Drug
War
Peace
Remains
Elusive,
Say
Panelists
at
San
Francisco
Forum
12/7/01
special to DRCNet by Steve Beitler "We are like mountain climbers on a perilous ascent. Often we stumble; sometimes it seems we may dash ourselves on the rocks below. But there is hope, for dimly we have seen a vision..." - meditation from Sabbath evening serviceThe setting was warm, the panel was top-drawer and the topic of the forum -- Finding Peace in the War on Drugs -- was intriguing. But the 75 people who attended at San Francisco's Congregation Sherith Israel on November 30 learned how far short we are of the justice and compassion that are needed to achieve genuine peace in the drug war. The timing of the panel inhibited optimism on the prospects for peace. California reformers and patients are reeling from the federal government's offensive against medical cannabis, and the shooting war in Afghanistan was looking more and more like the opening chapter of this century's version of the Cold War. Joshua Bamberger, medical director of housing and urban health for the San Francisco Department of Health, moderated the panel and began with a story about a female sex worker who had arrived at his office without an appointment. She had just swallowed 41 bags of heroin after seeing a policeman heading in her direction. When Bamberger said she had to get to a hospital immediately, she told him she couldn't. She was a two-strike felon, and in California, two strikes plus 41 bags of heroin equals life in prison. Bamberger decried the "impossible choice" the woman faced and wondered how we can follow the Jewish commandment of tikkun olam, to heal the world, when so many people face "choices" that are devoid of justice and compassion. Marsha Rosenbaum followed Bamberger and put the plight of the sex worker in a social and historical setting. Rosenbaum, who heads the San Francisco office of The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, painted a dispiriting picture of drug war failure, the dimensions of which were familiar to reformers in the audience but were probably news to many of the congregants. Since 1981, said Rosenbaum, we've spent around $250 billion to fight the war on drugs. The return on that investment has been an exponential increase in the availability, affordability and potency of all sorts of drugs. We're sending a half million people to prison every year on drug convictions and have three times that many children with parents in prison, she said. Rosenbaum skewered what passes for mainstream drug education. "We'll say anything to get kids to 'just say no,'" she said. "We talk, but they don't listen," Rosenbaum added, in large part because what they hear isn't useful information but propaganda. She showed a couple of examples, from her extensive t-shirt collection, of how "young people have rendered 'just say no' and similar messages a joke." One shirt said, "I said no to drugs but they just wouldn't listen." Rosenbaum argued that we should "weave drug education into biology, chemistry, psychology and physiology courses," adding that "San Francisco should have counselors on-site in the schools to provide real drug information and counseling -- the way some schools do for sex education." Lonny Shavelson, a Berkeley-based photojournalist and physician, painted a gritty picture of the drug scene on San Francisco's streets, where he met the people described in his recent book Hooked: Five Addicts Challenge Our Misguided Drug Rehab System. "People are treated like ping-pong balls, bouncing back and forth between substance-abuse treatment, mental health programs and more," Shavelson said. "There's no coordination of these programs to meet the needs of addicts for help with housing, child care and job skills in addition to their mental-health and drug problems." He told the story of Mike, who got into a car accident while simultaneously driving and shooting heroin on the eight lane Highway 101. Mike eventually made it to Walden House, where he made good strides in his substance-abuse treatment but got no help for his post-traumatic stress disorder, which had been brought on by his (and his sister's) being raped on a nearly daily basis while in foster care. Mike resumed using heroin two days after graduating from Walden House. "San Francisco has a treatment-on-demand program, but it doesn't work because it's way too narrow," Shavelson said. "About 180 homeless people die every year in this city, and more than half of them are drug-related." That might not have been the setup that San Francisco supervisor Gavin Newsom preferred, but if so, he didn't let it bother him. "We're the number one tourist destination in the world, and we're the most drug-addicted city in America," Newsom said. "We're number one in methamphetamine, number two in LSD (no one questioned his inclusion of LSD with addictive drugs), and number three or four in heroin. We spend more money in the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital on soft-tissue infections related to heroin than we do on anything else." Newsom was long on the practiced sound-bites but a bit shorter on fresh ideas for solutions. "Methadone works, and we clearly need a lot more methadone programs because we're in the midst of an epidemic, with 15-17,000 IV drug users in the city." He said San Francisco was about to roll out a new program "that will revolutionize healthcare for addicts." Bamberger, the panel moderator whose story of the sex worker who swallowed 41 bags of heroin opened the evening, had a happy ending to that story. He saw the woman about six months later at a clinic, and she "was doing fine." That was a small glimmer of hope for the audience to carry into the dark night of injustice that currently makes peace in the drug war an elusive goal.
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