Editorial:
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Encounters
6/1/01
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected] This issue of the Week Online comes to you from Albuquerque, location this year of the annual drug policy reform conference. The conferences always provide an eclectic, wide range of ideas and opinions on all different facets of drug policy. The first evening and day of this year's conference were no exception. As it turns out, though, some of the most interesting ideas -- or rather, clashes of ideas -- took place just outside. In front of the conference hotel, a small group of zealots protested. People who live in low-income neighborhoods, they charged, don't want legalization. Those who do, and we conference goers first and foremost, are therefore elitists who don't care about the inner cities or the people who inhabit them. They are mistaken. My several years in this issue have taught me that inner-city residents, not surprisingly, hold a range of viewpoints on this issue, just as would any other group of people queried. More support exists in such communities for ending the drug war, even for outright legalization, than our opponents would like the rest of America to believe. The protesters -- who were really protesting against open debate -- did an injustice to the very people they claimed to represent by stereotyping them as all thinking a certain way. It is no stereotype, though, to say that reasonable people everywhere agree that important social issues need to be openly discussed and all viewpoints heard, particularly on an issue such as drug policy where much is at stake and the current system is clearly failing. There was another group in the neighborhood that very much needed to hear that message, but didn't seem at all willing. That group was the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, ironically gathered right next door in the Albuquerque Convention Center. We found that out Wednesday night while getting ready for a "Town Hall" meeting discussing the HEA drug provision. A few of the students participating in the Town Hall decided to take some literature and go and dialogue with the cops and prosecutors the next day. They didn't get very far. Upon entering the meeting area, it became clear that its organizers viewed our pamphlet bearing student friends as a threat. Several police officers rapidly bore down on them and escorted them out -- saving their comrades from exposure to dangerous ideas that could contaminate and dilute their blind drug war obedience. It's easy to understand how rhetoric and ideology could poison such a group's members from wanting to talk with drug reformers who are questioning the validity of their entire profession. Still, you'd have thought they'd at least talk to college students. I guess the drug war isn't really about "the children" after all -- or if it is, the 18th birthday must be a sharp cutoff after which those who think differently become sympathizers of the enemy. Fortunately, democracy doesn't require us to convert everyone to our point of view to achieve our goals. The most extreme and entrenched may never come around, but there's an ocean of reasonable people who are willing to listen, most of whom have never heard the case for our cause. Our job is to reach them, and I can't be pessimistic until that job has been done.
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