1) Obama’s opportunity to reignite youth support by taking on a sane marijuana policy!
2) Congress eliminates federal funding for syringe exchange programs!
3) Virgin Founder Richard Branson column on Portugal decriminalizing drugs!
4) Study: 1 out of 3 Americans will be arrested before they are 23!
5) Personal Piece: Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me? Stop and Frisks in NYC!
Enjoy,
Tony
Washington Post Group Syndicated Column
Drug reform: Obama’s chance to reignite youth support?
Neal Peirce
December 17, 2011
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/12/drug_reform_obamas_chance_to_r.html
WASHINGTON — “Dance with the One that Brought You” is the title of a well-known song. But the Urban Dictionary offers a deeper meaning: “The principle that someone should pay proper fealty to those who have gone out of their way to look after them.”
Barack Obama should pay attention. In 2008, young voters were enthused and turned out for him by the millions.
But now? The campus/youth enthusiasm factor has declined sharply. The deficiency seriously imperils Obama’s re-election effort.
There’s one issue, though, that might reignite youthful enthusiasm. That issue is marijuana — partly its medical use, but especially Americans’ right to recreational use free of potential arrest and possible prison time.
Today’s grim reality is that police continue to arrest youth for marijuana possession by the hundreds of thousands. But each arrest is a red flag of danger, threatening life prospects for a young man or woman suddenly saddled with a permanent “drug arrest” record that’s easily located by employers, landlords, schools, credit agencies and banks.
Small wonder then that 62 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to 29) now favor legalizing marijuana, as a Gallup poll reported this October.
And it’s not just youth these days. Gallup this year found 50 percent nationwide support for legalizing marijuana use — the most ever, up from a measly 12 percent in 1969 to 30 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 2009.
A ballot measure to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana received 46.5 percent of the vote in California last year. Parallel measures are likely to be on the 2012 ballots in Colorado and Washington. Odd political bedfellows — Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Ron Paul, R-Texas — recently introduced a legalization bill and now have 19 co-sponsors. Paul even gets applause advocating legalization in Republican presidential debates.
But what about President Obama? In 2004 he endorsed marijuana decriminalization. He was candid about his early pot use and in 2006 told a group of magazine editors: “When I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently.” By his run for president in 2008, he was slipping away from decriminalization but at least talked of a “public health” approach, emphasizing drug treatment instead of prison, giving drug reform advocates hope for a new day in national policy.
But Obama as president has been a clear disappointment to reform forces. In White House-initiated electronic town halls, respondents — heavily weighted to original Obama supporters — have repeatedly put marijuana at the top of their issue lists. But the White House has either laughed off or provided dismissive retorts.
Obama’s Drug Policy Office claims the drug war is over, replaced by a focus on shrinking demand, “innovative, compassionate and evidence-based drug policies.” But Obama has not once singled out marijuana — a substance arguably far less harmful to the human body than alcohol — for special consideration. Nor has he spoken to the harm to youth caused by 800,000 yearly arrests. Or moved to stem the billions of dollars a year still being spent on marijuana-related arrests.
He reappointed, in fact, a Drug Enforcement Administration head, Michele Leonhart, who has refused repeated requests to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use.” That makes it much harder to test the initial indications that marijuana offers powerful relief for our ex-warriors suffering severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is clearly not the “change” Obama’s enthusiastic supporters of 2008 expected. And it’s deeply ironic. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance notes that if local police departments had been enforcing marijuana laws as harshly in the early 1980s as many do today, “there’s a good chance a young Columbia student named Barack Obama could have been picked up — and not be in the White House today.”
Nadelmann suggests that both the White House Drug Policy Office and the Justice Department enforcement divisions have been “co-opted” by holdover appointees deeply invested in anti-marijuana rhetoric and “let’s just bust them” drug enforcement.
Facing the 2012 election, Obama is not likely to advocate, suddenly, marijuana decriminalization. But he could announce that it’s time for a serious national dialogue on the issue, and that it will be a hallmark of his second term. He could express his dismay that 800,000 people, mostly young (and heavily black and Hispanic), are being arrested each year for marijuana possession — even as 50 percent of Americans favor legalization. He could focus on the massive costs of enforcement, the deep social costs of imprisonment. Let all America, youth included, join in the debate, he could urge.
A new openness to marijuana reform could help to reignite, on campuses and among high numbers of young people, the hope for “change” that really means something. Perhaps even prospects for the president’s own re-election.
Neal Peirce’s email address is nrpcitistates.com.
AlterNet
Reinstating The Federal Ban on Syringe Exchange Funding is Murderous
By Laura Thomas
December 16, 2011
Most Tuesday evenings, I stand in an alley behind the grocery store with a Buddhist monk and a few other volunteers, handing sterile syringes to people as they drop their old syringes into the bright red biohazard bucket. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, almost as long as Congress insisted that federal taxpayer dollars couldn’t be used to purchase the syringes we exchange.
Two years ago, determined policy advocates convinced the Democratic leadership that they had the votes to undo this costly decision. People across the country met with their representatives, having sometimes difficult conversations, educating them about the research, the weight of the evidence, and the impact of HIV and hepatitis in their communities. And science carried the day, with Congress voting to lift the ban. Since then, federal funding has been used to create new programs and expand existing ones, reaching communities that never had sterile syringe access. It’s gone to substance misuse treatment programs and health clinics and HIV organizations, giving people who inject drugs better tools to protect their health.
Now that all comes to an end, as Congress just voted to reinstate the absurd ban on federal funding for syringe access programs. I hope that those programs will find ways to raise the funds to keep going. Harm reduction advocates are experts at making a few dollars stretch a very, very long way. These are difficult economic times, and some of the programs will likely close, leaving people who inject drugs with few other avenues to protect their health and that of their family members and colleagues.
Reinstating the ban is murderous. It’s saying that people who use drugs should contract fatal and expensive diseases and die. Allowing the ban to go through is shameful. The leadership who allowed this to go forward, knowing that the research is unanimous, knowing that these programs protect our communities, knowing that they bring people into health care and substance misuse treatment, are also at fault. This is very literally a life or death decision, and the cry of “blood on their hands” is appropriate, for both the Republicans who insisted on this and the Democrats who let it happen.
I appreciate the leadership that led to the ban being lifted two years ago. But this is a truly shameful moment, when we go backward, instead of forward, and let a politics of ignorance, of stigma, of hate, win out over compassion, science, and a desire for a healthy community.
For the first time since I got involved in HIV/AIDS work more than 20 years ago, there’s a sense that the end is in sight, that we’ll be able to end this epidemic through a combination of treatment and prevention. We talk about “getting to zero.” There’s a new feeling of hope. All of which depends on us deploying everything against this disease. Syringe access programs are one of the single most effective and cost-efficient HIV prevention interventions we know of. They also link people to health care, connect people to detox, reduce syringes tossed in the trash, and reduce drug use overall. We will not end this disease if people who inject drugs are written off. All the anti-virals in the world are useless if people aren’t engaged in health care and syringes are still a whole lot cheaper than protease inhibitors.
Every Tuesday night, I get to see the people who come to the exchange. Some are homeless; some live in condos nearby. They show up on bikes, on foot, by bus. Some want to chat for a while or tell us a new joke and some just want to get what they need and leave. They come to get new syringes for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that they want to stop the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C in our community. I only wish that this Congress shared their concern.
Laura Thomas is Deputy State Director at San Francisco Drug Policy Alliance
Richard Branson Blog
Time to end the war on drugs
December 19, 2011
Ten years ago the Portuguese Government responded to widespread public concern over drugs by rejecting a “war on drugs” approach and instead decriminalized drug possession and use. It further rebuffed convention by placing the responsibility for decreasing drug demand as well as managing dependency under the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of Justice. With this, the official response towards drug-dependent persons shifted from viewing them as criminals to treating them as patients.
Now with a decade of experience Portugal provides a valuable case study of how decriminalization coupled with evidence-based strategies can reduce drug consumption, dependence, recidivism and HIV infection and create safer communities for all.
I will set out clearly what I learned from my visit to Portugal and would urge other countries to study this:
In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.
Jail time was replaced with offer of therapy. (The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is much more expensive than treatment).
Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country has some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. The recently realised results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April 2011, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.
Compared to the European Union and the US, Portugal drug use numbers are impressive.
Following decriminalization, Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%, Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Drug use in older teens also declined. Life time heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.
New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003.
Death related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half.
The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and the considerable money saved on enforcement allowed for increase funding of drug – free treatment as well.
Property theft has dropped dramatically (50% – 80% of all property theft worldwide is caused by drug users).
America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the EU (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the US, it also has less drug use.
Current policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering”, rather than empirical evidence on the effect of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem.
Decriminalization does not result in increased drug use.
Portugal’s 10 year experiment shows clearly that enough is enough. It is time to end the war on drugs worldwide. We must stop criminalising drug users. Health and treatment should be offered to drug users – not prison. Bad drugs policies affect literally hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities across the world. We need to provide medical help to those that have problematic use – not criminal retribution.
Huffington Post
Land of the Free? 1 out of 3 Are Arrested by Age 23!
Tony Newman
December 19, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-newman/land-of-the-free-1-out-of_b_1158915.html
The United States likes to portray itself as the “Land of the Free” yet we lock up more people overall and per capita than any country in the world. A new study out today found that one out of three people in the United States will be arrested by the time they are 23.
1 out 3 arrested by the time they are 23?! You want some more shameful stats? With just under 5% of the world’s population, we have nearly 25% of the world’s prison population — and the war on drugs is the driving force. Last year there were more than 1.6 million people arrested on drug charges and almost half of those arrests were for marijuana possession alone.
These embarrassing numbers remind me of Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s line about the broken United States criminal justice system and the need to look at our country’s laws: “With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different — and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.”
Senator Webb tried a few months ago to pass legislation creating a bi-partisan blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations for reducing incarceration and recidivism but Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson and other Republicans filibustered it.
Last week we witnessed the U.S. leaving Iraq after nine long years and questionable success. It is time to find an exit strategy from our 40-year-old war on drugs that is unquestionably a failure.
Tony Newman is the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)
Follow Tony Newman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TonyNewmanDPA
New York Times
Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?
By NICHOLAS K. PEART
December 18, 2011
WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.
One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”
I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.
Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.
I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.
These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head. For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.
Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result.
We need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.
Last May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet, then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door.
One of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me, but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.
Meanwhile, a white officer put me in the back of the police car. I was still handcuffed. The officer asked if I had any marijuana, and I said no. He removed and searched my shoes and patted down my socks. I asked why they were searching me, and he told me someone in my building complained that a person they believed fit my description had been ringing their bell. After the other officer returned from inside my apartment building, they opened the door to the police car, told me to get out, removed the handcuffs and simply drove off. I was deeply shaken.
For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.
As a teenager, I was quiet and kept to myself. I’m about to graduate from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and I have a stronger sense of myself after getting involved with the Brotherhood/Sister Sol, a neighborhood organization in Harlem. We educate young people about their rights when they’re stopped by the police and how to stay safe in those interactions. I have talked to dozens of young people who have had experiences like mine. And I know firsthand how much it messes with you. Because of them, I’m doing what I can to help change things and am acting as a witness in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights to stop the police from racially profiling and harassing black and brown people in New York.
It feels like an important thing to be part of a community of hundreds of thousands of people who are wrongfully stopped on their way to work, school, church or shopping, and are patted down or worse by the police though they carry no weapon; and searched for no reason other than the color of their skin. I hope police practices will change and that when I have children I won’t need to pass along my mother’s advice.
Nicholas K. Peart is a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Tony Newman | Director of Media Relations
Drug Policy Alliance
70 West 36th Street, 16th Floor | New York, NY 10018
Voice: 212.613.8026 | Fax: 212.613.8022
