|
| |
Clarifying terms for drug war's end
Houston Chronicle: www.houstonchroncile.com/metro
City & State
Section A, Page 27
Pubdate: Friday, April 27, 2001
Author: Thom Marshall
|
|
Thom Marshall:
Words intended to mean
one thing when leaving your mouth can mean something completely different
upon entering the ear of another.
Saying what you mean
in such a way that others will not misunderstand you is the great
challenge in most any type of discussion, debate or negotiation. I
wish I could remember who provided an illustration of this many years ago
by pointing out that a fellow might intend to convey a romantic message
meaning: "When I look at you time, time stands still." But if what
the listener understands is, "Your face would stop a clock," there
obviously was a major problem with word choice creating a definition gap
between intention and understanding.
The word-choice topic
came up in a dinner conversation Tuesday, when a California judge met with
a handful of Texas people who share his interest in changing the nation's
drug policy. Judge James Gray came to Houston to speak at a luncheon
Thursday sponsored by the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. He is the
author of a new book: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can
Do About it.
Regulating isn't
legalizing
Gray said he avoids
choosing and using the word "legalize" in connection with drug-policy
reforms. What he is working toward, he said, is
regulation.
Gray first went public
in 1992 as a critic of the nation's war on drugs because, he said, he had
seen firsthand and up close how the drug laws have failed, how they waste
tax dollars, increase crime and despair, and harm so many lives
unnecessarily.
He said at that time
that he predicted a major turnaround in drug policy - an end to the war on
drugs - by the year 2000. He admits he was off on that guess, but
based upon recent developments and the rapidly increasing support for
policy change, he believes it could happen in another two or three
years.
One of the folks at
that Tuesday dinner said that when he used the word "legalize" when
talking about drugs, he is proposing that they be treated like alcohol,
which once also was illegal.
The problem with that,
Gray explained, is that alcohol still is not legal in many
instances. There are many places where buying it, selling it or
consuming it are illegal for anyone. It is illegal for anyone
underage to buy it or consume it. It is illegal to sell it without
the licenses and permits. It is illegal to buy it without paying the
taxes on it.
Many people hear "
legalize" and they believe that to mean drugs would be readily available
to everyone. Alcohol is readily available to everyone. Alcohol
is regulated. And under potential policy changes favored by Gray and
many others who want to see an end to the war, other drugs also would be
regulated.
He does not claim that
regulating drugs would make them impossible for kids to get. After
all, teen-agers can get booze today, just as the judge and others of us
middle-age folks could get it when we were teens.
But kids have to go
to some effort to obtain alcohol, due to the way it is regulated.
Illegal drugs are easier to get, Gray said. illegal drugs come
looking for the kids, and there is a plentiful supply despite years of the
best efforts of those fighting the costly but ineffective drug
war.
Ill-defined words stall
progress
So Gray said he is for
changing laws o that the currently illegal drugs could be
regulated.
In his book, he calls
it a "major pitfall in the discussion of our current drug policy and
alternative options" that terms are not carefully defined by those who use
them.
"It is, regrettably,
very common for one person not to know what another person is talking
about, which naturally leads to a great deal of miscommunication and
misunderstanding," he wrote. "If everyone would take care to define
their terms, we would make a lot more progress."
He believes progress
is inevitable.
"Our country will
someday change to a materially different drug policy," he said, also
predicting that "we will look back in astonishment that we allowed our
former policy to persist for so long, much as we look back now at
slavery."
Thom Marshall's e-mail address is thom.marshall@chron.com |
|
| |
Judge
has a new take on drug war
El Paso
Times Borderland:
www.elpasotimes.com
Pubdate:
Sun, 29 April 2001
Author: Gary Scharrer
Metro Editor Dan
Williams
|
|
US JUDGES CALL FOR LEGALISING OF DRUGS
The restricted sale
of heroin, cocaine and cannabis 'would break the vicious cycle of
violence' Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
American judges are
growing so uneasy about their country's drugs laws that they are to go
public with their calls for change. The judge who will publish the
names of his concerned colleagues is calling for the regulated sale of
cocaine, heroin and cannabis as the only way to break the current
international cycle of violence and imprisonment.
The move
comes as an advertising campaign is launched advising jurors to acquit
people on drugs possession charges even when they are guilty and as a
citizen's commission publishes a report calling for drugs to be treated as
a medical and social rather than a criminal problem. It also
coincides with this week's report on the enormous disparity between the
numbers of black and white people jailed for drug
offences.
James P
Gray, a
superior court judge in Orange County, California told the Guardian
yesterday that his new book will contain the names of more than 20 judges
who favour a change in the policies, some of whom support his call for
legalisation, and are happy to say so publicly. He said that three
times that number of judges had given him permission to quote them by
name. Many others had told him privately of their belief that a
radical change to the drugs laws was urgently needed.
Judge Gray, 55, has been on the bench for 16 years and was
previously a prosecuting attorney. His experience on the bench
convinced him that the drugs laws were causing more crime than they were
stopping and that the "war on drugs" had been a
failure.
"There is
an increasing number of judges who want change," said Judge Gray, the author of the
soon-to-be-published Why our Drugs Laws have failed and What we can do
about it. "The momentum is truly building, we're making progress and
it is no longer a question of if there will be changes, but
when."
Judge Gray, who is due to outline his views
at a meeting in Los Angeles later this month, is critical of the United
States' drugs tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, whose budget has just been
increased from $17.8bn a year to $19.2bn (UKP13bn). He suggests that
asking Gen McCaffrey whether the right policy is being pursued is "like
asking a barber if one needs a haircut".
The
changes that Judge Gray would like to see include the regulated sale
to adults of heroin, cocaine and cannabis. No advertising should be
allowed, said the judge, so that drugs could be "de-profitised". He
also favours needle-exchange programmes. He believes that the
likeliest route for change would be for individual states to be allowed to
decide on what drugs policy suits them best.
"First of all,
we have to legitimise the discussion," he said. He stressed that
talking about change did not mean that he or fellow judges condoned the
use of drugs, merely that the existing laws were causing more harm than
good.
His move comes as the organisation Common Sense for
Drug Policy (CSDP) has been placing advertisements in magazines headlined
"Just Say Not Guilty".
The ad argues that "the jury right to
say 'not guilty' is an essential safeguard against injustice. [This]
dates back to English common law and the founding of the United
States."
Doug McVay of the Virginia-based CSDP said yesterday that
the aim of the advertising campaign was to remind people that "justice is
not simply the application of the law. The current situation
violates common sense". He said that the FBI made 1,559,000 arrests
for drug violations in 1998, 78% of them for possession and the campaign
wanted to "plant the seed" in the minds of potential jurors that they
could acquit people if they be lieved that the punishment did not fit the
crime.
The United States is now building a new prison every
week to cope with the people serving mandatory minimum sentences for drug
possession. The prison population in the US has risen from just
under 200,000 in 1966 to 2m today accounting for a quarter of the entire
world's prison population.
A further call for change has come
from the influential Institute for Policy Studies in Washington which has
published the findings of a citizen's commission on drugs policy entitled
The War on Drugs: Addicted to Failure. In the foreword to the
report, Professor Craig Reinarman states: "Drugs are richly functional
scapegoats. They provide the public with a restricted aperture of
attribution in which only the chemical bogey man or lone deviant come into
view and the social causes of a cornucopia of complex problems are out of
the picture."
The chairperson of the commission, actor, singer and
civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, said: "Having grown up in Harlem
during the Great Depression, I knew that the real roots of drug abuse and
addiction had more to do with poverty, alienation and despair than crimes
of malice."
He pointed out that in California five
African-Americans were in jail for every one in a state university.
The commission has called Gen McCaffrey's "war on drugs" a "monumental
failure" and recommends the ending of mandatory minimum sentences for drug
cases. It calls on President Clinton to revise the drug
laws.
Belafonte's point was emphasised by this week's
publication of a report by Human Rights Watch saying that 482 out of every
100,000 African-American men are in prison for a drug crime compared with
36 out of every 100,000 white men. In Illinois, a black man is 57
times more likely to be jailed for drugs than a white
man.
The figures were described as a "national scandal" by
the organisation, whose report was funded by George Soros's Open Society
Institute.
|
|
| |
US Judges Call
For Legalizing Of Drugs
Newshawk:
The Legalise Cannabis Alliance
Pubdate: Sat, 10 Jun
2000
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2000 Guardian Newspapers
Limited
Author: Duncan Campbell in Los
Angeles
Cited: http://www.csdp.org/ads/justsay.htm
|
|
US JUDGES CALL FOR LEGALISING OF DRUGS
The restricted sale
of heroin, cocaine and cannabis 'would break the vicious cycle of
violence' Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
American judges are
growing so uneasy about their country's drugs laws that they are to go
public with their calls for change. The judge who will publish the
names of his concerned colleagues is calling for the regulated sale of
cocaine, heroin and cannabis as the only way to break the current
international cycle of violence and imprisonment.
The move
comes as an advertising campaign is launched advising jurors to acquit
people on drugs possession charges even when they are guilty and as a
citizen's commission publishes a report calling for drugs to be treated as
a medical and social rather than a criminal problem. It also
coincides with this week's report on the enormous disparity between the
numbers of black and white people jailed for drug
offences.
James P
Gray, a
superior court judge in Orange County, California told the Guardian
yesterday that his new book will contain the names of more than 20 judges
who favour a change in the policies, some of whom support his call for
legalisation, and are happy to say so publicly. He said that three
times that number of judges had given him permission to quote them by
name. Many others had told him privately of their belief that a
radical change to the drugs laws was urgently needed.
Judge Gray, 55, has been on the bench for 16 years and was
previously a prosecuting attorney. His experience on the bench
convinced him that the drugs laws were causing more crime than they were
stopping and that the "war on drugs" had been a
failure.
"There is
an increasing number of judges who want change," said Judge Gray, the author of the
soon-to-be-published Why our Drugs Laws have failed and What we can do
about it. "The momentum is truly building, we're making progress and
it is no longer a question of if there will be changes, but
when."
Judge Gray, who is due to outline his views
at a meeting in Los Angeles later this month, is critical of the United
States' drugs tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, whose budget has just been
increased from $17.8bn a year to $19.2bn (UKP13bn). He suggests that
asking Gen McCaffrey whether the right policy is being pursued is "like
asking a barber if one needs a haircut".
The
changes that Judge Gray would like to see include the regulated sale
to adults of heroin, cocaine and cannabis. No advertising should be
allowed, said the judge, so that drugs could be "de-profitised". He
also favours needle-exchange programmes. He believes that the
likeliest route for change would be for individual states to be allowed to
decide on what drugs policy suits them best.
"First of all,
we have to legitimise the discussion," he said. He stressed that
talking about change did not mean that he or fellow judges condoned the
use of drugs, merely that the existing laws were causing more harm than
good.
His move comes as the organisation Common Sense for
Drug Policy (CSDP) has been placing advertisements in magazines headlined
"Just Say Not Guilty".
The ad argues that "the jury right to
say 'not guilty' is an essential safeguard against injustice. [This]
dates back to English common law and the founding of the United
States."
Doug McVay of the Virginia-based CSDP said yesterday that
the aim of the advertising campaign was to remind people that "justice is
not simply the application of the law. The current situation
violates common sense". He said that the FBI made 1,559,000 arrests
for drug violations in 1998, 78% of them for possession and the campaign
wanted to "plant the seed" in the minds of potential jurors that they
could acquit people if they be lieved that the punishment did not fit the
crime.
The United States is now building a new prison every
week to cope with the people serving mandatory minimum sentences for drug
possession. The prison population in the US has risen from just
under 200,000 in 1966 to 2m today accounting for a quarter of the entire
world's prison population.
A further call for change has come
from the influential Institute for Policy Studies in Washington which has
published the findings of a citizen's commission on drugs policy entitled
The War on Drugs: Addicted to Failure. In the foreword to the
report, Professor Craig Reinarman states: "Drugs are richly functional
scapegoats. They provide the public with a restricted aperture of
attribution in which only the chemical bogey man or lone deviant come into
view and the social causes of a cornucopia of complex problems are out of
the picture."
The chairperson of the commission, actor, singer and
civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, said: "Having grown up in Harlem
during the Great Depression, I knew that the real roots of drug abuse and
addiction had more to do with poverty, alienation and despair than crimes
of malice."
He pointed out that in California five
African-Americans were in jail for every one in a state university.
The commission has called Gen McCaffrey's "war on drugs" a "monumental
failure" and recommends the ending of mandatory minimum sentences for drug
cases. It calls on President Clinton to revise the drug
laws.
Belafonte's point was emphasised by this week's
publication of a report by Human Rights Watch saying that 482 out of every
100,000 African-American men are in prison for a drug crime compared with
36 out of every 100,000 white men. In Illinois, a black man is 57
times more likely to be jailed for drugs than a white
man.
The figures were described as a "national scandal" by
the organisation, whose report was funded by George Soros's Open Society
Institute. |
|
|
|
