For Release: Tuesday, 02 September 1997, 12 Noon
Contact: Alison Ames, Federation of American Scientists
202 546-3300
Press Conference: Tuesday, 02 September 1997, 12 Noon
National Press Club, Washington
Neither legalization nor an unrestricted "war on drugs" can end the drug problem, and a third way is needed, says a diverse and prestigious group of experts.
In a statement released in Washington today, the group, including laboratory, clinical, and social-science researchers, law enforcement and treatment practitioners, elected officials, and policy analysts with widely varying political perspectives, proposed that policies toward illicit and licit drugs alike should be based on science and evaluated by their results rather than their symbolic value.
"Drug abuse will respond to the same problem-solving approach that is bringing crime rates down," said William Bratton, CEO of First Security Consulting and former New York Police Commissioner. "The key is being firm about goals and flexible about means, and paying attention to what works rather than what sounds good."
"The drug problem in this country continues to be talked about as if its solution were to be
found in political ideology rather than in science and in solid research," said Hamilton Beazley,
former President of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. "While the
devastating consequences of alcohol and drug addiction accelerate, the national focus remains on
impassioned appeals rather than shifting to practical solutions research shows us will help."
"Talking sense about drug policy in today's climate of opinion can be political suicide," said
Charles R. Schuster, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Presidents Reagan
and Bush, who presented the statement at today's press conference. "We need to create some
space, and some silence, in which reason and scientific evidence can make themselves heard."
In its description of how drugs and drug policies are currently discussed, the statement says,
"Polarization and strong emotions give rise to misrepresentations of facts and motives,
oversimplification of complex issues, and denial of uncertainty."
"The polarization of the debate around the legalization question has distorted the politics of
drug policy and created paralysis," added Dennis E. Nowicki, Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) Chief
of Police and another signer of the Principles. "Public officials are reluctant to consider a variety of potentially helpful steps, from abandoning ineffective programs to reforming the sentencing laws, for fear of being labeled as pro-legalization or soft on drugs."
Citing an example of the options that are lost as a result of polarization, Jonathan P. Caulkins,
Professor of Public Affairs at Carnegie-Mellon University, said, "Drug hawks construe
opposition to long mandatory minimum sentences as opposition to all drug enforcement. Drug
legalizers construe it as support for their cause. Neither side seems to allow that someone could
favor modifying -- NOT eliminating -- the basic framework of the current drug laws by allowing
sentences to be set on a case by case basis rather than reducing them to a formula driven largely
by the quantity possessed."
To illustrate how polarization distracts attention from the most pressing drug issues, another
signer of the statement, Peter Reuter, Professor of Public Affairs and Criminology at University
of Maryland, said, "From the media coverage, you'd think that whether to permit the
medical use of marijuana was the most important decision to be made about drug policy. In
practical terms, it's not even in the top twenty."
Rather than presenting specific policy proposals, today's statement offers a set of "Principles
for Practical Drug Policies" to guide the development of drug policies. The statement proposes
that drug policies should be designed to minimize both the damage done by drugs and the
damage created by drug control measures. The statement draws a distinction between
this idea of minimizing overall damage from more simplistic conceptions of "harm reduction"
which focus exclusively on reducing the harms to individual drug users. The distinction, the
document says, comes from the fact that "damage can be reduced by shrinking the extent of drug
abuse as well as by reducing the harm incident to any given level of drug consumption."
Robert MacCoun, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, who also spoke at the press conference, added, "Some 'harm-reduction' programs, such as methadone maintenance or the designated driver, seem to work well. But if a given program to reduce the harm done to each user has the side-effect of increasing the number of users, it may well increase total drug-related damage. You have to do the evaluation program-by-program." He continued, "Unfortunately, serious discussion of how best to reduce damage has been made difficult by the suspicion that harm reduction is a 'Trojan horse' or 'slippery slope' towards legalization."
"We don't know nearly as much scientifically about drugs and drug abuse as we ought to, but we know a lot more than we're now using," said Dr. Schuster, currently Director of the Clinical
Research Division on Substance Abuse at Wayne State University School of Medicine. "It's time
to start passing laws and running programs based on what research has shown us about the
problems, not on what public opinion polls say. There is excellent evidence that appropriate
treatment reduces drug abuse. There is no evidence that stiffer prison terms for dealers reduce
drug abuse. At some point our policies ought to start to reflect that."
The statement criticizes both sides in the legalization debate, accusing them of giving the
"false impression" that legalization is the only alternative to current policies. Arguing that
"lifting prohibition on a substance is likely to increase its consumption" and that some drugs are so dangerous that even limited legal availability would be a bad idea, the Principles reason that "we cannot escape our current predicament by 'ending prohibition.' "
"Legalization isn't just the wrong answer," said Philip J. Cook, Professor of Policy Studies at
Duke University. "It's the wrong question. As long as the fantasy debate about legalization is
allowed to displace a real debate about how to make drug abuse prevention a fact rather
than a slogan, about how to enforce the laws to shrink the markets and reduce the violence, and
about what treatment services to deliver and how to deliver them where they are needed most,
our policies will continue to do more harm and less good than they ought to. And as long as the
debate stays focused on whether to legalize or partly legalize the currently illicit drugs, we can't
talk at all about alcohol, which causes the most violence, and nicotine, which causes the most
disease."
In explaining why he endorsed the statement, John O'Hair, Prosecuting Attorney of Wayne
County (Detroit) Michigan, echoed the often-repeated comment by "drug czar" Gen. Barry
McCaffrey that 'We can't arrest our way out of the drug problem.' Said O'Hair, "The drug laws
are necessary. Enforcing them is necessary. But everyone who works in law enforcement
knows we can't arrest or imprison our way out of this problem. No Congressman and no
Governor wants to risk seeming to be soft on drugs, so we keep doing what we know doesn't
work. Somebody had to say 'Enough!' If this statement makes it a little easier for public officials
to apply expert knowledge to the drug problem, it will have done its job."
In a letter commenting on the statement, Dr. Hoover Adger, Jr., Deputy Director of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said, "All of us at ONDCP share your goal of
fostering an atmosphere in which drug policy can be objectively based on science and reason
rather than ideological rhetoric."
The expert group was organized by the Drug Policy Project of the Federation of American
Scientists (FAS), a civic organization devoted to issues of science and society. FAS, founded by
World War II atomic scientists in 1945, is headquartered in Washington and is sponsored by over
60 Nobel Prize winners. The full text of the statement, "Principles for Practical Drug Policies,"
is available on the FAS website at http://www.fas.org/drugs/Principles.htm