Megaphone: Ethan Nadelman, Drug Policy Alliance

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.

Ethan Nadelman: Being able to talk about the positive aspects of drugs that are currently prohibited has to be part of this discussion. Our government is actually paying for serious research about psychedelics and MDMA as tools for dealing with post-traumatic stress, with the fear of death, with pain, with a range of conditions. Heavyweights of American drug research, including some who have been closely linked to the War on Drugs, have been pointing to powerful scientific evidence about the spiritual benefits of psychedelics used in particular environments.

At the same time, the War on Drugs has increased tenfold the number of people behind bars for drug violations, from fifty thousand in 1980 to half a million in recent years. We lock up more people for drug violations in America than the European Union locks up for all offenses put together — and they have a hundred million more people than we have. We’re talking about five or six million people carrying a drug felony conviction and hampered for life because of it. We’re talking about a massive prison industrial complex that eats up between $50 and $100 billion a year. This is also a cutting-edge issue for those people in America who want to push back basic civil liberties and basic civil rights, who want to curtail the basic freedoms that are in the Bill of Rights. They use the War on Drugs to legitimize a much more oppressive vision of American society. None of this is frivolous.

JC: If you were writing the law, how would you handle these issues?

EN: The framework is to think about the variety of drug policies on a spectrum, from the most punitive, prohibitionist policies that you see in parts of Asia and to some extent in the United States, to the most libertarian, free-market policies. I would define the sweet spot on that spectrum as accomplishing two objectives: reducing the harms of drug use and reducing the harms of drug prohibition and control. My model would be a legal but tough regulatory approach, something like the World Health Organization’s tobacco control convention. That’s been embraced by dozens of governments as a tough regulatory model that keeps prohibitions more or less at the edges of the policy.

No one should be criminalized or punished for the possession or use of a small amount of any drug for their own use, so long as they’re not behind the wheel of a car or putting other people in direct risk. If you want to possess a little bit of cocaine or marijuana or LSD, that should not be a crime. That’s our core principle of sovereignty over mind and body, that no one should be punished for what they put in their body, absent harm to others.

I would then move in the direction of making drugs available from legally regulated sources to those people who are determined to obtain them. We’re increasingly allowing people who have legitimate medical marijuana needs to use cannabis dispensaries in Colorado, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, Arizona, and California; heroin maintenance programs have popped up in Europe and in Canada, allowing people who are addicted to get pharmaceutical heroin from a clinic. First and foremost we need to allow the people who are most addicted to these substances to obtain them in legal, regulated forms, because that is the best way to dry up the black market. If the majority of people who are severely addicted to heroin could obtain that drug from legal sources, you would see a serious diminution in arrests, criminality, HIV-AIDS, Hepatitis C, all these negative consequences of drug prohibition. And the evidence from Europe and Canada shows that you would also see some of these people switching into methadone maintenance or deciding to go drug-free.

Part of transforming the way we deal with drugs in American society, and more broadly in global society, is sensitizing people not only to the horrific consequences of a prohibitionist policy — the crime, the violence, the corruption, the overflowing prison cells, the violation of rights — but also to accept the reality that we’re never going to be a drug-free society, that drugs are here to stay, and that the real challenge is to learn how to live with them so they cause the least possible harm and the greatest possible good.

With respect to marijuana, the basic objective is to regulate it and tax it more or less as alcohol is, especially in states and countries that have tough regulatory policies. Instead, today we have over eight hundred thousand Americans getting arrested for marijuana, with Mexican gangsters making millions of dollars, with people dying, all of that.

A significant majority of Americans now accept the evidence that marijuana has legitimate medical uses. But you also have other benefits, besides the traditional medicinal ones, benefits that people use for broader enjoyment of life: their tactile life, their sexual life, their intellectual life. There’s not been much research documenting this, but it’s pretty widely known, and it should be included as part of the broader dialogue about drug policy reform.

JC: Why isn’t Phillip Morris funding you? One would think that tobacco and pharmaceutical companies are poised to make these substances, especially marijuana, into lucrative products.

EN: To my knowledge, the alcohol and tobacco companies are not at all involved. They’re not funding my organization, we’re not seeking their funding, and I don’t think they’re funding anybody else involved in drug policy reform. The pharmaceutical companies are involved around the edges, with things that directly involve them — for example methodone maintenance. Pharmaceutical companies are producers of opioid medications — sometimes they’re overly aggressive in promoting these — and part of our agenda as drug policy reformers is to fight against the pervasive opia-phobia in our society and against the unreasonable restrictions imposed by the Drug Enforcement Administration on the rights of doctors to properly treat pain. So we and the pharmaceutical companies and the medical community do dovetail in our interests.

As support for making marijuana legal has jumped from 36 percent in 2005 to 46 percent today, and opposition has dropped from 60 percent to 50 percent, I would imagine companies are looking more and more at the potential there. The desire for profit is always going to play a role, whether it’s legal or illegal on the production side.

JC: Are you optimistic about ending the War on Drugs?

EN: I couldn’t do the work I do without being optimistic, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t go through periods when you feel despair. The 2010 election in the House of Representatives is going to push us back, but even there we’ll look for opportunities. If the Republicans want to cut budgets, they should be willing to cut the drug war budget.

The rapid movement of opinion on marijuana legalization has encouraged me more than almost anything else. Just a few weeks ago, the new Republican governor of Georgia said, Look, we can’t afford to keep locking up nonviolent drug offenders, we have to find another way. Andrew Cuomo, in his State of the State address, said we can’t keep building prisons as part of a jobs program. Just as the Depression was the thing that brought down alcohol prohibition and led to the 21^st Amendment so quickly, so is the very severe recession we’re going through forcing politicians to think and talk some sense around drug reform.