Ethan Nadelmann is founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, headquartered in New York City, which works with legislators and grassroots organizations nationwide to propose alternatives to the forty-year-old War on Drugs. Nadelmann, the son of a rabbi, holds a PhD from Harvard and a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Cops Across Borders, the first scholarly study of the internationalization of U.S. criminal law enforcement, and co-author of Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations. He has appeared on The Colbert Report and numerous other media outlets.
Jewish Currents: Six years ago, we had a cover story in Jewish Currents that featured a group discussion among several researchers who are investigating the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelic drugs and MDMA (Ecstasy). We “politicized” the article by including a sidebar about the social costs of the War on Drugs, yet many of our readers, especially of the older generation, seemed to consider the whole feature frivolous. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on June 6, 2011
The Supreme Court determined by a 5-4 vote on this date in 1971 that 19-year-old Paul Cohen’s wearing of a jacket embellished with the words, “Fuck the Draft,” was protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”[O]ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” wrote Justice John Marshall Harlan II. Cohen had been convicted in 1968 of disturbing the peace and sentenced to 30 days in jail simply for wearing the jacket in a corridor of a Los Angeles courthouse.
“[A]bsent a more particularized and compelling reason for its actions, the State may not, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public display here involved of this single four-letter expletive a criminal offense.” —John Marshall Harlan II
by Lawrence Bush on April 26, 2011
Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54 on this date in 1977 with a party that included Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Liza Minelli, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Cher, Martha Graham, Salvador Dali, and a whole bunch of other celebrities (among those turned away at the door by the club’s trademark crowd-control bouncers were Woody Allen and Frank Sinatra). The disco became synonymous with decadence, drugs, sexual license, and snobbery, and was a key symbol of the “me-decade” of the 1980s until it closed in 1986 (with a final party called “The End of Modern-Day Gomorrah”). Rubell was a failed dental student and closeted gay man who went to jail for a year, along with his silent partner Schrager, for tax evasion; they earned their freedom by naming other club owners who were dodging taxes, too. He died of AIDS in 1989.
“[W]e want everybody to be fun and good-looking.” –Steve Rubell
by Lawrence Bush on March 6, 2011
Ted Gold and Terry Robbins were two of three members of the Weathermen who were killed in an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse on West 11th Street when one of the bombs they were constructing went off on this date in 1970. Gold had been a leader of the Columbia University strike two years earlier; Robbins had been a leader of the Kent State University student movement. The bombs were reportedly intended for use at a Fort Dix, New Jersey army base dance, “to bring the war home,” according to Mark Rudd. Diane Oughton was also killed, and two surviving members of the Weathermen who were caught in the explosion, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, immediately went underground and evaded arrest for a decade. The Weathermen had emerged as a faction within Students for a Democratic Society and proceeded, after the townhouse explosion, to bomb the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the Department of State, and several banks, always with advance warning to avoid killing people. Other well-known Jewish members of the Weathermen, which soon became known as the Weather Underground, were Naomi Jaffe, Eleanor Raskin, David Gilbert, Susan Stern, Bob Tomashevsky, Sam Karp, Bernadette Dohrn (nee Ohrnstein) and Russel Neufeld.
“The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.” —Bill Ayers
Ethan Nadelmann is founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, headquartered in New York City, which works with legislators and grassroots organizations nationwide to propose alternatives to the forty-year-old War on Drugs. Nadelmann, the son of a rabbi, holds a PhD from Harvard and a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Cops Across Borders, the first scholarly study of the internationalization of U.S. criminal law enforcement, and co-author of Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations. He has appeared on The Colbert Report and numerous other media outlets.