Baker Institute panel weighs different approaches to US drug policy

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

For 40 years, supporters and opponents of U.S. drug policy have argued past each other, with very little dialogue aimed at bridging their differences. While this may be “comforting” to those involved, said Rice sociologist William Martin, it “has not led to much mutual understanding or the sharing of information, ideas and perspectives that might foster more cooperative and perhaps more effective ways of dealing with these complex issues.”

Martin, the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Senior Fellow in Religion and Public Policy at the Baker Institute, moderated a Nov. 19 panel discussion titled “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime: Would Legalization Help?” hosted by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. The discussion featured three speakers with distinctly different views on drug policy.

	GEORGE WONG

Gary Hale, chief of intelligence at the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), emphasized his colleagues’ role as “soldiers in the drug war.” He argued that the term “war” is appropriate because “it’s a conflict that’s marred by death and certainly threats to our national security.” And DEA agents are instruments of government policy, Hale added. “DEA does not pass laws; we’re not in the legislative branch.”

Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, directly challenged Hale’s mission. “I personally regard the war on drugs as essentially a fundamental evil in our society and in global society,” he said. “I think that that policy, which evolved over the last 100 years or so around the world with the U.S. government as the principal proselytizer and enforcer of a global drug-prohibition regime, has generated immense harm, immense death and suffering and crime and organized crime and violence all around the world.”

Nadelmann pointed to the U.S. incarceration rate — the highest in the world — as evidence that drug prohibition has had a negative effect on society. “Ending marijuana prohibition would be a huge step forward in injecting a level of sanity into our drug-policy debates,” he said.

The third panelist, Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy and director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, countered that cocaine and heroin are the biggest causes of crime and violence among illegal drugs, not marijuana. He also noted that alcohol should be included in the discussion, despite its current status as a legal intoxicant.

Kleiman listed three sets of problems related to drugs: drug abuse/ dependency, drug-related crime, and incarceration for drug offenses. He proposed a number of steps that he said would limit the damage caused by all three. The authorities need to break up known drug markets and enforce swift and predictable punishment for repeat/chronic users. “The general formula for reducing crime and incarceration,” Kleiman said, is “to apply the minimum effective dose of punishment.”

Nadelmann conceded that “there are innovations short of legalization that can help,” but maintained “prison and incarceration need to be the last resort, not the first.” Criminal sanctions, Nadelmann said, “are supposed to reflect a moral consensus,” like laws criminalizing rape, murder and theft. He cited polling data that show roughly 40 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana. When large segments of the population oppose a law, Nadelmann said, it delegitimizes government and the law.

The DEA’s Hale said that drug producers respond to demand. In the U.S., they have a big consumer base that offers the prospect of huge profits. Today’s traffickers smuggle marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines, but 80 years ago it was liquor, he noted. Hale also explained the transition from an almost-exclusively Colombian network of transportation and distribution in the 1980s to the current situation in which Mexican traffickers control the business.

Kleiman concluded the discussion with a strategic view tempered by realism. The problem of illegal drugs entering the country should not be seen as fighting a war, he said, but rather as a kind of flood-control effort. “We have to ask,” he said, “What is the least-destructive channel through which that quantity of drugs could flow into the U.S.?”

The event was organized by the Baker Institute’s Drug Policy Program and the Latin American Initiative.