Today, Vice President Biden introduced Gil Kerlikowske, the police chief of Seattle, Washington, as President Obama’s nominee to be the nation's new drug czar (Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy). I was disappointed, of course, that the nominee was not someone with real expertise in drug policy, such as David Lewis, Tom Nicholson, or Ethan Nadelmann. There is some cause to hope that Gil Kerlikowske may turn out to be an effective choice. It would be hard to imagine how he could possibly fail to be an improvement over the Bush administration's drug czar, John Walters.
Norm Stamper, who preceded Kerlikowske as Seattle's police chief and is now active in the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has also expressed disappointment that a drug policy expert wasn't selected but he does see Kerlikowske as "a huge improvement" over Walters. In his experience, Kerlikowske is "an open-minded, thoughtful individual who is much more likely than John Walters to entertain dialogue about the failure of the drug war and what an effective alternative might look like".
Alison Holcomb, Director of the Washington ACLU's Drug Policy Project, expressed similar views, syaing that the ACLU's experience with the Seattle Police Department under kerlikowske's leadership had been "fairly positive." While expressing the view that she would prefer that there simply was no drug czar, or at least that the position be filled with "someone from the public health world, who would turn our laws toward a public health model," Ms. Holcomb sees signs that Kerlikowske could be good for the job and may push for meaningful reforms. She hopes to see Kerlikowske use his office to advocate for repeal of the ban on federal funding of syringe exchanges, elimination of disparities between crack and powder cocaine sentences that amount to a de facto racist bias, and "shifting a lot of resources away from the international interdiction efforts that are leading to insane violence in Mexico and using that money to do health-based education and treatment here in the US."
Kerlikowske's record in Seattle suggests that such hopes may be realistic. During his tenure there, he was a vocal supporter of addictions treatment and of that community's syringe exchange program. In 2003, he opposed a Seattle ballot measure that would have directed the police department to consider arrests for marijuana possession a low priority, but he did so saying that such arrests were already a low priority for his department. This history suggests that he may be more open to reform than his recent predecessors as drug czar.
Nevertheless, I am not comfortable with the choice of someone from law enforcement to direct the new administration's drug policy effort. It seems all too likely to signal that the government will continue to emphasize law enforcement strategies in an area where they have consistently added to the problem rather than contributed to its solution. Perhaps, instead, Kerlikowske may be able to use his law enforcement background to good advantage in overcoming objections to moving us away from the failed "war on drugs" approach founded on criminalizing some drugs and their use.
Regrettably, Vice President Biden's comments in announcing Kerlikowske's nomination do not suggest that this is the administration's intent. He praised Kerlikowske as being the most qualified person to reduce illegal drug use in the U.S. but, as N.A.P.H.P. has pointed out repeatedly, the rational policy goal for our nation would not be reducing drug use (illegal or legal) but rather should be reducing drug abuse (illegal or legal). The fact that the Vice President doesn't see that those are two quite different things is not a hopeful sign for change.
In his introductory remarks, Biden spoke about the violence between warring drug cartels and the government in Mexico, which has increasingly spilled over into the United States. He stressed that Kerlikowske faces "daunting" challenges in the border region thanks to drug trafficking from Mexico, a concern echoed by President Obama in a statement on Kerlikowske's nomination. Unfortunately, neither Biden nor Obama seems to grasp that these problems are a direct result of drug prohibition not of drug use. Increasing violence has not been a natural result of drug use or of trafficking in drugs but rather of the stepped up enforcement of drug prohibition by Mexican authorities. If our nation’s response is to step up that enforcement even more, the inevitable result will be more violence not less.
Mexican distillers and brewers produce and traffic in alcohol, a drug that is considerably more dangerous than the currently illegal drugs being exported to the U.S. from Mexico. Somehow, they manage to do so without recourse to assault rifles or decapitations. Likewise, American tobacco companies and tobacco farmers in states like the one where I live don't seem to need any private armies to conduct their trade in the most addictive drug known to mankind. The crucial difference lies not in the drugs being trafficked but in the legality of the drug. America's experience with alcohol Prohibition demonstrates what happens whenever prohibition is applied to any popular drug -- the drug becomes more dangerous, use may decline somewhat but abuse increases dramatically, and a dangerous and violent black market develops in the drug. No level of enforcement has ever made any drug prohibition work.
In his statement, President Obama said, "never has it been more important to have a national drug control strategy guided by sound principles of public safety and public health." That has always been NAPHP’s position and we can only hope that, unlike his predecessors at O.N.D.C.P., Mr. Kerlikowske will actually prove able to grasp sound principles of public health and to apply them to redirecting our nation's drug policies away from a self-defeating law enforcement approach and toward effective prevention of drug abuse.
