Editorial:
Prohibition's
Final
Battle
5/3/98
"It is imperative that we win the Drug War in four years, or else the public will grow cynical, and the movement to legalize drugs will succeed." - Newt Gingrich, 4/30/98 With those words, House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched a "comprehensive... World War II-style battleplan," a legislative agenda that he says will create a "Drug Free America" by 2002. And while raising the spectre of "the legalizers" is a calculated move designed to conjure up images of LSD and Methamphetamine being sold out of corner convenience stores, it would be impossible to overstate the historical significance of Gingrich's putative warning. Newt Gingrich, whatever you might think of him, is a smart man. And in looking at the state of the drug policy debate around the world, and the growing strength of the American reform movement, he knows that this is very likely the last chance that anyone will have to prove, despite damning evidence to the contrary, that Prohibition can actually work. Gingrich has every reason to be concerned. In 1994, the Swiss government began a program of heroin maintenance for hard core addicts over the strong objections of the United States and its virtual puppet, the United Nations office of Drug Control Policy (UNDCP). The results, released late last year, were so promising that in a nationwide referendum, over 71% of Swiss voters agreed that aggressive harm reduction, including where appropriate, opiate maintenance, should become national policy. In the aftermath of those results, Australia was ready to begin a similar trial, until the U.S. State Department, in an arm-twisting maneuver that was supposed to remain secret, threatened to have the UNDCP shut down Tasmania's legal opiate industry if the Australians went ahead with the trials. At the last possible moment, the Australian government backed down. Since then, at least five European nations have expressed interest in holding trials of their own. On cannabis policy, Belgium, which long has been caught between France's US-style drug policy on one border and the Netherlands' decriminalized market on the other, recently resolved to decriminalize possession for personal use. This followed on the heels of the new French Socialist government's statements indicating that it would like to see a radical change in their own laws, as soon as public opinion, long subject to harsh drug war rhetoric from French leaders, could be swayed. In England, a sustained and vocal movement to legalize cannabis has materialized, while in Canada, which shares a virtually indefensible border with the US, polls show that the majority is already in favor of a legalized and regulated market. Here in the US, constituencies which were until recently either hawkish or disinterested on drug policy have begun to attack various aspects of the Drug War. African American and Latino leaders, many of whom had at one time been adamant that more police be assigned to minority neighborhoods and that the war be fought tooth and nail on their streets, seem to have suddenly come to the conclusion that their children and their communities cannot withstand the levels of incarceration and disease that the war has wrought. Mandatory minimum sentences, injection-related AIDS, and concerns over police brutality and corruption have led to an expanding re-examination of the Drug War. Syringe exchange is another issue around which opposition to the war has coalesced. The vocal and well-organized anti-AIDS movement, virtually silent on drug policy for nearly a decade, suddenly got involved when it became apparent that the majority of new AIDS cases were related to injection drug use. And the medicinal use of marijuana, now out of the closet, has further involved the AIDS community in reform, and has brought others, including friends and family of patients, members of the medical establishment, and legions of concerned citizens to question whether having our government wage war on the sick and the vulnerable is rational policy. Or whether it is a message that we want to be sending to our children. Other issues, such as the escalation of U.S. military involvement in Latin America, the national explosion of asset forfeiture, the DEA campaign of terror waged against physicians who treat chronic pain, the expansion of random drug testing, and on and on, have brought new constituencies to the issue of the Drug War. And, as these various groups have begun to look at the war through the prism of their single issues, it has become apparent to many of them that it is the Drug War itself that is the problem. That the system is unredeemable. That Prohibition doesn't work any better for drugs than it did for alcohol. That it is imperative that we find alternatives. On April 30, 1998, Speaker Newt Gingrich announced his intention to make America drug free in four years. Gingrich and his troops know that this is their one last chance to show that Prohibition can work. They know that the forces of reform are steadily gaining ground. And so the warriors prepare for the mother of all battles, complete with troops and guns and prisons and propaganda and all of the other weapons at their disposal. But Prohibition cannot work. It never has and it never will. And the movement will grow. And it will succeed. And it will happen sooner than most Americans believe. Go ask Newt. He said so himself. Adam J. Smith
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