With the Drug War's Total Failure, Can CA's Legalization Battle Kick-Start a Movement for Change?

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AlterNet / By Terrence McNally and Ethan Nadelmann

In the Face of the Drug War's Total Failure, Can California's Legalization Battle Kick-Start a Movement for Change?
Drug prohibition is remarkably ineffective, costly and counter-productive -- it has cost people their lives, and put millions behind bars. Is the tide turning?

September 5, 2010 |


Prohibition has failed -- again. Drug prohibition has proven remarkably ineffective, costly and counter-productive. 500,000 people are behind bars today for violating a drug law – and hundreds of thousands more are incarcerated for other prohibition-related violations. There is a smarter approach usually called harm reduction. Reducing the number of people who use drugs is not nearly as important as reducing the death, disease, crime, and suffering associated with both drug misuse and failed policies of prohibition.

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the DRUG POLICY ALLIANCE, the leading organizations in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs, grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. He received his BA, JD, and PhD from Harvard, and a Master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. He authored COPS ACROSS BORDERS and co-authored POLICING THE GLOBE: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations.

McNally: How did drug policy reform become your life’s work?

Nadelmann: It had something to do with my growing up in a fairly traditional Jewish family, going off to college, smoking marijuana, enjoying it, and wondering why people were getting arrested for it. I was reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty at the time, and I wondered why we were criminalizing something so much less dangerous than alcohol. In graduate school, I ended up writing a dissertation on the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Then at the peak of drug war hysteria In the late 80’s, I wrote a piece in Foreign Policy magazine, saying that most of what we identified as part and parcel of the drug problem were the results of a failed prohibitionist policy. Shortly thereafter the Mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, said much the same thing, and we got a lot of media play. One thing led to another, and finally to my running the Drug Policy Alliance, and becoming deeply involved in efforts to change drug laws both in the US and around the world. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/drugs/148090/in_the_face_of_the_drug_war%27s_total_failure%2C_can_california%27s_legalization_battle_kick-start_a_movement_for_change/