A New Era for U.S. Drug Policy?

(CBS)  This story was written by Ken Millstone as part of a CBSNews.com special report on the evolving debate over marijuana legalization in the U.S. Click here for more of the series, Marijuana Nation: The New War Over Weed.

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Ethan Nadelmann is feeling good. Really good.

As the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Nadelmann has long advocated for the liberalization of U.S. drug laws -- specifically, making marijuana legal, regulated and taxed and ending criminal penalties on the possession and use of all other drugs.

For most of that time the Alliance has been relegated to the fringe of serious policy discussions, a space long occupied - or so the stereotype goes - by radical libertarians and readers of the marijuana enthusiast magazine High Times.

But things are changing. The last few months are "the first time I've ever felt that the wind is at my back and not in my face," Nadelmann said. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum across the board."

Consider the developments of the last year. In March, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb introduced a bill calling for a wholesale overhaul of the criminal justice system in the United States. Our system is cripplingly large, he argued, and marred by wrongful incarcerations, poor rehabilitative treatment and mental health care and a price tag of $44 billion a year on prisons alone.

Webb called the situation a "national disgrace," and said the elephant in the room is sky-high incarceration rates for drug users due to the U.S.'s 40-year-old War on Drugs.

California, the first state to make marijuana legal for medical use, is considering a bill to legalize and tax marijuana for all residents; it had its first hearing in the state assembly last week. Massachusetts voted to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana. The attorney general of Arizona has said that legal marijuana might be an answer to the Mexican drug cartel violence spilling over into his state.

Breckenridge Votes to Legalize Pot

And a Gallup poll released last month shows that support for national marijuana legalization has climbed steadily since the early 1980s, recently hitting an all-time high of 44 percent.

"That is the most extraordinary poll result as I have seen in all my years working in this," Nadelmann said. "We haven't changed our position, but we are basically more and more part of the mainstream discussion." He likens the situation to movements like gay rights and civil rights that made rapid strides in relatively short periods.

"We're getting awfully close to something that looks a lot like a tipping point," he said.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Marijuana Nation

The recent reform push hasn't been limited to the United States, either. In August, Mexico, with little fanfare, passed a bill decriminalizing the possession and use of small amounts of all narcotics, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. The U.S. - in what drug reform advocates see as a promising sign - made no criticism of the change. (The George W. Bush administration persuaded then Mexican President Vicente Fox not to sign an identical measure in 2006.) Argentina has passed its own decriminalization bill and Brazil and Ecuador are considering similar measures.

None of this means that liberalizing drug laws in the United States is going to be easy for Nadelmann and his allies. Webb's bill, which is being heard Thursday in the Senate Judiciary Committee, has amassed 34 Senate co-sponsors - including Republicans Lindsey Graham and Olympia Snowe - and drawn broad support from justice advocacy groups.

But according to Webb spokeswoman Jessica Smith, "Twenty-one amendments have been filed in Judiciary that speak to our bill. They're largely from the Republicans [and] I imagine a large amount of them are going to be about drug policy. ... They don't want to go home and say 'I'm legalizing drugs.'"

Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, offered an amendment explicitly forbidding any recommendations that even discuss drug decriminalization or legalization.

To be clear, Webb's bill does not call for drug legalization or even focus on drug policy exclusively. Instead, it would appoint a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations on reforming the criminal justice system as a whole.

"We have 5 percent of the world's population. We have 25 percent of the world's known prison population," Webb said when he introduced the bill. "We have an incarceration rate in the United States - the world's greatest democracy - that is five times as high as the incarceration rate of the rest of the world."

"There's only two possibilities here," he continued. "Either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice."

Webb's bill calls for a hard look at drug policy with all options on the table. He has talked about "overincarceration" and the "criminalization" of drugs - phrases that have been taboo until now in mainstream drug policy discussions. One talking point: the United States had 41,000 drug offenders in prison in 1980. Now the number is more than half a million - a 1,200 percent increase. And many of those are non-violent offenders jailed only for possession.

(CBS)

"We can't have a debate about our criminal justice system if we just ignore the drug part of it," Smith said and the goal of the bill is to dispassionately consider all options for reform. "States across the country - their budgets are being completely eaten up by incarceration. ... Is it effective? Is it cost effective? Are we doing the right thing here when we lock people up?"

Left: Webb

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon appointed a former Republican governor, Raymond Shafer, to lead a similar commission to examine marijuana. The commission's report recommended the decriminalization of personal use and questioned the constitutionality of harshly criminal marijuana policy generally.

Nixon repudiated the recommendations, but the commission's findings were no aberration, according to Nadelmann.

"The same thing happens almost every time," he said. "If you actually set up a commission that is truly independent ... inevitably they come up with recommendations that favor significant reform."

Portugal: A Case Study

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized not just marijuana but all drugs - heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine. Drug use has held steady overall, but declined in several key demographics, including teenagers. Drug-related crime plummeted. So did overdoses and HIV from needle use.

Last year, the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute sent the writer Glenn Greenwald to Portugal to report on the country's experience in the nearly eight years since decriminalization.

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Greenwald, a former attorney who blogs at Salon.com, is best known for his liberal positions on civil liberties, torture, and the Bush administration. He said he has never written about drug policy before and went to gather empirical evidence on Portugal's outcomes. (Greenwald lives in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese.) The result was a strongly positive 30-page report published by Cato in April.

"In the 1990s they probably had the single worst problem with drug abuse and related pathologies of any country in Europe. Crime was through the roof," Greenwald said in an interview in September. "They felt like they had a huge crisis on their hands ... The more they criminalized the worse it got."Portugal - focusing only on drug policy - did essentially what Webb is proposing: it assembled a non-partisan commission of experts to make recommendations on alleviating the rampant drug problem. The only option not considered - because Portugal concluded it would violate treaty obligations - was full-scale drug legalization. The result was complete drug decriminalization.

Here's the difference. Drug use and possession are still against the law in Portugal, but they do not carry criminal penalties. They are considered administrative offenses - like parking tickets - and are punishable by fines or mandatory treatment. Even those penalties are rarely handed out. Police who catch drug users issue them citations calling them before a three-person "dissuasion commission," which usually consists of a health worker, a judge or lawyer, and one other official. The commission considers whether the subject is a first-time or frequent user and offers treatment options. (In 2005, 83 percent cases ended with a suspension of proceedings - no penalty imposed.)

The whole process takes place outside the realm of criminal law - no arrests, courts, probation or criminal records. Drug trafficking - as well as furnishing drugs to a minor - remain criminal offenses. Greenwald reports:

Since decriminalization, lifetime prevalence rates (which measure how many people have consumed a particular drug or drugs over the course of their lifetime) in Portugal have decreased for various age groups. For students in the 7th-9th grades (13-15 years old), the rate decreased from 14.1 percent in 2001 to 10.6 percent in 2006. For those in the 10th-12th grades (16-18 years old), the lifetime prevalence rate, which increased from 14.1 percent in 1995 to 27.6 percent in 2001, the year of decriminalization, has decreased subsequent to decriminalization, to 21.6 percent in 2006.

Other age groups saw increases: lifetime prevalence among 20- to 24-year olds rose about 9 percent.

The Other Side

Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation calls the Portugal evidence misleading.

"Everything always starts off that American drug policy is a failed policy," she said. "It's a false premise. ... If you look at the drug trends since 2001, we have reduced in this country illicit drug use in all categories by 25 percent. That's not a failure."

Fay pointed to Monitoring the Future a government-backed study of U.S. 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders showing that youth drug use has fallen further in the U.S. than in Portugal since Portugal's decriminalization.

Drug use and HIV rates have also fallen worldwide since Portugal's decriminalization, she said, raising the question, "Would they have had a bigger drop in those things had they not decriminalized drugs?"

Fay added that for nearly 40 years, youth drug use in the U.S. has correlated closely to perception of harm.

"Part of the perception of harm is tied in to the fact that they are illegal," she said. "When a government says, 'We're going to decriminalize it. We're going to it normal. People can use it,' kids get the idea that well this might not be so harmful."

Joseph Califano, who heads the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, agrees that children and teenagers are the most important demographic when it comes to curbing drug abuse. But he says that drug war has indeed failed, mainly because it hasn't focused on keeping kids away from drugs before they become users.

When Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1969, "60 percent of the money was spent for prevention and treatment and 40 percent for interdiction," Califano said. "We've totally flipped that. I think the emphasis we've had on the use of these funds is wrong. There's no question in my mind that we should be spending more money on prevention and more money on treatment."

That approach tracks with Webb's bill - and with Portugal's emphasis on harm reduction. But Califano says it doesn't mean decriminalizing.

"We have two legal drugs in the United States of America" - alcohol and tobacco - "and the use of those drugs among kids dwarfs the use of any other drugs," he said. "I think just opening the door and legalizing drugs is just going to create more drug use."

As for marijuana, Califano says that teenagers in the U.S. are typically confronted by police 9 to 15 times before facing any consequences - a situation that Portugal's lenient approach does little to address.

Heroin was the crux of Portugal's drug crisis in the 1990s and drug decriminalization has helped move addicts into treatments like methadone while reducing HIV and AIDS rates. Marijuana use appears to have increased modestly, but remains low compared to other countries.

For the period from 2001-2005, the proportion of the general population (age 15-24) in Portugal who had ever used marijuana was the lowest among E.U. nations - about 9 percent. Denmark, the U.K, and France had the highest rates - 25 to 30 percent. The Netherlands, with its famously liberal drug policies, was in the middle of the pack.

Greenwald stresses that Portugal's approach has been purely utilitarian - not some grand ideological experiment.

"Portugal is a very socially conservative society. The Catholic church exerts enormous influence. They are very conservative on issues like abortion and gay rights." he said. "Decriminalization wasn't based on ideological notion that people should be able to use drugs."

Nadelmann points out that Portugal's experience provides evidence for a broad trend, documented in Peter Reuter and Robert J. MacCoun's 2001 book Drug War Heresies - that, in Nadelmann's words "fluctuations in the rate of drug use by and large have no correlation to how harsh the drug policies are." There are countries with harsh laws and high drug use and those with liberal laws and low drug use. In the Netherlands, the rate of marijuana use has risen and fallen pretty much in tandem with the rate in Europe as a whole - a rate far lower than in the United States.

That suggests that whatever one's ideological views on drugs, the public policy question is one of resource allocation. Tight budgets mean state and local law enforcement agencies have to choose between aggressive enforcement (and imprisonment) and harm reduction approaches like Portugal's. (Nadelmann points out that it was budget constraints that sealed the demise of New York's harsh Rockefeller drug laws.)

"The tougher we get with regard to marijuana prosecution ... the softer we get with the prosecution of everything else," said retired Orange County, California judge Jim Gray in testimony on the California legalization bill. "We simply have so many resources and if we're spending them in prosecutions of marijuana, we are not spending them for prosecutions of rape, homicide et cetera."

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Coming Up Thursday and Friday on CBSNews.com: Read a point-counterpoint on marijuana legalization featuring retired judge and author Jim Gray and the Drug Free America Foundation's David Evans.

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The Bottom Line

Despite some evidence that harsh criminalization of drug use hasn't worked, most conversations about liberalizing drug laws are over before they begin.

Portugal's case is important, Greenwald says, because it provides hard evidence that removes the debate from the realm of speculation.

"If you're the first state to do it, there's really no way you can point to evidence of what will or will not happen. ... It's just theory and it's very abstract," he said. "The more examples that arise and the more that you can prove that the sky doesn't fall in," he said, the more politically feasible drug liberalization will become in the U.S.

So far, Portugal has largely flown under the radar, even in drug policy circles. But Greenwald says that, six months after his paper was released, he's getting more invitations than ever to present it. In August, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof cited it in a column praising Webb's reform push.

"There's no political upside except that I think one could argue that it's a ripe opportunity to do it," Smith, Webb's spokeswoman, said. "People, I think, get it that we're spending so much money on criminal justice and they don't feel safer."

Webb is "not doing this for political reasons. There's definitely a risk involved," she said. "He knows that there are gambles."

[MatterofLiberty]

The debate on this Bill starts Thurs Dec 3 write your senator and tell them to support this bill!!! No seriously heres an easy link to do it(http://capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=13046001) You want to help? Start pitching in. Letter writing is easy and cheap and at least then you can say your trying.

[revraygreen]

QUESTION: I hear there was an amendment to a bill tomorrow that would legally prevent some of the government?s top advisers from ? according to some of the memos we?ve seen ? even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs.

Can you talk a little bit about that? I understand that you pulled that amendment, but, nonetheless, I wanted to ask you what your intent is with that.

GRASSLEY: Well, my intent on that amendment isn?t any different than any other amendments that are coming up. The Congress is setting up a commission to study certain things. And the commission is a ? is an arm of Congress, because Congress doesn?t have time to review some of these laws.

And ? and ? and the point is, for them to do what we tell them to do. And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to ? to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.

Their ? their program would be what we tell it it is. ?

Senator Webb wants to understand why we have 5% of the world?s population but 25% of the world?s imprisoned. Sen. Webb understands that the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs? has a lot to do with it. Sen. Webb understands that discussion of marijuana legalization must be on the table. I?m not sure which concept is more misunderstood by Senator Grassley: science, democracy, free speech, or justice. Wait, maybe it?s compassion:

QUESTION: Would your amendment have even stopped the discussion of legalized marijuana for medical purposes?

GRASSLEY: I think that would not ? let?s see. Yes, the extent to which it would be decriminalization, the answer is yes

[doc_holliday76]

by bajajohn1:
"A large if not overwhelming portion of personal freedom is a concept called 'choice.' So Republicans, are you telling Americans the government has the right to make choices for individuals? If not, then why are you opposed to the public option in healthcare? Isn't your mantra named 'freedom' without government intervention? Are we not talking about making choices?"
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Yep....the hypocritical republican'ts have always been against our FREEDOMS, and have only wanted to rule in the most authoritative way. The conservitards have always had a need to GROW their hated government ever larger with a very expensive criminal justice system that attacks our very freedoms. I'm surprised the busheviks and the GOP-led congresscritters that passed the Unpatriot Act of 2001 didn't require chip implants for all Americans, along with their national ID cards!

[tahoedeadhead]

The Republican party is a party of hypocrites. Their idea of freedom is to allow people to pollute the atmosphere because of greed, rip of the government by hiding money in offshore accounts, install faulty wiring in troop barracks in Iraq. Prohibition took the mafia from bunch of penny ante crooks that preyed on their own to a billion dollar operation. The Mexican cartels are the same. The "War on Drugs" is a complete waste of time and money. I find it interesting that the legal drugs(alcohol and tobacco) cause so much trouble that they are not made illegal. My mistake we already tried that(prohibition)and look what it did for the Mafia. Anyone that wants to know why pot is illegal should read the book " The The Emperor Wears No Clothes"

[doc_holliday76]

by snowball77:
"We've had the 40 year old war on the American public, isn't it time to try something else that might work better and cost less?"
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Yes, leading the entire world by number of incarcerations mainly due to a very failed WAR on drugs, is nothing to be proud of, and something that definitely needs to be changed. Other countries like Portugal are proving just how wrong our policies are, and it's people like grassley that are the problem and should just retire.

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"In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon appointed a former Republican governor, Raymond Shafer, to lead a similar commission to examine marijuana. The commission's report recommended the decriminalization of personal use and questioned the constitutionality of harshly criminal marijuana policy generally."
-----------

Obviously, we've had the recommendations of better policy for decades now, but it's bozos like tricky dickie that swept them under the carpet for the worst ideological reasons!

[bouret1035]

Being a user of pot years ago and what it has done to me. Think of the KIDS!I was a kid and this road taken is the road to ruins. End of story

[doc_holliday76]

Our system is cripplingly large, he argued, and marred by wrongful incarcerations, poor rehabilitative treatment and mental health care and a price tag of $44 billion a year on prisons alone.

Webb called the situation a "national disgrace," and said the elephant in the room is sky-high incarceration rates for drug users due to the U.S.'s 40-year-old War on Drugs.
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Well duh.......after 40 years of very failed policy, it's well past time to try something different.

Only morons continue to do the same exact thing and expect a different outcome when it's already proven to be a huge failure!

[RFWoodstock]

Valid medicinal value, it?s a victimless crime, the War on Drugs WAY too costly, too many arrests for simple possession, tax it and use the money to pay for health insurance and to reduce the deficit?Need I say more?

Woodstock Universe supports legalization of Marijuana.

Add vote in our poll about legalization at http://www.woodstockuniverse.com.

Current poll results?97% for legalization, 3% against.

Listen to RADIO WOODSTOCK 69 which features only music from the original Woodstock era (1967-1971) and RADIO WOODSTOCK with music from the original Woodstock era to today?s artists who reflect the spirit of Woodstock. Watch Woodstock TV.

Peace, love, music, one world,
RFWoodstock

[revraygreen]

What kind of person would deny sick people good medicne ?

Charles Grassley, that's who........the last bastation of the reefermadness.


http://www.ketv.com/news/21522854/detail.html

Medical Marijuana Hearing Wraps Up In Iowa
Iowa Board Of Pharmacy Considers Whether Cannabis Has Medical Potential 11/4/09

Iowa Board of Pharmacy held its final hearing Wednesday about medical marijuana, with advocates on both sides of the issue offering opinions.

The last of four hearings took place inside a ballroom within Harrah's Casino in Council Bluffs. The board now must issue its recommendation to the Legislature.

Terry Mitchell supports the use of medical marijuana. He suffers from a degenerative disc disease causing him to slouch and use a cane to get around.

"I can't stand straight up," Mitchell said. "With smoking cannabis, I can get just as close as I can get."

Without the drug, Mitchell said his ability deteriorates.

"By the time two weeks rolls around, I look like a gorilla. I'm dragging my knuckles on the ground and my knees are buckled, and it even hurts to try and straighten up."

Susie Dugan said legalization would create problems, not solutions.

"It's really a dangerous drug and it's not benefiting those sick people at all," she said.

[txpeloton]

How about a Public Option which respects the Constitution,
and addresses the points in this article?

How about some respect for the Constitution?
That is an option that the public can fulfill.
All it takes is one simple sentence.

Back in the good ol' days, farmers like George Washington
were growing cannabis hemp. Then, in the 20th century,
the US took over Northern Mexico and called it New Mexico,
and Arizona. They found the Mexicans smoking cannabis.
It smelled bad. What they called it, to a racist Anglo's
ears, sounded like, 'marihuana'.

Suppose marijuana was defined so simply. Such as this:
"The term 'marihuana' means all parts
of the smoke produced by the combustion
of the plant Cannabis sativa L."

Instead perhaps, there was a debate over contending points.
"Marihuana is whatever it is that is in cannabis that
gets those Mexicans high."
"Marihuana in all its parts, is the same as cannabis hemp."
"Hey, wait, you mean hemp is marijuana? No way."

Suppose that the official definition of marijuana,
was decided by committee, with the assent of the
parent of the DEA, and was defined preciously
in a way which met all those conditions, then
put in a Statute 40 years ago.
Formatted as poetry, it reads like this:

"The term 'marihuana' means all parts
of the plant Cannabis sativa L.,
whether growing or not;
the seeds thereof;
the resin extracted from any part of such plant;
and every compound,
manufacture,
salt,
derivative,
mixture,
or preparation of such plant,
its seeds or resin.
Such term does not include
the mature stalks of such plant,
fiber produced from such stalks,
oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant,
any other compound,
manufacture,
salt,
derivative,
mixture,
or preparation of such mature stalks
(except the resin extracted there from),
fiber,
oil,
or cake,
or the sterilized seed of such plant
which is incapable of germination."

Now that is an abstruse definition.
Does that make it a necessary, or proper legal definition?

How can an abstruse definition have value when an equivalent,
and simple definition is clearly constitutional?

The abstruse one is neither necessary, or proper.
It is the inverse of both.
It is probably unconstitutional, null and void.

This is true because it is an option that the public has retained
all along, anyway. Because the written law ignores the simple truth,
our only constitutional option has been to demonstrate that marijuana
is the smoke, not the plant.

Suppose we temporarily had a chance to correct it,
before it disappeared as law.

Would we prefer something to remain restricted?

Would we legalize it?

Just what is it?

Suppose the Public Option is beneficial, simple, and healthy.
If the members of the public were given the option, would they use that option?

Suppose the States could work with the Federal government to maintain
a necessary and proper Public Option, in their own ways?

What if the Public Option was for the Federal government to simply recognize,

1). the public's right to grow and use cannabis, and
2). the public's option is to not smoke it,

by just defining marijuana in a simple way.

Just one simple sentence for the Public. A Substance worth controlling. Just say it!

"The term 'marijuana' means all parts of the smoke produced by the combustion of the plant Cannabis sativa L."

The current definition of marijuana is a politically motivated unconstitutional omnibus. With so many people suffering economically, medically, and legally because of marijuana prohibition, obviously the time is right for a simple definition of marijuana.

This simple definition restores the States' 10th Amendment rights to regulate cannabis, and restores the Peoples' 9th Amendment rights to the medical benefits of cannabis, as well as our right to the many industrial benefits of cannabis hemp, seed and oil. We can use this new definition to engender the ideals promised in the Preamble of the
US Constitution.

Rights are recognized, cannabis is unscheduled and State regulated,
and marijuana simply remains illegal. The Constitution was designed for that.

With this Public Option, we can grow cannabis, and benefit from its spectrum of uses. With the assent of Congress, and according to State regulations, we can again grow and use all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., except the smoke (in public).

Also, now that we know it is the smoke, we can soon have the smoke rescheduled.

Not enough of a change? Too much of a dare?
Prefer the current definition? Can you recite it?

Otherwise, everything stays the same.

Our Constitution suffers, but we can show the world how to do it right!

How about Cap and Trade?

Each person can get a cannabis grower's license capped at one carbon credit.

Then you either trade it for the carbon credit, or keep it to be recognized as a cannabis grower.

Let's Go!

[kansas1946]

The drug war has done more to harm America and Americans that almost anything else in history. Been going on for forty years with no results except thousands of dead cops, suspects, millions of lives ruined, trillions of dollars wasted, full prisons, corruption in everly level of law enforcement because of the money, murders everyday in Mexico, all over a problem that is medical, not criminal. No shortage of stupidity in America.

[sarcasticfrog]

Cannabis is ON THE ROAD to decriminalization/legalization. Nixon didn't listen to the first commission (Shafer Commission) that recommended allowing adult American citizens to possess and use cannabis.

Currently, we have a senator (stuck in the 1950s - Chuck Grassley - Iowa) who is trying to tell, again (Nixon), what a commission should do regarding recommending marijuana's decriminalization/legalization and our correctional system failure. This is a disgrace and a pathetic move from a politician in America. This is in fact, a Gag Order Amendment. I'm sorry, but why the hell should you have a system, in checking laws and failures, if you aren't going to listen and accept the research and scientific data put into a report? Is this STILL the American way of Washington D.C.? So much for the "change"...


I know Grassley went to Sunday School, but I doubt he went to anything beyond the 8th grade.

[AttentionDeficit]

sarcasticfrog: mark souter from indiana is another one of the dyed in the wool drug warriors.