is a
23 research professor of anesthesiology
24 at N.Y.U. Medical Center. He was
25 educated at the University of Taluse
49
1
2 and the University of Rochester and
3 the University of Minnesota.
4 He has received the
5 presidential metal of freedom and a
6 number of other awards. His
7 expertise is in pathology and
8 pharmacology and with particular
9 reference to the biochemical
10 impairment of the brain as a result
11 of drugs.
12 Doctor, would you like to sit
13 or do you need to stand in order to
14 present your testimony?
15 DR. NAHAS: I am very honored
16 to present a view point of a
17 physician and of a scientist on this
18 very complex question of the control
19 of the drugs.
20 What I would like to stress
21 mostly is, I think that it's very
22 important to define what we are
23 speaking about. There seems to be a
24 real gap which is increasing between
25 the scientists and what is called
50
1
2 biological scientist and social
3 scientist and which the law is
4 included, because we don't seem to
5 speak of the same thing when you
6 speak of illicit drugs.
7 Indeed, I don't think that
8 anyone here that I have heard so far
9 realizes what drugs do to the body
10 and mainly to the brain. The
11 effects on the brain have been
12 studied over the past few years.
13 Scientists indicate that
14 illicit drugs of dependence impair
15 primarily in a persistent fashion
16 the most important organ of man,
17 which is his brain.
18 I would like to show you some
19 slides, because that is the only way
20 you can perceive the importance of
21 this.
22 The area of the brain which
23 controls pleasure reward, memory,
24 coordination, judgment, goal
25 oriented activities are
51
1
2 preferentially and persistently
3 targeted by drugs of dependence,
4 mainly cannabis, cocaine and
5 heroin.
6 You will see in the slides
7 changes in blood flow and glucose
8 utilization, and biochemical
9 pathways have been measured as long
10 as 100 days after cessation of
11 chronic use of cocaine along with
12 alterations in psychomotor
13 functions.
14 With marijuana, deficits in
15 memory storage are still present
16 more than six weeks following
17 cessation of habitual marijuana
18 smoking.
19 After a single marijuana
20 cigarette, trained pilots exhibit
21 for 24 hours measurable errors of
22 piloting and are unable to land in
23 the center of the landing strip.
24 Changes in cognitive function
25 can be measured in former chronic
52
1
2 marijuana smokers as long as three
3 months after they have stopped
4 taking the drug.
5 More recently in Houston, a
6 few weeks ago, there was a report
7 from a group of psychologists from
8 Sidney indicating that after
9 marijuana use there were persistent
10 alterations in psychomotor functions
11 which could be measured up to six
12 months.
13 They were small, but they
14 were clearly measurable with our
15 new techniques and this was a
16 definite study.
17 Every thousandth of a second,
18 the brian depends upon the capacity
19 of this extraordinary computer to
20 integrate messages arising from all
21 of its functional parts in a
22 coherent fashion.
23 Every thousandth of a second,
24 the brain marshals billions of
25 signals according to modalities that
53
1
2 adjust to the conditions of the
3 environment and to its own memory
4 banks.
5 These signals are chemically
6 transmitted through minute
7 quantities of substances called
8 neurotransmitters which are secreted
9 by billions of nerve cells.
10 Neurotransmitters regulate the
11 transmission of nerve impulses
12 racing through the cerebral network,
13 across a hundred billion relays or
14 chips or synapses.
15 Drugs impair the release of
16 these neurotransmitters and also
17 damage biochemical regulatigg
18 mechanisms which program their
19 constant physiological recycling.
20 Illicit drugs of dependence
21 in amounts of a few billionths of a
22 gram will not only target receptors
23 in the membrane of brain cells but
24 also the genes of the neuronal
25 cells.
54
1
2 You have heard a lot about the
3 cells. There are genes in the brain
4 also which program all the activity
5 of the brain. These genes are part
6 of the DNI molecule.
7 Drugs of dependence impair
8 persistently the basic mechanism of
9 the brain cell by altering the
10 expression of the DNA contained in
11 its nucleus.
12 As a result, new biochemical
13 patterns are established in brain
14 areas which control pleasure reward,
15 coordination, memory and goal
16 oriented behavior.
17 These new biochemical patterns
18 may become so deeply imprinted in
19 the brain as to prove virtualy
20 irreversible.
21 The addicted subject will then
22 display drug seeking and drug
23 consuming behavior and lose his will
24 power and freedom of choice. The
25 gene regulation of his brain has
55
1
2 been altered.
3 He is transformed into a drug
4 seeking robot, only able to function
5 inside the narrow context defined by
6 his habit.
7 Brain biochemical alteration
8 induced by drugs will also affect
9 hormonal regulation which control
10 male and female reproductive
11 function and maturation of germ
12 cells.
13 Drugs cross the placenta and
14 impair fetal development. Some
15 members of the future generation are
16 impaired even before they are
17 conceived, because now scientists
18 have found these drugs are attached
19 to receptors on the germ cell and
20 there is a risk for babies. Of
21 course, there is a chance of the
22 wrong signal being signaled to the
23 egg. It's all a matter of
24 transmission in the body.
25 All those signals have to
56
1
2 cycle in a very orderly fashion and
3 what drugs do is to disorganize this
4 organized transmission throughout
5 the body, in the brain, in the cells
6 and in the immune system.
7 All of this points to a great
8 risk related to an important part of
9 the population. I am concerned
10 about the kids 14 years old starting
11 to take drugs, marijuana smoking,
12 for instance, because he thinks it's
13 not harmful to him and yet there is
14 a risk for him.
15 I have drafted also a few
16 recommendations here, the message I
17 would like to give here, and I would
18 like to show you a few slides as to
19 what I have been saying.
20 MR. SALOMON: We only have
21 three minutes.
22 DR. NAHAS: I will just then
23 end up. I think you got the
24 biological message and you can find
25 out in hundreds of publications.
57
1
2 Tobacco, though addictive,
3 does not impair information
4 processing by the brain required for
5 proper intellectual and psychomotor
6 performance, attention and
7 judgement. The same may be said for
8 alcohol in small doses by adults.
9 The advocates of legaliza-
10 tion also overlook the specific
11 rapid and long lasting impairing
12 effect of illicit drugs on
13 the genes of the cerebral cells
14 which program the normal
15 biochemistry and physiology of the
16 brain.
17 They omit to state that while
18 a sociological failure in the United
19 States, alcohol prohibition was a
20 public health success, as documented
21 by the significant decrease of liver
22 cirrhosis and psychiatric admissions
23 during that period.
24 Second, they grossly over-
25 estimate the effectiveness of
58
1
2 treatment for drug addiction for
3 which there is no known cure.
4 The use of drugs spread
5 according to availability and
6 follows the social laws governing
7 the spread of epidemics. The drug
8 user is a proselyte person and
9 wishes to share the drug
10 experience with others.
11 In the middle of the last
12 century, legalization of opium trade
13 was forced upo China by British
14 armed intervention.
15 Fifty years later, 90 million
16 Chinese, a forth of the population,
17 had become addicted to the drug.
18 China had the support of
19 International community led by the
20 United States and Theodore
21 Roosevelt.
22 It took 50 years for the
23 Chinese to learn their lesson in
24 whatever regime they opted for, the
25 Peoples Republic, Republic of
59
1
2 Taiwan, or the Republic of
3 Singapore.
4 What are we to think of the
5 earlier actions of the British
6 Empire taken in the name of personal
7 freedom and free trade, which as
8 this history shows, in fact enslaved
9 an entire nation.
10 Using similar methods of
11 supply reduction after World War II
12 the Japanese were able to first
13 overcome a major epidemic of I.V.
14 amphetamine use and later an
15 epidemic of intravenous heroin use.
16 The Singapore Republic, at the
17 doorstep of the Golden Triangle
18 overcame in a few years an epidemic
19 of heroin smoking by strict law
20 enforcement to prevent heroin from
21 reaching the market and compulsory
22 drug free rehabilitation.
23 These victories did not come
24 easily or cheaply. They were
25 achieved at the cost of severe
60
1
2 repression of the major offenders
3 and of very costly rehabilitative
4 measures.
5 I must give an example.
6 It's an example of Sweden.
7 Sweden has stopped an epidemic of
8 heroin, marijuana use by applying a
9 strict policy of intervention and
10 also a policy of, very costly
11 policy, at least $40 billion a year
12 and this policy has worked. Sweden
13 has the lowest rate of drug
14 addiction. This country has the
15 highest rate of drug use.
16 So I think that the foregoing
17 facts are cited in order to clarify
18 the real situation as seen by a
19 pharmacologist who has devoted
20 nearly the whole of his professional
21 life to making the scientific
22 community more aware of the dangers
23 inherent in recreational use of
24 illicit drugs.
25 MR. BROWN: Good afternoon,
61
1
2 Dr. Nahas. How are you today?
3 Actually, I have a lot of
4 questions I would like to ask you,
5 but in the interest of time, I am
6 just going to try to focus on a
7 couple of matters I think I would
8 like you to address here today.
9 I read your paper very
10 carefully. You mentioned at the
11 outset there is a gap between the
12 scientists and social scientists.
13 I understand that you tried to
14 present here the gist of what you
15 had, only 15 minutes to present
16 here.
17 I was disappointed in the
18 level of detail that was presented
19 in this paper. I thought things
20 were said in sweeping manners
21 without any kind of support or
22 explanation about exactly what you
23 are saying.
24 Let me pin you down on one
25 specific point. I read this paper
62
1
2 carefully. Maybe I am wrong. It
3 seems to me that your thesis is that
4 drugs are bad because drugs impair
5 the brain and the way the drugs
6 impair the brain is that they affect
7 the brain by causing changes in the
8 way the brain functions. Is that
9 correct?
10 DR. NAHAS: Certainly, it's
11 correct.
12 MR. BROWN: Aren't there other
13 situation experiences in life in
14 addition to drug use that cause
15 permanent changes in the way that
16 the brain functions?
17 For example, isn't the whole
18 basis of psychotherapy that people
19 go to speak to a psychotherapist by
20 going through the process of
21 articulating their problems and they
22 are having some permanent changes to
23 their brains or don't you believe --
24 DR. NAHAS: I think that you
25 make a fundamental error between
63
1
2 the psychotherapy and its effect on
3 the brain.
4 MR. BROWN: Let me give you
5 another analogy. I happened to
6 study marshal arts. Let me talk
7 about something.
8 DR. NAHAS: You see, these
9 drugs are attached to receptors in
10 the brain and the psychotherapist is
11 going to act in a very indirect
12 way.
13 But this effect of the drug is
14 immediate and it will be immediately
15 followed by a measurable biochemical
16 change, which will be prolonged,
17 which will outlast by several hours
18 or days acute reaction, pleasant
19 reaction of the brain.
20 The brain is going to
21 substitute with a normal neuro-
22 transmitter. In the case of
23 cocaine, it's going to substitute
24 with Dobermine. This is why it has
25 such a profound effect. It's going
64
1
2 to create in the brain within a few
3 days some very lasting biochemical
4 change.
5 MR. SALOMON: Do you have
6 another question?
7 MR. BROWN: I just want to
8 follow up on this question and to
9 say one more thing.
10 Obviously the reason that
11 drugs work in the brain is because
12 these chemicals are able to mimick
13 certain neurotransmitters that
14 naturally occur in the brain.
15 In fact, in the brain there is
16 a receptor site that is similar to,
17 it accepts the active ingredient
18 THC, and that must be because there
19 is a naturally occurring substance
20 in the brain for which this receptor
21 is designed.
22 I am having a hard time
23 understanding the idea, because
24 these substances act on neuro-
25 transmitters, I mean receptor sites
65
1
2 in the brain.
3 Therefore, in the long term,
4 this means drugs are bad. But we
5 have to have this whole elaborate
6 system of law enforcement and a
7 society built around the people who
8 do this to themselves that say they
9 are evil, they need to be
10 incarcerated, they need to be kept
11 away from any normal activities in
12 life, they are destroying
13 themselves, becoming robots. That
14 is what you told me in this paper
15 here.
16 DR. NAHAS: You see, sir, in
17 your question, you asked five
18 different subjects which are
19 overlapping to each other.
20 Nature has put in the
21 brain not more than 12 or 13
22 receptors for specific substances
23 which are produced, which was to
24 allow for a regular recycling of the
25 nerve transmitter and regular
66
1
2 programming of the brain.
3 What you are doing is
4 substituting to this
5 neurotransmitter. Marijuana is
6 going to produce some long lasting
7 impairment of this information.
8 MR. SALOMON: Dr. Nahas, we
9 are going to have two questions from
10 the floor. I hope we can ask these
11 questions briefly and they can be
12 answered briefly.
13 The first question is by the
14 gentleman back there in the third
15 row.
16 SPEAKER: High school students
17 today are taught that marijuana
18 physically damages, actually kills
19 brain cells. Is this true?
20 DR. NAHAS: There is no
21 evidence that the brain cell is
22 being killed, except that it's
23 altered. It is altered in its
24 branching of synapsis, as shown by a
25 number of experimental studies.
67
1
2 From the pictures that we see,
3 we see some abnormal aspect of the
4 cell, as far as nuclear construc-
5 tion.
6 MR. SALOMON: The gentleman
7 in the back has been here all day
8 and is asking his first question
9 now.
10 SPEAKER: First let me
11 give you my scientific background.
12 I am in the National Institute of
13 Study Section for Alcoholism and my
14 field of research is membranes.
15 I must confess, I am somewhat
16 embarrassed by this talk. I hope
17 you will forgive me by saying that,
18 but many of the statements, the
19 assumptions that are made or the
20 statements that are made, based
21 upon what is stated to be a fact, is
22 not a fact.
23 The billionth level of
24 concentration of drugs that affects
25 DNI is simply not correct. DNI
68
1
2 is not affected by billionth level
3 concentrations. Billionths of a
4 gram was the way you put it.
5 The billionth level barely
6 affects a hormone site on a
7 receptor. It is way below
8 concentration of what binds on
9 the surface of the cell.
10 So your levels of what you are
11 talking about are way off. There is
12 a whole series of statements made as
13 though they are facts.
14 I don't know of any citations
15 in the literature for many of them.
16 DR. NAHAS: Well, I can give
17 them to you.
18 SPEAKER: I would appreciate
19 them. I don't mean this to be a
20 nasty statement. This is presented
21 to a lay group and we are scientists
22 that should have a standard.
23 DR. NAHAS: I don't think that
24 you are aware of the work of - -
25 SPEAKER: Cannabis stays in
69
1
2 the brain and it stays in the brain
3 for eight days.
4 DR. NAHAS: What is the
5 concentration of THC in the neuron
6 cell after, let's say, five days?
7 SPEAKER: What is the
8 concentration? It's barely
9 detectable. It's barely detectable
10 and after eight days our best
11 instruments can't detect it.
12 MR. SALOMON: Thank you very
13 much for your testimony today.
14 Now our next speaker is
15 Robert Jesse. Mr. Jesse is a
16 graduate of John Hopkins School of
17 Engineering in 1981 and founded
18 C.S.P. in 1994.
19 MR. JESSE: Thank you very
20 much. I would like to thank the
21 members of the committee for taking
22 on a really huge problem, one that
23 we have seen throughout the
24 testimony today. There is not a lot
25 of agreement.
70
1
2 It's really inspiring to me to
3 see that you have devoted your time
4 and energies to doing something that
5 is so tough.
6 Having said that, what I have
7 to talk about today may seem a
8 little out of place. This testimony
9 is about the impact that the drug
10 laws inadvertantly have on the free
11 exercise of religion, affecting
12 people for whom certain prohibited
13 substances are an essential feature
14 of their spiritual practices.
15 That impact effectively
16 constitutes religious persecution,
17 even though most of the people
18 conducting it have no desire to
19 prosecute and don't even know they
20 are doing it.
21 The substances we are
22 considering here are those known in
23 the medical community as
24 hallucinogens and elsewhere as
25 psychedelics. These drugs are
71
1
2 sharply dissimilar from such drugs
3 as cocaine and heroin.
4 Several of them have been
5 shown to be very low in addiction
6 potential and overdose risk and to
7 be of very low organic toxicity.
8 Here is a chart that I would
9 like to spend just a minute on. One
10 researcher named Robert Gable was
11 approached by a son of his who
12 wanted to know about the dangers of
13 taking certain drugs and, to his
14 surprise, there was no information
15 available about the addictiveness or
16 acute toxicity of various drugs.
17 Let me just describe to you
18 what this chart is here, and I have
19 additional copies of it. He
20 conducted that computer research for
21 information and literature about
22 addiction potential and acute
23 toxicity of drug use. I actually
24 reviewed 700 and ended up making
25 this chart on the basis of 350
72
1
2 papers.
3 Acute toxicity means risk of
4 death from an acute overdose. The
5 up and down access is representation
6 of severe risk of fatality at the
7 top and bottom, negligible risk of
8 fatality. Over to the left we have
9 very low dependency and over to the
10 right very high dependency.
11 We have drugs such as L.S.D
12 and psilocybin, which is the active
13 component in mushrooms, rating very,
14 very low in toxicity.
15 I would like you to remember
16 that chart and notice how different
17 drug substances are. This only
18 shows two dimensions of risks. One
19 comment that I will leave for the
20 committee, it does not make
21 sense to try to develop public
22 policy that treats all these
23 substances similarly.
24 Given their widely varying
25 profiles, it would not give us more
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1
2 control over the drug situation to
3 treat each individual substance or
4 their category of substances.
5 The risks of injurious
6 behavior and of psychological harm
7 from the altered consciousness
8 experience, which are not negligible
9 in unsupervised casual use, appear
10 to be minimized when they are used
11 in ritual settings.
12 It's the ability of the
13 substance to catalyze religious
14 spiritual practices. We use a new
15 word entheogens to describe the
16 substances when they are used for a
17 spiritual purpose.
18 For as long as we know of,
19 there have been at least a few
20 people in every culture, the mystics
21 and the saints, who were able
22 through prayer, meditation, or other
23 techniques to bring upon themselves
24 mystical states of consciousness.
25 In some cultures, this direct
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1
2 experience of the sacred was
3 available to everyone, or to members
4 of special bodies of initiates,
5 through the sacramental use of
6 psychoactive plants and
7 preparations.
8 For example, we have very
9 good evidence now that the
10 Eleusinian Mystery rites, perfomed
11 annually near Athens for almost 2000
12 years, featured a mystical
13 revelation brought on by the
14 drinking of a hallucinogenic brew.
15 The Sanskrit Rg Veda, one of
16 the oldest religious texts known,
17 praises a mind-altering substance
18 called soma, now identified as the
19 psychoactive mushroom Amanita
20 muscaria.
21 As early as 300 B.C., the
22 Aztecs used the entheogenic cactus
23 peyote in their spiritual practices.
24 Continuing to this day, indigenous
25 peoples in Russia, Africa, Mexico,
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1
2 South America and North America,
3 including an estimated 25,000 to
4 400,000 American Indians in the
5 U.S., use a variety of psychoactive
6 sacraments classied as Schedule I
7 controlled substances in the United
8 States.
9 Many of these substances,
10 which are used around the world, are
11 classified by the U.S. Government as
12 controlled substances.
13 Over the last century, as
14 Western ethnobotanists rediscovered
15 some of the traditional sacramental
16 substances and as chemists isolated
17 their essences, this knowledge
18 slowly circulated among the
19 intelligentsia.
20 Aldous Huxley took mescaline,
21 the principal psychoactive component
22 of peyote, in 1953 and described his
23 enlightening experience in The Doors
24 of Perception. By that time,
25 another wave had been set in motion.
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1
2 In 1943, Albert Hofmann
3 discovred the psychoactivity of LSD
4 and within a few decades, potent
5 chemical means for facilitating
6 primary religious experience were
7 within easy reach of people.
8 It must be acknowledged that
9 probably most contemporary users of
10 hallucinogens take them with no
11 explicit ritual surround or
12 spiritual intention, though even
13 then, the fire from heaven has
14 sometimes been known to descend
15 unbidden.
16 The religious import of the
17 entheogens is confirmed in accounts
18 by and of religious leaders and
19 members of traditional
20 entheogen-using cultures.
21 This spiritual significance is
22 corroborated by the personal
23 accounts of scores of Western
24 authorities, Metzner, Roberts and
25 Hruby, including physician and
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1
2 church founder John Aiken, Walter
3 Houston Clark, professor of
4 psychology of religion at Andover
5 Newton Theological Seminary, Harvard
6 theologian Harvey Cox, MIT
7 philosopher and theologian Huston
8 Smith and Jesuit scholar David
9 Toolan.
10 A landmark scientific study,
11 the "Good Friday Experiment"
12 conducted under the spnsorship of
13 Harvard University by physician and
14 minister Walter Pahnke in 1962, also
15 strongly supports the thesis that
16 the entheogens facilitate mystical
17 consciousness and are compatible
18 with Christian workship.
19 I have given to the
20 committee a bibliography of 220
21 books from scholars, physicians, and
22 so on, with excerpts describing
23 their intake of entheogens.
24 How about religious liberty in
25 the United States? European early
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1
2 modern age, whether the struggle was
3 Catholic versus Lutheran, Calvinist
4 against Anabaptist, or Anglican
5 versus Unitarian, the central issues
6 tended to concern the efficacy of
7 various sacraments.
8 The same issue has resurfaced
9 in the supression of etheogenic
10 practices. It's not surprising that
11 people take very seriously arguments
12 about what can actually bring them
13 closer to divine.
14 But we decided two centuries
15 ago that those arguments were too
16 important to be decided by force or
17 by majority vote. They are best
18 left to the decisions of
19 congregations or to the individual
20 soul.
21 The First Amendment and a
22 variety of statutes, administrative
23 practices, and judicial decisions
24 all protect religious freedom in
25 this country.
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1
2 The general principles of that
3 corpus law are that the state may
4 not treat any particular religion
5 preferentially and that you can live
6 your religious life pretty much as
7 you choose so long as you don't
8 infringe the rights of others or
9 interfere too much with state
10 interests.
11 The entheogens present a
12 complex problem for those who want
13 to make good on our nation's promise
14 of religious liberty. The classical
15 form of religious persecution
16 involves banning certain activities
17 expressly becuase of their religious
18 intent and content. This kind of
19 persecution is relatively easy to
20 identify and remedy.
21 With entheogens, the present
22 burden on religion comes in the form
23 of a general ban on substances that
24 are sometimes used spiritually and
25 sometimes not. To relieve the
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1
2 burden, an exemption must be granted
3 from the law of general
4 applicability that imposes the
5 burden.
6 Native American use of peyote,
7 this complex problem has been
8 thoroughly explored in the instance
9 of the Native American sacramental
10 use of peyote.
11 As the peyote religion spread
12 among tribes in the U.S. in the late
13 1800's, it was met with explicit
14 government persecution in the form
15 of rules forbidding Indian use of
16 peyote and, for example, "old
17 heathenish dances."
18 Since then, numerous
19 contradictory federal and state
20 legislative, regulatory,
21 enforcement, and court actions have
22 variously supported Indian use of
23 peyote.
24 The most prominent failure to
25 accommodate peyotism was the 1990
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1
2 Supreme Court Smith decision, which
3 ruled that the First Amendment does
4 not protect the religious use of
5 peyote by Indians.
6 The court reached its decision
7 by changing prior standards to make
8 it much harder to get relief from
9 laws of general applicability that
10 burden religious activity.
11 A broad coalition of religious
12 bodies responded swiftly by
13 advocating new federal legislation,
14 leading to the enactment of the
15 Religious Freedom Restoration Act of
16 1993.
17 Finally, in 1994, the Federal
18 government enacted the American
19 Indian Religious Freedom Act
20 Amendments, providing consistent
21 protection across all 50 states for
22 the traditional, ceremonial use of
23 peyote by American Indians.
24 What price, if any, does
25 society pay for the granting of this
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1
2 religious liberty?
3 The House of Representatives
4 Committee on Natural Resources
5 reported recently that medical
6 evidence, based on the opinion of
7 scientists and other experts,
8 including medical doctors and
9 anthropologists, is that peyote is
10 not injurious.
11 Indeed, with a long history of
12 use and several hundred thousand
13 people currently active in the
14 Native American Church, there are no
15 known reports of peyote related
16 harm.
17 What is more, the Committee
18 also reported that spiritual and
19 social support provided by the
20 Native American Church has been
21 effective in combating the tragic
22 effects of alcoholism among the
23 Native American population.
24 So the law now accommodates
25 one racial group practicing one
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1
2 religion using one controlled
3 substance. Yet there are also
4 non-Indian religious groups and
5 individuals in this country for whom
6 entheogens play a central
7 sacramental role.
8 They are less well-known at
9 least in part because, in the
10 absence of protections, their
11 worship potentially subjects them to
12 fines, forfeitures, and
13 imprisonment.
14 How could we respond to a
15 non-Indian group that wishes to use
16 peyote in its religious practices,
17 or to a group that wants to use some
18 other plant or chemical for similar
19 purpose?
20 It is possible to hold the
21 view that people ought to be
22 permitted to use some controlled
23 substances for religious purposes
24 without holding the libertarian view
25 that everyone ought to be able to
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1
2 use any drug for any purpose.
3 On a more practical level, you
4 can believe that it's safe for
5 people to take peyote and therefore
6 that it's safe to permit peyote
7 taking, without also believing that
8 another drug is safe and should be
9 available.
10 Thus, the right to free
11 exercise of religion could be
12 honored by granting narrow
13 exemptions for the use of only some
14 substances in carefully
15 circumscribed religious contexts.
16 Such exemptions would support
17 the anti-drug abuse objectives of
18 the current drug laws. If a
19 religious group without a
20 demonstrated safety record were to
21 seek such an exemption, Government
22 might reasonably ask a number of
23 questions, for example:
24 Are they working with a
25 substance of reasonable safety? Do
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1
2 they draw a reasonably sharp line
3 between ritual and recreational use?
4 How is informed consent obtained?
5 What safeguards do they incorporate
6 in their practices to protect
7 participants? What is their policy
8 regarding minors?
9 One accommodation mechanism
10 would be to allow applicants to
11 document the details of their
12 proposed entheogen use and, if they
13 satisfy reasonable safety
14 requirements, receive an exemption.
15 This could be done at the
16 denominational level or by licensing
17 qualified entheogen practitioners,
18 who would then serve congregations
19 or spiritual communities.
20 Licensees would grow or
21 obtain, store, and be accountable
22 for the supervised use of the
23 authorized substances. Simple
24 reporting requirements would allow
25 government to monitor the prevalence
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1
2 and safety of entheogen use and make
3 policy adjustments as necessary.
4 These are very important
5 details, ones that CSP is
6 addressing, but they are details.
7 The main question we ask you
8 to consider is whether current laws,
9 which forbid all Americans, except
10 Indians, to use scheduled
11 psychoactive sacraments, are
12 justifiable in light of
13 constitutional traditions and a
14 realistic assessment of the risks
15 associated with the entheogens.
16 MR. KAYSER: Would you have
17 any objection that would interfere
18 with your scheme of things, if we
19 were to have a regulated legislation
20 of drugs where drugs were sold
21 through, say, licensed pharmacies,
22 taxes commensurate with the tax on
23 alcohol and tobacco and the tax
24 funds were put into some kind of
25 dedicated fund for treatment of the
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1
2 types of uses associated with the
3 down side of drug use?
4 MR. JESSE: I think that would
5 be a huge advance, but let me also
6 say that there are long series of
7 cases in this country deciding when
8 religious drugs may be taxed.
9 Costs are not generally
10 supportive with respect to taxation
11 if they are to head back to the
12 general funds so, with that proviso,
13 I would say that would be a step in
14 your direction and would end
15 religious persecution for a group of
16 people.
17 MR. SALOMON: Thank you. We
18 are going to take a few questions
19 from the floor.
20 This gentleman?
21 SPEAKER: Have the boundaries
22 of the Religious Freedom Act of 1993
23 been determined by a case to assess
24 its applicability?
25 Has such a case occurred or
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1
2 are there any impending?
3 MR. JESSE: It's difficult to
4 get a judge to allow a religious
5 defense.
6 My understanding, there are
7 cases that come up where that will
8 be permitted.
9 I would also like to add one
10 or two other things, if I could.
11 I realize for some of you what I
12 just said will make a lot of sense
13 and others it will not.
14 To further add to your
15 confusion, I would like to make a
16 another distinction between the
17 entheogens and so-called drugs for
18 abuse, high addiction.
19 That has to do with the
20 relationship between addiction and
21 spirituality. One of the things
22 that drives people in our culture to
23 excessive drug use or of sex or
24 material acquisition is some kind of
25 a deep thirst that is not satisfied
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1
2 by our culture. A number of
3 philosophers wrote about this.
4 It is just now coming within
5 the review of scientists
6 apparently.
7 MR. SALOMON: Our next speaker
8 is Rick Doblin, the president of
9 MultiDisciplinary Association for
10 Psychedelic Studies, Inc., otherwise
11 known as M.A.P.S. Maps is involved
12 in research and educational
13 organizations. Welcome.
14 MR. DOBLIN: In addition to my
15 work as the founder and director of
16 M.A.P.S., I am a Public Policy Ph.D
17 student at Harvard's Kennedy School
18 of Government.
19 My area of concentration is
20 the analysis of policies concerning
21 Schedule I and II drugs, in
22 particular psychedelics and
23 marijuana.
24 What I am trying to do is
25 basically, with the non profit
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1
2 organization, support research that
3 government and pharmaceutical
4 companies and foundations are not
5 supporting.
6 I am trying to find ways to
7 regulate the beneficial uses of
8 these drugs. I would like to offer
9 the committee something that I
10 think should be something easy to
11 add to your list of agenda items.
12 In reading your report, I
13 realized that I had one main comment
14 to offer. There is another major
15 category of costs of the War on
16 Drugs that was not even mentioned in
17 your intial report. This cost may
18 possibly even dwarf all the other
19 costs.
20 I am speaking about the
21 opportunity cost of forgone benefits
22 from the drugs against which the war
23 on drugs is being waged.
24 I think over the next 5 or 10,
25 15 years, we will find these drugs
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1
2 have enormous benefits and we will
3 look back with some great regret,
4 whereas Bob was talking about
5 religious freedom, that is a really
6 strong and deep case and yet it's
7 very hard to make, particularly in
8 terms of a policy prescription,
9 because in a way everyone is their
10 own, has their rights to have their
11 own spiritual insights, to try to
12 create a situation where you approve
13 the religious use of a drug for
14 some, to try to figure out how to
15 limit that. It's a complex problem.
16 What I am doing is one step
17 easier to try to talk about
18 scientific freedom when it comes to
19 research with these drugs.
20 To give you an example, there
21 was a classic study that was done in
22 1962 and it was called Good Friday.
23 It was an experiment conducted that
24 scientifically studied the potential
25 of psychedelic drugs to catalyze
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1
2 religious experiences.
3 The man who did an experiment
4 was a doctor and minister and he was
5 working on his P.h.D. and he took 20
6 students into church on Good Friday
7 and he gave them all a pill and half
8 of them had a placebo and what he
9 wanted to do is test them afterward
10 and have them describe what their
11 experience was and test them after
12 six months, if their experience had
13 any kind of impact on their lives.
14 What he found was remarkable.
15 He found 9 out of the 20
16 people had what he considered to
17 be a mystical experience and he
18 defined that as a deep sense of
19 unity with creation, being in the
20 presence of something holy and
21 sacred and deeply felt positive
22 mood.
23 When he looked six months
24 later, they described a series of
25 positive changes in their lives.
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2 From my undergraduate work, I
3 did a thesis where I tracked these
4 people down after 25 years. It took
5 me about five years to do this study
6 and I identified 19 out of the 20
7 and I flew all over the country to
8 interview them.
9 Many of them are now ministers
10 and I said, "What was this
11 experience? How would you describe
12 this experience now?" What impact
13 has it had on your life?
14 Every single one that I spoke
15 to said he considered it to be a
16 mystical experience to this day.
17 Many of them said it opened a
18 doorway to their religious life.
19 They had dreams praying. They
20 described a series of changes which
21 I will just read to you from my
22 paper.
23 "Each of the participants felt
24 the experience in a positive way and
25 expressed appreciation for having
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1
2 participated in the experience.
3 Most of the effects discussed,
4 in long term followed interviews,
5 enhanced the appreciation of life
6 and nature, deep in sense and joy,
7 ministry or what other locations
8 the subject chose, enhanced,
9 increased tolerance of other
10 religious life crises,
11 identification with foreign people,
12 minorities, woman and nature.
13 Now, it's not all roses. One
14 of the persons who would not talk to
15 me had a difficult experience. I
16 later found out this researcher had
17 admitted to the fact one person was
18 tranquilized during the experience
19 and I think it traumatized that
20 person. He is now successful, but
21 to think back on it, gives him some
22 pain.
23 It turns out that this
24 experiment was done in 1962. Now we
25 are all concerned about religious
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1
2 life. You would think that in a
3 society where there was freedom of
4 scientific inquiry this would not
5 have been the last study looking at
6 this phenomena.
7 This has been replicated
8 and today this cannot be
9 replicated. There is some question
10 as far as whether the F.D.A. will
11 accept such a study. No one has had
12 the courage to try to request that.
13 The scientific chill that's
14 been produced by the war on drugs
15 has been awesome.
16 This research is begging to be
17 undertaken again and yet it has not
18 been and I think it's a great
19 tragedy. That is talking about the
20 religious use.
21 When we want to talk about the
22 medical use of these drugs, I would
23 like to give you a little bit of
24 history of what my organization and
25 I have been through just to get
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1
2 permission to study the medical use
3 of marijuana.
4 Picture high school
5 adolescents. They will have little
6 arrows to all his parts of his body.
7 How do you know signs of drug abuse,
8 their socks don't match, they can't
9 dress themselves, they are dirty.
10 There is a line to this kid's mouth
11 that says increases appetite.
12 It's generally true marijuana
13 increases appetite. There is very
14 little medication that is available
15 to the Aids people who have little
16 appetite. There is a capsule.
17 There is a lot of evidence
18 that the smoked marijuana works
19 better than the pill. I have been
20 trying with some of the very best
21 Aids researchers in the world, we
22 have the epidemic, we have been
23 trying for three and a half years to
24 get permission for this study and we
25 have been unable to do so.
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2 The F.D.A. has been our main
3 allie. After quite a lot of work
4 they did permit the study. I ran
5 into an obstacle. It was shocking.
6 In America, where you can walk
7 probably within two or three blocks
8 from here and buy marijuana, this
9 study cannot take place because we
10 cannot get a legal supply of
11 marijuana.
12 So far, every person who has
13 gotten approved by the F.D.A. to do
14 marijuana research has gotten a
15 supply of marijuana. This study is
16 approved by the F.D.A. California
17 is the only state that has its
18 review body to look at Schedule I
19 and Schedule II research.
20 The National Institute of
21 Health, they only review grant
22 applications. We were willing to
23 fund this ourselves. They said you
24 have now got to get money from the
25 government and then if you get money
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1
2 from the government, maybe we will
3 give you the marijuana.
4 I think it's an undue burden
5 on the medical researchers. It
6 should not come as any surprise, in
7 the last ten years there has been
8 only one person that has tried to
9 get permission to do Aids research
10 with marijuana. And it took me a
11 year before that to find somebody
12 who was willing to try to go through
13 this process.
14 Now again it's hard to make a
15 case, for people who have not had
16 personal experiences, that these
17 drugs may have beneficial uses. I
18 would like to talk briefly about one
19 use of psychedelics, which is the
20 use of psychedelics as a tool to
21 prepare for dying, and this is
22 something that's been used in
23 religious context for thousands of
24 years.
25 I would like to start you with
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1
2 a brief, very moving discussion by
3 Laura Huxley, and this was a
4 discussion in a book she wrote
5 called This Timeless Moment, and it
6 was about the death of her husband
7 in 1963, and so she is describing
8 what his dying days, last few hours
9 were like, and he had asked her to
10 give him some LSD so he would die
11 while he was under the influence of
12 LSD, which he felt it would help him
13 open up and let go.
14 And then Laura says, "Then we
15 were quite. I just sat there
16 without speaking for a while. He
17 seemed, somehow I felt he knew, we
18 both knew, what we were doing, and
19 that has been always a great
20 relief to Aldous. A decision has
21 been made.
22 Suddenly, he accepted the fact
23 of death. Now he had taken this
24 moksha medicine in which he
25 believed. Once again he was doing
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2 what he had written in Island.
3 And I had the feeling he was
4 interested and relieved and quiet.
5 Now the expression on his face was
6 beginning to look as it did when he
7 had taken the moksha medicine, when
8 this immense expression of complete
9 bliss and love would overcome him.
10 This was not the case now, but
11 there was a change in comparison to
12 what his face had been two hours
13 before. He was very quiet now. He
14 was very quiet and his legs were
15 getting colder, higher and higher.
16 I could see purple areas of
17 cyanosis. Then I began to talk to
18 him saying light and free, you let
19 go, darling, forward and up. You
20 are going forward and up toward the
21 light.
22 You are going toward a greater
23 love. It is easy, it is so easy,
24 and you are doing it beautifully.
25 From 2:00 until the time he died,
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1
2 which was 5:20 P.M., there was
3 complete peace, except for once.
4 That must have been about 3:30
5 or 4:00, when I saw the beginning of
6 struggle in his lower lip, as if it
7 were going to struggle for air.
8 Then I gave the direction more
9 forcefully. It is easy and you are
10 doing this beautifully and
11 consciously, in full awareness.
12 Darling, you are going toward the
13 light.
14 The twitching stopped. The
15 breathing became slower and slower
16 and there was absolutely not the
17 slightest indication of contraction
18 of struggle. It was just that the
19 breathing became slower and
20 slower.
21 The ceasing of life was not a
22 drama at all, but like a piece of
23 music just finishing so gently. At
24 5:20 the breathing stopped.
25 And now, after I have been
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2 alone these few days, and less
3 bombarded by other people's
4 feelings, the meaning of this last
5 day becomes clearer and clearer to
6 me and more and more important.
7 Aldous asking for the moksha
8 medicine while dying is not only a
9 confirmation of his open-mindness
10 and courage, but as such a last
11 gesture of continuing importance.
12 Now, is his way of dying to
13 remain for us, and only for us, a
14 relief and consolation, or should
15 others also benefit from it?
16 Aren't we all nobly born and
17 entitled to nobly dying?"
18 This is now against the law
19 today. It would be considered a
20 crime. What I would like to point
21 out and to let you know is that in
22 1990 there was a change in terms of
23 the F.D.A.'s attitude.
24 They had completely repressed
25 all efforts to do research of
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2 psychedelics. David Kesler was
3 appointed the head of the F.D.A. and
4 he made a policy decision that
5 science should take precedence over
6 drug war politics, which was
7 extremely courageous, and research
8 has very cautiously started
9 reentering into the laboratory, so
10 there has been a few studies since
11 1990 and all of them have been
12 generally safety studies where we
13 are trying to describe, with the new
14 modern techniques, what these drugs
15 do to the body and whether they are
16 safe to use.
17 All government funding has
18 fallen off. Some of the early
19 studies were funded by the
20 government. We are looking for
21 risks. It's the same thing. We are
22 identifying areas of a concern.
23 As we now see to it, the
24 marijuana research we are trying to
25 do, the agencies directed by the
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1
2 Clinton Administration are refusing
3 to permit research.
4 There has been an incredible
5 exaggeration of the use of
6 marijuana. The concern is that we
7 will now show that it can be used.
8 We have heard that marijuana is
9 damaging to the immune system. It
10 may be the Aids patients are
11 benefited by marijuana.
12 It should be an easy case to
13 make that scientific freedom should
14 take precedence over the propaganda
15 needs over the war on drugs. I
16 hope that is something you can make
17 explicit.
18 As we are now entering this
19 attempt to do the second phase of
20 studies into the medical use and
21 benefit of these drugs, we are going
22 to need a lot of support. Just to
23 let you hear one last thing, this is
24 now MDMA.
25 It's known on the Street
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1
2 as extody. It produces an easy flow
3 of emotions. It's been used with
4 post traumatic stress, rape victims,
5 people who have been in war
6 situations.
7 There is a story here. This
8 is about a woman who helped her
9 husband die. But this now was
10 administered well before the actual
11 day of death.
12 "My husband felt he was really
13 making progress with his liver
14 cancer. The pain had diminished and
15 the swelling had gone down. The
16 oncologist showed Dick his tumor was
17 not better at all.
18 Once Dick was home, he began
19 to map out ways to kill himself. He
20 knew about electricity, so he talked
21 of ways to connect wires. I thought
22 it sounded horrible. I knew that he
23 very much feared loss of control-
24 pain that he couldn't cope with.
25 He was a very proud man and he
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2 could not bear the thought of lying
3 there, stripped of control and
4 dignity.
5 Because I had read about what
6 happens to livers out of control, I
7 was also afraid of swelling, pain
8 and jaundice for Dick.
9 In his despair, he consented
10 to doing what he feared most in
11 life, losing control with a
12 drug, MDMA, but he was at the end of
13 the line.
14 Taking the drug let him
15 understand himself, so he was more
16 accepting of what was happening. It
17 was a healing. Not the way people
18 usually talk of healing, either. It
19 was a soul healing.
20 On a practical level, MDMA
21 gave me a tool, because I learned to
22 hypnotize Dick easily. While he was
23 in this suggestible state, he was
24 conditioned to a simple wrist
25 signal. After this grew familiar, I
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1
2 dispensed with even that. A simple
3 suggestion was enough.
4 Dick had amazingly little pain
5 with his cancer. Most pain came
6 from his stomach ulcers, which
7 possibly had emerged from acute
8 anxiety.
9 A helpful friend brought over
10 some marijuana and Dick was able to
11 eat, once his stomach was soothed.
12 It was almost magical to see him get
13 the munchies, which I had only read
14 about.
15 When Dick lay dying in his own
16 bed, he complained of a pain in his
17 liver. All I did to help him was
18 say that I was injecting Demoral
19 (imaginary). His arm grew rosy, his
20 body relaxed. He was in peace.
21 I feel that priming him with
22 MDMA made pain contol and relief
23 very easy. What makes non-narcotic
24 help so appealing is that the
25 patient is conscious and
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2 communicating with those he loves.
3 Dick had a beautiful death of
4 acceptance and serenity. He died
5 with the loving support of me and my
6 son. It made a bond between us that
7 sustained me through the heavy
8 months that followed. Now that four
9 years have passed, the pain is less,
10 but my gratitude for giving Dick
11 MDMA is as strong as ever."
12 In order for these no longer
13 to be crimes, we need to do
14 scientific research and we need
15 support from reports such as yours.
16 MR. SALOMON: Thank you. Do
17 we have any questions?
18 MR. KAYSER: Would you have
19 any objection, if a regulatory
20 screen of drugs were licensed, to
21 the sale of such to pharmacies where
22 you had labeling and counter-
23 indications and warning labels and
24 so forth and they were taxed and tax
25 revenues were put into a dedicated
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1
2 fund and a portion of that dedicated
3 fund, the revenues be used for the
4 research?
5 MR. DOBLIN: I am glad you
6 asked that question. I would agree
7 in general that would be a good
8 idea.
9 I would presume what you will
10 have would be a prescription against
11 the use by minors and - -
12 MR. KAYSER: And that would be
13 to enhance the enforcement - -
14 MR. DOBLIN: If we look at
15 the cultures, all of them have - -
16 when you look at the native American
17 Church, they don't like to publicize
18 it, but three year olds, five year
19 olds, they eat small amounts of
20 peyote.
21 When at home, in ritual
22 contexts, the use of alcohol is
23 given to children. The family does
24 it together. They see there is a
25 place and time for it, so that when
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2 you keep it strictly restricted, I
3 think you create more problems, so
4 that what I would very much like to
5 see is a situation where the drugs
6 were restricted to children but
7 there was an exception granted for
8 parental override of those rules and
9 to further point out something, I
10 would like to say that historically,
11 drugs have been used in these
12 cultures as rights of passage, to
13 aide and right of passage.
14 I know one of the things that
15 I tell my parents was the fact that
16 it was my barmitzvah and I had
17 expected this ritual. I thought
18 these rituals still carried
19 power the way I hoped they really
20 did.
21 During my barmitzvah, I felt
22 for the days and weeks after somehow
23 God must have been busy. There were
24 a lot of people bar mitzvahed on
25 that day, and it made me realize the
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1
2 rituals that we have today, high
3 school graduation, these things they
4 don't do the way they used to.
5 I think there is a hunger for
6 these challenges. Drug use is a
7 very safe and successful way of
8 doing that. One of the ultimate
9 long term solutions to the problem
10 of adolescent drug use is provide
11 safe context for those who want it,
12 to experience the drugs.
13 MR. SALOMON: We have a
14 question.
15 SPEAKER: In the 25 year
16 follow up story, the Good Friday
17 story, had the people become
18 unblinded at that time, and the
19 second thing regarding the
20 researcher, has he tried applying
21 with modified protocol?
22 MR. DOBLIN: It's very
23 difficult to do double blind
24 research. It's hard to fool
25 people.
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1
2 In this particular study, one
3 of the question items was, which
4 group do you think you were in, and
5 everybody was 100 percent right, so
6 whenever I asked them, did you think
7 back, were you in this group,
8 everybody was correct.
9 Instead of comparing the
10 treatment with no drug, you are
11 comparing the treatment with a
12 slight amount of the drug which
13 still can have an impact.
14 If you have just a little bit
15 of LSD, people have mystical
16 experiences without LSD. In the
17 future, keep in mind that the
18 research we are doing is now
19 handicapped in a way.
20 The researcher Donald Abrams
21 is so overwhelmed by trying to do
22 this study, he is not in a position
23 to grow marijuana.
24 SPEAKER: All you have to do
25 is label the material.
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2 MR. DOBLIN: I am working with
3 a group.
4 MR. SALOMON: Any other
5 questions? Thank you.
6 Our last speaker today is
7 Frederick Goldstein, general counsel
8 of Phoenix House. Welcome,
9 Mr. Goldstein.
10 MR. GOLDSTEIN: Thank you. I
11 too would like to thank the
12 committee for this opportunity to
13 present Phoenix House's position
14 on the legalization issue.
15 Phoenix House brings to this
16 question nearly 30 years of
17 experience in the treatment and
18 prevention of drug abuse.
19 During this time, we have
20 become the nation's largest
21 substance abuse agency with 20
22 facilities in four states and more
23 than 3,000 clients in treatment,
24 most of them in long-term
25 residential treatment.
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2 The drug abusers we treat have
3 been, in the main, heavy, high risk
4 users of the most disabling
5 substances.
6 These men and woman come from
7 what is called the "hard core" of
8 the nation's drug abusing
9 population. Many of them can be
10 found in the criminal justice
11 system, and that where we now treat
12 close to 1300 prison inmates.
13 From our earliest days, we
14 have worked with and within the
15 criminal justice system. The very
16 first treatment program in a
17 correctional setting was developed
18 by Phoenix House on Rikers Island at
19 the end of the sixties.
20 A number of studies have since
21 demonstrated the effectiveness of
22 this treatment model in reducing
23 recidivism and it is now widely
24 employed throughout the country.
25 Phoenix House itself operates
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1
2 programs in New York State's Marcy
3 and Taconic facilities and at two
4 prisons in Texas. We developed a
5 treatment program for juvenile
6 offenders in California and are
7 working now on programming for
8 prisons in Great Britain.
9 Here in New York, we also run
10 a large community reintegration
11 program for former prison program
12 participants. In addition to
13 programs for inmates and released
14 prisoners, Phoenix House has worked
15 with judges, prosecutors and defense
16 counsel in the Bronx, Manhattan,
17 Brooklyn and Queens to provide
18 treatment as an alternative to
19 incarceration for adolescents and
20 adults, including youthful offenders
21 and predicate felons.
22 This experience gives us a
23 perspective on drug use and on
24 legalization that we believe is
25 substantially different from the
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1
2 perspective of those who advocate
3 the curtailment, revision or
4 abandonment of present drug laws.
5 From where we stand and where
6 we work, we can appreciate the
7 seductiveness of the legalization
8 argument. But we see, perhaps too
9 clearly, the fundamental
10 misconceptions on which it rests.
11 These reflect a flawed or
12 limited understanding of the nature
13 of addiction, the relationship
14 between crime and drug abuse, the
15 true costs of drug abuse, the nature
16 of treatment and exactly how
17 legalization would work, but before
18 examining these issues, let's take a
19 moment first to consider what
20 appears to me to be the primary
21 rationale for a proposal as extreme
22 as legalization.
23 And it is an extreme proposal,
24 a radical departure from present
25 policy and one that comes with no
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1
2 details and absolutely no assurance
3 that it will improve in any way an
4 admittedly dreadful situation.
5 The rationale for this
6 proposal is that, at bottom line,
7 nothing works. This "sound bite"
8 summarizes the conviction that the
9 various government initiatives we
10 have pursued, with more or less
11 fervor over the past 25 to 30 years,
12 have all been ineffective and
13 wasteful.
14 And what's more, the argument
15 goes, drug laws now cause more
16 problems than drugs do themselves.
17 How can it be said that
18 "nothing works" when evidence is now
19 piling up showing that a great deal
20 of what we have been doing to combat
21 drug abuse is demonstrably
22 effective.
23 Treatment works, and more and
24 more studies confirm this,
25 prevention works, and the national
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1
2 campaign to de-normalize drug use
3 in this country has been an
4 enormous success.
5 Since 1979, the number of
6 Americans who use illicit drugs has
7 been cut just about in half, from 25
8 million to 13 million. That is
9 success, by any standard.
10 True, the number of "hardcore"
11 drug abusers has diminished hardly
12 at all during this period and this
13 may be influenced by a pattern of
14 decline that parallels the last
15 substantial drop in illicit drug
16 use, that which occurred between
17 1920 and 1950.
18 Decreasing drug use at that
19 time began with the middle class and
20 although drugs did not disappear
21 from the scene, they were
22 increasingly found near the margins
23 of society where hardcore use tends
24 to be most prevalent.
25 What is perhaps most
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1
2 disturbing today is the resurgence
3 in adolescent use, paralleling a
4 shift in teen attitudes about drugs
5 and drug dangers.
6 It is generally believed that
7 this shift reflects a softening of
8 overall societal attitudes, a
9 growing tolerance for drug use that
10 can been seen in diminished public
11 concern, in limited media attention
12 and in various proposals to curb
13 anti-drug initiatives.
14 If we want youthful drug use
15 to continue to rise, there is no
16 better way to do it than by
17 legalization. Illegality is the
18 ultimate means of stigmatizing
19 behavior.
20 And there is powerful evidence
21 that drug laws and the fear of
22 getting in trouble are the most
23 potent means we have to influence
24 adolescent behavior.
25 It is because so much of what
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2 is being done to curb drug abuse is
3 working, and working well, that we
4 find the rationale for legalization,
5 the notion that "nothing works"
6 plainly flawed. So too, are other
7 perceptions that go to make the case
8 for legalization.
9 One is the nature of
10 addiction. For there is an
11 assumption within the legalization
12 camp that drug abusers are
13 otherwise normal people who just
14 happen to use drugs. And, on this
15 point, is pinned the presumption
16 that drug prohibitions exist
17 primarily to clamp moral constraints
18 on their free choice.
19 But there is a far more
20 practical basis for prohibitions.
21 They exist not so much to protect
22 otherwise normal folks from the
23 consequences of their own actions,
24 but to protect society from folks
25 who can easily lose the ability to
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1
2 function normally.
3 This does not mean that
4 society is endangered by the
5 behavior of all drug abusers or even
6 the great majority of them. Yet, a
7 substantial number cross the line
8 from permissible self destruction to
9 become out of control and put others
10 in danger of their risk-taking,
11 their violence and their
12 criminality.
13 Let's examine the nature of
14 this criminality and recognize that
15 the drug-crime connection is far
16 more complex than most legalizers
17 allow. The majority of drug abusers
18 in prison today are not there for
19 violating drug laws. Nor are they
20 necessarily in prison because they
21 must rob or steal to pay inflated
22 prices for illicit drugs.
23 Even when provided with free
24 drugs, we cannot assume that drug
25 abusing criminals will cease their
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1
2 lawless ways.
3 A British study of addicts in
4 a heroin maintenance clinic during
5 the seventies found that fully half
6 were convicted of a crime while
7 enrolled in the program and
8 receiving enormous amounts of free
9 heroin.
10 The criminality of hardcore
11 drug abusers is less a result of
12 drug laws or drug prices than a
13 manifestation of their generally
14 disordered behavior and criminality
15 is just one such manifestation. Add
16 to it, a broad range of anti-social
17 behaviors, violence of all kinds,
18 domestic violation, child abuse and
19 the kind of risk-taking and
20 irresponsibility that spreads HIV
21 infection and tuberculosis.
22 Social disorder deriving from
23 drug abuse shows up everywhere, and
24 we pay an enormous price for it, not
25 only in the costs of crime and
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1
2 punishment, but in the costs of
3 health care, foster care, welfare
4 and care for the homeless, in
5 accidents on the road and in the
6 workplace, plus $50 billion or more
7 in lost productivity.
8 Will legalization limit this
9 pathology or reduce these costs? It
10 is hard to see how it can fail to
11 increase both.
12 Making drugs universally
13 available, as they are not available
14 today, and providing them at
15 moderate prices, cannot but result
16 in significantly higher levels of
17 use.
18 When we increase access and
19 remove disincentives, we are
20 sanctioning or normalizing drug use,
21 eliminating all the impediments that
22 now, no matter how imperfectly,
23 limit its spread.
24 We should anticipate, after
25 legalization, not only more users,
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1
2 but more heavy, high-risk use.
3 Absent disincentives and high
4 prices, few regular users find it
5 easy to control their consumption.
6 This was a lesson British physicians
7 learned when heroin prescription
8 there was common.
9 Even when the clinics were
10 prescribing huge doses, 20 to 30
11 times what U.S. street addicts
12 consum, patients always wanted more,
13 and former cocaine users in
14 treatment at Phoenix House almost
15 uniformly report that economic
16 constraints alone limited their
17 intake.
18 Legalization would also
19 produce more disorder and higher
20 social costs. And we should not
21 look for a reduction in crime.
22 Lower drug prices might reduce the
23 number of property crimes committed
24 by individual addicts, but this
25 would be more than offset by growth
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1
2 of the addict population, and with
3 the ensuing increase in disordered
4 behavior, we should expect many more
5 crimes of violence, child abuse,
6 rape and assault.
7 So, under legalization, we
8 would anticipate more drug users,
9 heavier use, and an enormous
10 increase in drug-related social
11 disorder.
12 We would also expect drug
13 abuse treatment to become
14 significantly less effective,
15 particularly treatment for the most
16 disordered or hardcore.
17 These are the drug abusers who
18 most need treatment, benefit most
19 from treatment, and hardly ever
20 enter treatment, except under
21 pressure.
22 Before pursuing this thought,
23 let me clear up some misconceptions
24 about treatment.
25 Not all drug users need
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1
2 treatment. Many require only a
3 compelling reason to quit,
4 and most can be helped by
5 interventions that are only
6 moderately intrusive.
7 But the most profoundly drug
8 involved do require treatment and
9 the most demanding kind of
10 treatment. And since denial is a
11 universal characteristic of drug
12 abuse, few of these disordered drug
13 abusers seek the treatment they need
14 voluntarily.
15 It is true that motivation is
16 essential to successful treatment,
17 and drug abusers must be active
18 participants in their own recovery.
19 But few seriously impaired abusers
20 enter treatment with this kind of
21 motivation. Recognizing the need
22 for treatment, and generating the
23 desire to recover, are the initial
24 achievements of effective treatment,
25 not it's prerequisites.
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1
2 It is external pressure that
3 brings most disordered drug abusers
4 into treatment, particularly into
5 the comprehensive and demanding
6 regimens they require. And this
7 pressure tends to reflect societal
8 attitudes.
9 When there is widespread
10 tolerance for drug use, the
11 pressure on drug abusers is low.
12 When tolerance declines, pressure
13 rises.
14 It is families, lovers,
15 friends and employers who most often
16 exert this pressure, but so does the
17 criminal justice system. We do not
18 believe that anyone should have to
19 serve time solely for buying or
20 using drugs. But the enforcement
21 of drug laws, that make it more
22 difficult or dangerous to buy or
23 sell drugs, prompts a good many
24 abusers to seek help.
25 When the courts allow drug
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1
2 abusing offenders the option
3 treatment, they open a door many
4 would never open for themselves.
5 Indeed, the most dysfunctional drug
6 abusers are unlikely to enter
7 treatment any other way.
8 So drug laws serve as a potent
9 adjunct to treatment, bringing into
10 treatment the most reluctant and
11 recalcitrant drug abusers, where
12 research shows them to be just as
13 successful as those who enter
14 voluntarily.
15 Under legalization, judicial
16 pressure would be gone and societal
17 pressures would diminish. Addicts
18 would be off the hook, with cheap
19 and legal drugs, and no one on their
20 case. To most of the treatment
21 community, this is a truly
22 terrifying scenario.
23 But what scenario do the
24 proponents of legalization envisage?
25 They have none. What they offer is a
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1
2 broad range of options and an
3 absolute absence of details. To
4 some extent, this insulates their
5 position from attack.
6 But despite a reluctance to
7 spell out the specifics of drug
8 distribution in a post-legalized
9 era, it is clear that only pan-
10 legalization, the elimination of all
11 restrictions, would bring an end to
12 illicit drug traffic.
13 Unless heroin, crack, PCP and
14 the latest in designer hallucinogens
15 were legally and widely available
16 and at bargain prices, some illegal
17 trade would survive. And since no
18 legalization plan anticipates sales
19 to minors, that is anyone under 21,
20 this major consumer group would
21 likely continue to secure drugs as
22 they now do.
23 Moreover, anything but totally
24 unrestricted pan-legalization, would
25 give government a far more difficult
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1
2 mandate than it has today. Rather
3 than curbing traffic in illegal
4 drugs, government would be required
5 to regulate it.
6 In conclusion, what we are
7 saying is this: much of what we are
8 doing today to arrest drug abuse is
9 working. It is being compromised by
10 softening public attitudes and, in
11 particular, by those who make the
12 case for legalization, and
13 legalization itself would not
14 eliminate the need for drug laws,
15 but would result most likely in more
16 drug users, more drug related
17 disorder, higher social costs and
18 more crime. Thank you.
19 MR. SALOMON: Thank you. Are
20 there any questions?
21 SPEAKER: I am wondering about
22 your claim that drug use would rise
23 among legalization.
24 I am concerned with your idea
25 that drugs are not universally
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1
2 available today. I am wondering if
3 the clients of Phoenix House seem to
4 have any problem in obtaining
5 illegal drugs.
6 MR. GOLDSTEIN: No, I don't
7 think I would personally become an
8 addict if drugs were legalized
9 today.
10 I know many people who would
11 use drugs and abuse drugs to far
12 greater degrees, if drugs were
13 available at lower prices, which as
14 I understand it, one of the
15 principal arguments of legalization
16 is to eliminate the incentive for
17 crime by reducing the price of drugs
18 in an illegal market by creating a
19 legal market.
20 I have spoken to many people
21 in treatment, who clearly would have
22 abused drugs even far more than they
23 did, had drugs been available at
24 more reasonable prices than they
25 already were.
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1
2 I also know that when forms of
3 cocaine were developed, namely
4 crack, that was sold at $3.00 for a
5 hit rather than the high price
6 cocaine was commanding on the
7 market. There was an epidemic of
8 crack use.
9 Could you repeat the second
10 part of your question?
11 SPEAKER: I am wondering about
12 the basis for your statement that
13 drugs are not universally available
14 today.
15 It seems to me, anyone who
16 wants drugs can get them. Everyone
17 is using illegal drugs of which you
18 know there is a giant volume in our
19 country.
20 MR. GOLDSTEIN: People are
21 getting them at greater exposure,
22 with consequences to them and their
23 families than if they were legal.
24 Those things make them more trouble-
25 some to get.
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1
2 There are people who would be
3 willing to do drugs, had those
4 barriers not existed. I believe and
5 I have spoken to people who are
6 deterred by needing to go to a
7 street corner and dealing with
8 somebody and engaging in an illegal
9 transaction and risk their
10 reputation and freedom.
11 MR. BROWN: I just have a
12 couple of questions.
13 I understand that Phoenix
14 House, by your testimony, has
15 experience with heavy users, high
16 risk users.
17 I just would ask you to
18 comment briefly, what do you think
19 about any kind of changes in the law
20 with regard to marijuana or the
21 entheogens we were talking about
22 earlier today by Robert Jesse?
23 MR. GOLDSTEIN: It's a very
24 complicated question. It's not
25 a good question to answer.
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1
2 The marijuana I know, from
3 visiting and talking with
4 adolescents in treatment both here
5 in New York and on the west coast,
6 there are lot of adolescents in
7 treatment around the country who are
8 now 13 years old who started
9 drinking and using marijuana when
10 they were eight or nine years old.
11 They were given marijuana by
12 their parents. They smoked
13 marijuana with their parents.
14 I am not sure if I am in favor
15 of parental acception to legalize
16 the availability of drugs for
17 minors. That has gone onto a
18 dependence on inhalants and other
19 drugs.
20 Marijuana, we believe, is a
21 gateway drug to other drugs. I
22 don't have a problem supporting
23 research in a controlled way. I
24 have no problem in trying to expand
25 knowledge about the effects of
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1
2 drugs.
3 Many of our colleagues
4 believe that ought to be done.
5 Research should be a big part of the
6 governmental budget towards finding
7 out the truth about drugs and their
8 effect on behavior, as well as the
9 chemistry of drugs. I don't think
10 there should be drastic revisions in
11 the laws.
12 MR. BROWN: You said that
13 there was an effort to denormalize
14 drug use in this country and you
15 said the illegality is the most
16 important form of stigmatizing
17 behavior in our society.
18 Does it surprise you there has
19 been a drop off of people who, say,
20 from 25 million people at a certain
21 point 20 years ago to now 13 million
22 today, people who say they used
23 drugs?
24 MR. GOLDSTEIN: No, it does
25 not surprise me. Most of the
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1
2 decrease has been in the casual use
3 of drugs. Most of it I believe
4 occurred during the decade from '79
5 to '89 when there was far more.
6 A recent survey reported
7 increased use of drugs among
8 adolescents, there are segments of
9 that population where that use is
10 going up rather than down and we
11 believe that reversal of that trend
12 is caused by a lack of political
13 attention, a lack of funding and
14 lack of media interest in this
15 issue.
16 MR. BROWN: What I am saying
17 is, that do you think when people
18 say they are not using drugs, that
19 accurately reflects what they are
20 doing?
21 MR. GOLDSTEIN: I don't know.
22 MR. BROWN: Do you think that
23 is connected with the stigmatization
24 and denormalizing of drugs in the
25 society?
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1
2 MR. GOLDSTEIN: We get more
3 than 100,000 calls a year, well more
4 than 100,000 calls, who say they are
5 doing drugs and want information
6 about drugs.
7 I don't think, in that
8 context, there is a reluctance to
9 admit to drug use in an anonymous
10 way.
11 MR. KAYSER: I have a couple
12 of questions. My first is to the
13 extent that you have drug
14 prohibition, drug sales occurring in
15 our society.
16 Do you recognize that we are
17 subsidizing drug use by failing to
18 collect taxes?
19 MR. GOLDSTEIN: If the IRS
20 wants to tax income on drug sales, I
21 believe they should do that.
22 Yes, I agree with you, there
23 ought to be government taxation of
24 illegal profits, yes.
25 MR. KAYSER: To get voluntary
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1
2 compliance, you can't do it and make
3 it legal.
4 You can only get a small
5 percentage of the drug sales which
6 you collect as a result of
7 forfeiture laws.
8 MR. GOLDSTEIN: I don't know
9 how much revenue would be gained,
10 whether it would be worth the
11 effort, et cetera.
12 MR. KAYSER: My next question
13 has to do with whether or not you
14 think, whether or not you might
15 recognize, do you know what percent
16 of the people who use drugs actually
17 can be classified as drug users or
18 do you equate use with abuse?
19 MR. GOLDSTEIN: No, I don't
20 equate use with abuse. There are
21 approximately six million users of
22 hardcore drugs whose use would
23 constitute very chronic high risk
24 drug abuse in the country.
25 MR. KASER: How many people?
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1
2 MR. GOLSTEIN: Thirteen
3 million people report using
4 drugs once a year.
5 MR. KAYSER: You are
6 advocating a system that would
7 eliminate choice and liberty for the
8 other 60 percent that you recognize
9 that do not fall into the risk
10 category who are not abusers and you
11 eliminate their freedom of choice
12 and you have them run the risk of
13 having their life ruined which might
14 affect their careers and their lives
15 because you would be trying to
16 protect the 40 percent?
17 MR. GOLDSTEIN: I am not
18 trying to protect anybody. That is
19 a misstatement.
20 What I am saying is those
21 people who engage in disordered
22 behavior who cause enormous social
23 costs, should not be protected.
24 They should be encouraged by the
25 criminal system to go into treatment
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1
2 and take responsibility for their
3 actions.
4 I have no doubt that one of
5 the biggest problems to ease the
6 laws and basically to normalize drug
7 abuse for the general population
8 would be to invite massive amounts
9 of people, who are not abusing
10 drugs, at this time to become drug
11 abusers including minors and
12 adolescents and preadolescents.
13 MR. SALOMON: We will now take
14 questions from the floor.
15 SPEAKER: First, according to
16 your testimony, according to your
17 testimony, Phoenix House gets
18 clients directly from the justice
19 system?
20 MR. GOLDSTEIN: Yes.
21 SPEAKER: The small number of
22 addicts, the small percentage of
23 addicts whose lives are disordered,
24 you cannot control their lives.
25 Is there any system that you
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1
2 can think of that can deal with
3 those people's lives without putting
4 hundreds of thousands of other
5 people in prison and creating all of
6 the other problems we have seen?
7 MR. GOLDSTEIN: Yes. The
8 first question is no, Phoenix House
9 does not defend on the availability
10 of criminal justice clients to run
11 its programs.
12 It's a non profit Organiza-
13 tion. We have more than 4,000 people
14 who knock on our doors every day.
15 We cannot possibly treat that many
16 people.
17 As a matter of fact, we
18 believe sincerely that the opposite
19 would happen, that if you legalize
20 drugs, we would have a greater
21 flood. There would be more disorder
22 rather than less disorder.
23 My understanding, from the
24 Bureau of Justice Statistics, there
25 are now people using drugs for their
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1
2 own enjoyment or their own social
3 lubrication who are spending an
4 enormous amount of time in federal
5 jails or state jails.
6 Seventy percent of the
7 arrested population in New York
8 State test positive for some kind of
9 drugs. Certainly, they are not most
10 of them being arrested for
11 possession of recreational
12 quantities of drugs.
13 Most of the people spending
14 time in jail are felons who are
15 selling drugs, not just using them
16 for their own pleasure.
17 There is another system. It
18 is equally controversial than the
19 subject we are talking about today,
20 which is why I hesitate to bring it
21 up, but yes.
22 SPEAKER: Mr. Goldstein, I was
23 wondering if you were familiar with
24 the report I mentioned this morning
25 from the Grant Corporation showing
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1
2 that spending on treatment is vastly
3 more cost effective than spending on
4 enforcement, and I am wondering,
5 considering that resources are
6 limited, whether you would favor a
7 shift of resources into treatment
8 and from enforcement?
9 MR. GOLDSTEIN: I am familiar
10 with that study, with the California
11 study. I have seen lots of numbers,
12 which I am always pleased to see.
13 There are numbers ranging from
14 $1.00 to $11.00. The answer,
15 generally speaking, is yes. I would
16 rather see government policy move
17 towards treatment than towards
18 enforcement and certainly towards
19 treatment and enforcement of local
20 drug laws rather than enormous
21 amounts of money being spent on
22 international addiction.
23 Unfortunately, I come back to
24 the final argument that I made,
25 which is the notion that we
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1
2 should provide treatment on demand
3 as a more cost effective way to
4 spend government resources. Very
5 few addicts who are on heroin or
6
