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hereinstead.com: drug prohibition studies

: The Sept/Oct 2007 issue of Foreign Policy, the highly-respected magazine published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has a cover story titled "Legalize It" -- with a short, lucid, beautifully laid-out article about the destructive failures of drug prohibition by ... Ethan Nadelmann.

We are putting Ethan's fine article hereinstead and using the occasion to make available other writing examining drug prohibition, its powerful support, growing opposition, and humane alternatives.

It is long past time for mainstream policy and political discussion to focus attention on world-wide drug prohibition and the range of options available within it and without it.

Welcome to the exciting, eye-opening field of Drug Prohibition Studies.


Ethan Nadelmann on DRUGS: "Looking to the United States as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal with race. The United States ranks first in the world in per capita incarceration -- with less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The number of people locked up for U.S. drug-law violations has increased from roughly 50,000 in 1980 to almost 500,000 today; that's more than the number of people Western Europe locks up for everything."

"And yet, despite this dismal record, the United States has succeeded in constructing an international drug prohibition regime modeled after its own highly punitive and moralistic approach. It has dominated the drug control agencies of the United Nations and other international organizations, and its federal drug enforcement agency was the first national police organization to go global. Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed policies to the rest of the world."

"But now, for the first time, U.S. hegemony in drug control is being challenged...."


Global Drug Prohibition's Invisible Empire (by Harry G. Levine): "Global drug prohibition is a world-wide system structured by a series of international treaties supervised by the UN. Every nation in the world is either a signatory to one or more of the treaties or has laws in accord with them. As a result, every country in the world has drug prohibition enforced by its police and military."

"Until recently, the global drug prohibition system has been taken for granted and nearly invisible. Now that is changing. As global drug prohibition becomes easier to see, it loses some of its other ideological and political powers."


The Drug Prohibition Church (by Peter Cohen): "Whatever the origin of the UN Drug Treaties, and whatever the official rhetoric about their functions, the best way to look at them now is as religious texts. They have acquired a patina of intrinsic and unquestioned value and they have attracted a clique of true believers and proselyters to promote them. They pursue a version of Humankind for whom abstinence from certain drugs is dogma in the same way as other religious texts might prohibit certain foods or activities. The UN drug treaties thus form the basis of the international Drug Prohibition Church. Belonging to that Church has become an independent source of security, and fighting the Church's enemies has become an automatic source of virtue...."


Lynn Zimmer on World Wide Cannabis Prohibition: The great Lynn Zimmer on world-wide cannabis prohibition in "Cannabis Science: From Prohibition to Human Right", a book edited by Lorenz Bollinger (Peter Lang, 1997). Professor Zimmer's path-breaking essay is now available ... hereinstead.

Before most of us understood that global cannabis prohibition existed, Lynn wrote:

"The worldwide prohibition of cannabis emerged as part of a system of international controls first developed for other psychoactive drugs.... Although there appears to have been no study, cannabis was included in the 1925 Geneva Convention, which grew out of the next set of international meetings held under the auspices of the League of Nations. With this Convention, signatory nations agreed to limit the export of cannabis, opiates, and cocaine to quantities necessary to meet the legitimate medical and scientific needs of importing countries. Pressure to add cannabis came from Egypt, South Africa, Canada and the United States, with the latter's role being most dominant."

"Through the Geneva Convention and later international agreements, the United States influenced the nature of marijuana-control systems around the world for the rest of the 20th century. While few countries ever created laws as punitive as those in America, until quite recently, they offered no serious challenge to the idea that marijuana should be prohibited. However, current developments in other countries suggest that the era of American dominance may be ending...."


The Dutch Show That Liberal Drug Laws are Beneficial (by Craig Reinarman): "In 1972, after an exhaustive study by a team of top experts, President Richard Nixon's hand-picked National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended decriminalization of marijuana. Five years later, President Jimmy Carter and many of his top cabinet officials made the same recommendation to Congress. Both the Commission and the Carter administration felt that the 'cure' of imprisonment was worse than the 'disease' of marijuana use. U.S. drug control officials argued strenuously that Congress should ignore such recommendations, which it did."

"At about the same time, however, the Dutch government's own national commission completed its study of the risks of marijuana. The Dutch Commission also concluded that it made no sense to send people to prison for personal possession and use, so Dutch officials designed a policy that first tolerated and later regulated sales of small amounts of marijuana...."


The Futility of Random Drug Testing (by Marsha Rosenbaum): "Though touted by the Bush administration as the "silver bullet" that will force teenagers to "just say no," random drug testing is of questionable effectiveness. It is also costly, counterproductive and violates basic American values. That's why the million-member California State PTA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and the majority of the nation's school districts oppose school-based drug testing."


An Epidemic of Marijuana Arrests in New York City, 1997 to 2006: "In the last ten years New York City has arrested and jailed over 360,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Nearly everybody arrested has been put in handcuffs, taken to a police station, finger printed, photographed and had their information sent to the FBI. Most have then been taken to one of the city's five central jails and held over night. On average, New York City has arrested 100 people a day, every day, for ten years."

"The marijuana arrests are racially skewed. Of the 360,000 people New York has arrested and jailed from 1997 to 2006, about 55% are Black, 30% are Latino, and 15% are White. About 91% are male and most people arrested are under 30 years. U.S. government surveys, however, find that Whites use marijuana more than Blacks and Hispanics, but the Whites get arrests far less often. Most of the people arrested were not smoking in public but just carrying a small amount of marijuana, usually in a pocket."

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