Mind Alteration

Drug-policy scholar Ethan Nadelmann on turning people against drug prohibition

Jacob Sullum from the July 1994 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Nadelmann: The AIDS issue has been a blessing in disguise--a horrible blessing, but nonetheless it gives real momentum to a whole range of initiatives. We've got to put abstinence from drugs on the back burner, because AIDS is more important. Although the U.S. has been painfully slow to accept this, harm reduction is getting a serious push. You see it abroad--in Europe and Australia--and it's made some inroads here. Fifty cities in the country have needle-exchange programs, compared with one or two five years ago.

The replacement of the Bush administration with the Clinton administration was generally a good thing. It brought in a lot of new blood, new thinking. Lee Brown is not what I would call a desirable drug czar, but he's no William Bennett, either. There's more room for consideration of alternatives.

Progress in the rights of homosexuals, and increasing concerns about maintaining privacy in a technologically sophisticated environment, may redound to the benefit of the drug issue. I think also that the war on cigarette users--if you want to call it that--is raising the issue of individual autonomy vis-à-vis drug use in a context to which tens of millions of Americans still relate. And the more that cigarettes get tarred as a drug, the more that connection is going to become prominent. You're going to have tens of millions of Ameri- cans beginning to identify more and more with the heroin and cocaine and marijuana users. At the same time, you're going to have these arguments about individual rights and the freedom to use drugs in your own home.

If amphetamine really starts to come on big in this country, that's a drug that's pretty hard to control. It doesn't come from abroad; it's domestically produced; it's easily produced; pretty dumb people can make it. The government's capacity to control it may turn out to be remarkably limited. So are we then going to go to widespread drug testing, or are we going to be forced to look at some alternatives?

There's a sense that the drug war has proven its failure. Five or six years ago, people would say, "Well, we haven't really tried it." It's hard to say that with credibility any more. People tend to get bored with old ideas. and the war on drugs is becoming an old idea. There's a kind of natural pendulum or circularity, where people begin to think that change is inevitable. And that's going to happen in the drug area.