This was written for Contexts (Vol 1 No 3), a new magazine published by the American Sociological Association.It had to be under 1600 words, and so little could be said about any of the books.I agreed to do it because it allowed me to briefly talk to non-specialists about several important drug policy topics including global drug prohibition, harm reduction, decriminalization, and drug courts.The piece came out in the Fall of 2002.
Global Drug Policy: A Retreat From War
by Harry G. Levine
-- The United States and International Drug Control, 1907-1997 by David R. Bewley-Taylor. London and New York: Pinter, 1999, 242 pages.
--Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, & Places by Robert J. MacCoun & Peter Reuter. Cambridge University Press, 2001, 479 pages.
-- Reinventing Justice: the American Drug Court Movement by James L. Nolan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 254 pages.
The events of September 11 changed many things; one of them is the U.S. war on drugs. Just the possibility of new terrorist attacks immediately shifted police priorities throughout America. On October 10, The New York Times reported that the emphasis on terrorism surprised long-time customs officers like the chief inspector at Dulles Airport. "For 31 years," he said, "I've been fighting the war on drugs." Now "drug trafficking is a distant, secondary priority." The drug war's high imprisonment rates have always depended upon many police to arrest people for possessing drugs. However, cannabis, cocaine and heroin are obviously less dangerous than anthrax, smallpox and portable nuclear devices. Now most government officials agree that defending against terrorism has much greater urgency than "fighting drugs." Thus it seems unlikely that anti-drug policing efforts will immediately return to their pre-September 11 levels -- although they may increase during 2002 if there are no further terrorist incidents.
This reconsidering of priorities in America has occurred at a time when many other countries are expanding their policy of decriminalizing drugs -- choosing not to arrest and jail people for possessing prohibited substances. Recently support for decriminalization has been popping up close to home. On August 20 and 21, 2001, Canada's major newspaper, the Toronto Globe, urged the country to "Decriminalize all -- yes, all -- personal drug use, henceforth to be regarded primarily as a health issue rather than as a crime."
Just before that, on July 26, The Economist, the respected, conservative, British business magazine, devoted a special issue to a well-informed discussion of drug policy reform. The Economist called for drug decriminalization, further expansion of harm reduction policies such as methadone and heroin maintenance and consideration of open distribution of cannabis. The Economist also reported that U.S. government anti-drug publications "are full of patently false claims" and that U.S. drug policy "has proved a dismal rerun of America's attempt, in 1920-33, to prohibit the sale of alcohol."
Since then, with the support of both Labour and Tories, the British government began further reforming its drug policies. The trend among other Western democracies of instituting drug decriminalization and harm reduction-style public health policies, coupled with the events since September 11, is likely to further legitimize long-term drug policy reform efforts in many countries, including America.
Three recent books help readers to see where U.S. and international drug policy has come from and where it could go. Each focuses on a somewhat different facet of the drug issue, but together they form a rich portrait of global drug policy and the place of the United States within it.
The best of the three is The United States and International Drug Control, 1909-1997 by David R. Bewley-Taylor, a British scholar and professor of American studies and international relations. His book provides a brilliant history of the rise of worldwide drug prohibition and emphasizes the starring role of the United States in establishing the key international drug control treaties and institutions. The long effort to build and enforce global drug prohibition Bewley-Taylor smartly labels "the American crusade." From early in the 20th century, the United States and some European governments used the League of Nations and then the United Nations to create, spread and enforce the prohibition of heroin, cocaine and cannabis. This culminated in the U.N.'s "Single Convention" or treaty of 1961. Together with a series of subsequent treaties, the Single Convention finally established a single drug prohibition regime for the entire world.
Every country in the world now has drug prohibition laws banning the production and sale of heroin, cocaine and cannabis. However, each country has its own policing and punishment policies regarding drug possession and use. The United States has the harshest and most punitive drug policies of any democratic nation. In other countries, many local, regional and even national governments have instituted formal or informal decriminalization of most drug possession and use. This now includes Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Germany, Denmark and Australia.
Drug War Heresies: Learning From Other Vices, Times, & Places by Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter is an excellent example of the shift in views occurring close to the center of U.S. drug policy. Both authors are professors of public policy who worked for the RAND Corporation, the mainstream military and domestic policy think tank. They still consult for RAND, and their book is published in the series, RAND Studies in Policy Analysis. This is perhaps the first significant semi-official acknowledgment that the United States has much to learn from the drug policy reforms of European and other Western countries.
Over the course of 400 pages, the authors gradually acknowledge that harm reduction policies and public health approaches, such as needle exchange and even heroin maintenance, may be more sensible than the lock-em-up drug war. By the final paragraph, the authors step out from behind the curtain of their dense policy analysis rhetoric to say that "our own sympathies are with the reform effort."
Drug War Heresies is a rather ironic title. Only ardent drug warriors are likely to regard the authors' cautious endorsement of mild drug-policy reforms as heretical. However, the most important audience for the book will be such people: politicians, editorial writers and policy makers who have backed the drug war but who are looking for exit strategies. MacCoun and Reuter provide them with a thorough review of the evidence and rationales for various ways of winding down the war on drugs. The policy-making elite may find it easier to consider such heresies in our post-September 11 world.
In Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement, James L. Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College, draws the most detailed and devastating portrait of drug courts in print. Reinventing Justice never fully comes together as a coherent volume, and some of it is more like an addendum to Nolan's books on "culture wars" and the "therapeutic state." However, the five central chapters describing drug courts are extraordinarily illuminating.
Drug courts originated in 1989 as a response to overcrowded jails and as an effort to get at the "root" of crime by addicts, namely their addiction. As a result, drug courts are often viewed as a "liberalizing" or "humanizing" policy. Reinventing Justice correctly insists that this is not so. Nolan shows that drug courts are not "soft" on crime or drugs, and they frequently "widen the net," bringing more people under control of the criminal justice system. Court-mandated, drug-free treatment programs often do not produce drug-free people; the many defendants who fail to routinely produce clean urine (like the actor Robert Downey Jr.) are usually sent to prison. Therefore, drug courts do not necessarily reduce the number of people locked up for drug offenses, even temporarily. Many arrestees who "choose" to go to a drug court do not spend less time incarcerated than if they had gone through a traditional criminal court; some actually do more time. Finally, drug courts subject the convicted or plea-bargained client to an almost unprecedented degree of supervision and coercion.
In short, drug courts constitute a new and rapidly growing front of the crusade for a drug-free America. Despite drug courts -- or perhaps with their help -- the United States is still imprisoning a higher percentage of its population for petty drug crimes than any nation on earth: currently almost 500,000 out of America's 2 million prisoners.
Reinventing Justice describes, in fine ethnographic detail, what Nolan saw and heard in countless hours of observation and interviews with drug court judges and prosecutors. He writes about: the judges who sometimes resemble TV talk show hosts, moving around the courtroom with wireless microphones; the recovery, twelve-step and therapeutic language that engulfs all participants; the evangelical fervor of drug court advocates; the willingness of some judges to trick or intimidate defendants "for their own good"; the microscopic attention the courts pay to the personal lives of their clients (prisoners).
Although Nolan does not say so explicitly, he clearly does not like drug courts. Indeed, a reader might reasonably conclude that Nolan was utterly appalled by drug courts. He criticizes drug courts because they abandon the traditional role of courts; they provide "therapy" and "recovery" instead of seeking justice. For Nolan, the drug court system is punishment and correction masquerading as medical care; it is the illusion of benevolence -- and I think he is absolutely correct about that.
But unlike MacCoun, Reuter and Bewley-Taylor (indeed unlike the Toronto Globe and The Economist), Nolan does not wish to see drug policy move in the direction of public health, harm reduction and decriminalization. Rather, he appears to want to return to the drug policy in place before drug courts. Nolan criticizes drug courts from a committed, ethical perspective that views drug use itself as a serious crime that should be punished. Nolan thinks drug offenders should face traditional criminal courts and go to prison. President Bush's new drug czar, John Walters, may share this view; but most veteran drug warriors have enthusiastically embraced drug courts -- with prison for the "clients" who don't "recover" in "treatment."
Nolan's detailed descriptions make clear that drug courts are an odd institution. The United States has a long history of drug treatment fads so no one knows how permanent drug courts will be. As the other two books discussed here explain, there is also a workable alternative being proposed and demonstrated by many democratic countries in Europe and elsewhere. This real-world alternative is not arresting drug users and addicts and instead offering them services they want and need. It is called decriminalization and harm reduction.
Harry G. Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York. His recent book with Craig Reinarman, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, was published by the University of California Press. He can be reached at hglevine@compuserve.com.