Via 21209.org, an excellent article by the former mayor of Baltimore on how we can start to recover from all the damage wrought by the War on Drugs. The article begins:

A different commander-in-chief will soon assume leadership of the War on Drugs. Let’s hope that a new leader will implement a new strategy, because for nearly a century now– following the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914–America’s War on Drugs has been seen primarily as a criminal justice problem. And for nearly a century, we’ve seen this approach to fighting drugs fail and fail and then fail again. Almost nobody’s pleased with the results. So my question is: Why haven’t we been able to change course? And why haven’t we been able to convince policymakers and the public to deal with one of our great domestic blights the way it should be dealt with: primarily as a public health issue?

It has been twenty years since I, as Mayor of Baltimore, joined in efforts led by others to reform America’s national drug control policy. Prior to my election, I had served as a loyal foot solider in the drug war as a prosecuting attorney. From that vantage point, I viewed the drug problem one-dimensionally, as a crime problem. Drug dealers and users were to be arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, and their material gains were to be seized. The assumption was (and remains) that in time this would decrease the problem and rid our cities of the scourge of substance abuse. Throughout the country, major arrests and drug seizures were announced with great fanfare. Cars, planes, boats, and houses were confiscated. Arrest and incarceration statistics soared. The public perception was that we were winning the War on Drugs.

Once I became mayor, I viewed the drug problem from a different perspective. I came to see it as a three-headed monster of crime, AIDS, and addiction. As I listened to the body wire worn by Baltimore Police Detective Marty Ward shortly before he was killed by a drug dealer, I learned that there were people who were more hooked on drug money than on drugs, and that the only way to stop them was to take the profit out of distributing drugs at the street level. As I met with dozens of babies born drug addicted and HIV positive, the victims of intravenous-drug-using mothers, I discovered the need for public intervention to protect these innocent children. And as I spoke with teachers about the number of children who came to school from homes where one or more adults were addicted, I saw how the lure of “the corner” could overwhelm the imperative to learn. It became clearer and clearer to me that the victims of the drug war couldn’t be helped solely by increasing the prison population.

Unfortunately for opponents of the prevailing national drug control policy, the political environment rarely allows for a dispassionate discussion of policy alternatives. Those who argue for drug policy reform are labeled as soft on crime, a damaging characterization that most politicians desperately wish to avoid. I remember well the harsh bipartisan criticism I encountered when I began questioning the rationale of the War on Drugs twenty years ago. Two things helped me to weather the storm: a four-year term and the fact that I had been a prosecuting attorney before my election as mayor. Most congressmen, running every two years, do not enjoy that kind of political protection.

The inertia the political environment creates is especially frustrating because good alternatives–most notably, “harm reduction” and “therapeutic sentencing”–have existed for some time now. The basic tenet of harm reduction, as noted by the Drug Policy Alliance, is that drug policies should seek to reduce the negative consequences (principally death, disease, crime, and suffering) of both drug use and drug control policies themselves. Therapeutic sentencing improves the effectiveness of drug courts by allowing for an expansion of drug treatment alternatives, the expungement of records for non-repeat offenders, and the creative use of probation and other alternatives to incarceration. But every time we talk about drug policy, it inevitably gets filtered into an absolutist and not particularly useful discussion on legalization that, on both sides, is light on substance and heavy on grandstanding.

So, here’s one suggestion to break the gridlock: …

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