From: "Paul Hager" <hagerp@moose.cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Text of my message to Clinton
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 00:19:41 -0500


TEXT OF E-MAIL TO CLINTON:
     As per request, I am posting the text of my e-mail to
the Clinton campaign on CompuServe.  Readers familiar with
my letter to Tsongas will note that it is the source for
about half of the material in this e-mail.

--paul
--------------------------text follows----------------------------

                         30-August-1992

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From: Paul Hager             tel: (812) 333-1384
      4475 N. Benton Ct.     fax: (812) 333-9544
      Bloomington, IN 47408  InterNet: hagerp@moose.cs.indiana.edu
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To:   Clinton/Gore           75300.3115@compuserve.com
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     My name is Paul Hager and I chair the Drug Task Force of the
Indiana Civil Liberties Union, which is the state affiliate of the
ACLU.  I am also a registered Democrat and intending to support the
Clinton/Gore ticket, although I do have misgivings.  It is these
misgivings that have prompted me to send this message.

     I have followed the campaign assiduously since before New
Hampshire and believe that I understand Governor Clinton's
positions quite well.  I am quite disturbed, however, that the
Governor seems to be committed to continuing and perhaps escalating
the drug war.  I will say a few things about the Clinton/Gore plan,
which was posted on the InterNet, a little later.  First, I would
like to say some things about drug prohibition and its
alternatives.

     The idea of drug legalization has been around for some time. 
Democrats and liberal Republicans (before the term became an
oxymoron) in the 1970s began to push for an end to "victimless
crimes", including private drug use.  This movement was gaining
considerable force through the end of the '70s, culminating in
widespread marijuana decriminalization.  Unfortunately, the
election of Ronald Reagan brought an end to this and many other
reforms.  Today, it seems that, if anything, Democrats are even
more pro-drug war than the Bush administration.

     At bottom, the drug laws are sumptuary laws and, as a civil
libertarian, I reject them on that basis.  However, there are
solid, pragmatic reasons to oppose drug prohibition that even the
most ardent statist should be willing to embrace.  Allow me to
enumerate some of the main ones:

1. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT DRUG PROHIBITION HAS EVER BEEN
EFFECTIVE IN REDUCING CONSUMPTION.  David Musto has written about
the history of drug prohibition in _Scientific_American_ (see,
"Opium, Cocaine, and Marijuana in American History", July 1991, pp.
40-47) and observed that public consumption of opiates peaked in
the 1890s and declined for the next 20 years, right up to the time
the Harrison Act of 1914 was enacted, which marked the beginning of
federal drug control -- and ultimately drug prohibition.  James
Ostrowski in his paper "Thinking About Drug Legalization"
(_Cato_Institute_, policy analysis #121), has further noted that
the estimated number of opiate users as a percentage of the
population has remained relatively invariant since 1914 while, over
the same period, the percentage of cocaine users has gone up by a
staggering 4000 percent.  The greatest explosion of drug use came
during the period when Nixon was declaring his "war on drugs." 
Economist Thomas C. Schelling in "Addictive Drugs: The Cigarette
Experience" (_Science_, V.255 pp. 430-433) states in the abstract
that "cigarettes are among the most addictive substances of abuse
and by far the most deadly."  Nonetheless, a massive decrease in
use of this drug has occurred over 3 decades with "virtually no
regulation of smoking by any level of government."  The historical
evidence is clear: the most important factors in determining drug
use patterns are cultural and educational, and the laws have been
functionally irrelevant.

2. PROHIBITION HAS CREATED ORGANIZED CRIMINAL EMPIRES AND MASSIVE
LAWLESSNESS.  The existence of a criminal black market in drugs is
the true cause of so-called "drug crime."  It is astonishing that
the lesson of alcohol prohibition has never been applied to our
experience with other drugs.  In his excellent book,
_The_Hardest_Drug:_Heroin_and_Public_Policy_, John Kaplan makes a
convincing case that the Harrison Act and subsequent prohibition
was a public policy disaster.  (Interestingly, Kaplan believes that
we have lived with prohibition so long that we must continue the
policy but that the drug war should be abandoned in favor of
coerced treatment.)  Two other books that state the public policy
failures of prohibition very well are Arnold Trebach's book,
_The_Heroin Solution_ and Richard Lawrence Miller's book,
_The_Case_for_Legalizing_Drugs_.

3. THERE IS NO RATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR DRUG PROHIBITION.  It
would be one thing if all of the various prohibited drugs were more
dangerous to individuals and to society than the legal drugs,
however, a look at the pharmacology indicates that this is not so. 
In fact, drug prohibition (as some of the sources I cited above
state) was driven in large part by race prejudice (opium
prohibition targeted the Chinese immigrants, cocaine prohibition
targeted blacks, marijuana prohibition targeted Mexican immigrants
and to a lesser extent blacks, and alcohol prohibition targeted
Southern Europeans and Catholics).  A further justification that
was used to give a patina of legitimacy to opium prohibition was
the supposed medical efficacy of coerced abstinence as a way of
treating addiction.  This latter policy was given official sanction
nearly 80 years ago and has been a dismal failure.

4. ATTEMPTING TO "WIN" THE DRUG WAR WILL REQUIRE THE SUSPENSION OF
MORE AND MORE BASIC CIVIL LIBERTIES.  As I write this, CBS is
repeating its "60 Minutes" segment on civil forfeiture.  Like the
earlier series by the Pittsburgh Press, the story is told of the
extent to which this method is being used to fight the war. 
Because of the lowered standard of proof and the fact that the onus
falls on the accused to assert the innocent owner defense, large
numbers of people are losing property, homes, and businesses --
people who are never found guilty of a crime.  If this particular
end-run around the Constitution weren't bad enough, there is also
the ongoing "reform" in criminal procedure.  Just about every
reduction in procedural rights that has occurred in the past 10
years has been associated with the drug war.  And, perhaps most
egregious of all is the recent Supreme Court decision which found
that the kidnapping of a Mexican citizen as part of a drug case did
not violate our extradition treaty with Mexico.

     These are the main points but I could easily go on for another
50 pages, detailing the social costs of pursuing this flawed
policy.  One of the most articulate advocates for an end to current
drug prohibition is Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore.  Mayor Schmoke
has used Vietnam as a metaphor for our current drug war.  I find
this an apposite formulation: the drug war has been going on for a
long time (78 years) with no end in sight; we continue to hear
reports of large numbers of busts and tons of drugs seized
(remember the body count reports?); and, in the desperate search
for victory, fundamental civil liberties are being stripped away
(we had to destroy the village in order to save it).

     I know that Mayor Schmoke is a supporter of Governor Clinton
and that they are acquainted.  Mayor Schmoke has advanced a plan to
end the drug war and replace it with a flexible mix of legalization
and medicalization.  In his plan, marijuana would be fully
legalized and other drugs would be legalized based upon thorough
study and review.  Those drugs not deemed appropriate for full
legalization would be handled by a medicalization approach. 
Possession and use of the medicalized drugs would not be punished
but sale, distribution, or manufacture outside of legal channels
would.  This is a rational approach around which a consensus could
form.  I would hope that Governor Clinton would listen to Mayor
Schmoke and other progressives who are calling for an end to this
disastrous drug war.

     I won't address all of the problems I have with the
Clinton/Gore plan.  Instead I will focus on two.

     BOOT CAMPS -- This is a terrible idea and is a transparent
attempt to deal with the massive overcrowding of federal and state
prisons that has come about by the drug war escalations of the
1980s.  Why do nonviolent substance (ab)users need to be
incarcerated in the first place?  The overwhelming majority of
USERS of drugs -- legal and illegal -- do not ABUSE the drugs; they
are not addicts but, instead, occasional or, in the words of Daryl
Gates, "casual" users.  I'm glad that, unlike Chief Gates, Governor
Clinton doesn't want to shoot casual users, but penning them in
what are, in effect, concentration camps, and subjecting them to
psychological terror and threats is only a slight improvement.  And
for those who have a real problem?  Shouldn't this be handled by
medical professionals and not authoritarian camp guards?  I expect
this sort of medieval thinking from the party that the Republicans
have become but not from the Democratic Party.  "Treatment on
Demand" is a worthy idea but the coercion on the other end has no
place in a civilized country.  If people have a drug problem and
desire treatment, let's see that treatment is available but the
"boot camp" idea is one that should be abandoned as the inhumane
disaster it will prove to be.

MARIJUANA ERADICATION -- Marijuana prohibition is the dirty secret
of the drug war.  A drug less addictive than coffee, much less
harmful to its users than either alcohol or tobacco, and having
important medical uses is classified by the DEA as Schedule I. 
There is only one reason for this: to acknowledge that marijuana
prohibition was a mistake calls into question the whole rationale
for drug prohibition.  The continued prohibition illustrates the
power wielded by the mortmain of bureaucratic inertia and self-
interest.  While it is true that the public, a majority of which
favored marijuana legalization in the early 1980s, now opposes
legalization by a slight plurality, this is only the result of
well-financed propaganda by such groups as the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America (which, as reported in the March 9, 1992 issue of
_The_Nation_, gets a large part of its funding from the legal drug
companies: alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical).  In order to wage
this war against marijuana, the federal and state governments
allocate about half of their drug war expenditures.  And, of
course, there are all of the erosions of civil liberties that go
with this war, including the indignity of drug testing which is
primarily designed to ferret out casual marijuana users.

     I fervently believe that matters of public policy should be
approached by reason and logic.  I can't adequately convey how
appalled I've been by the massive retreat from rationality that has
characterized the Reagan/Bush era.  It is easy to look at data
about drug use over the past 15 years and conclude that the
Reagan/Bush crackdown of the mid-80s was cynically motivated. 
After the U.S. liberalized marijuana laws, by 1979 ALL drug use
began a decline that has continued ever since.  Several years into
this trend, the Reagan people decided that we had a drug problem
and with much fanfare, launched the latest campaign in the 80-year
war.  The funny thing is that, even as the Reagan/Bush people tried
to take credit for a historical decline, COCAINE USE STARTED TO GO
UP.  Meanwhile, we have been filling prisons with non-violent drug
offenders and there is research out there that supports the
observation that violent offenders are getting shorter sentences
and/or early releases to make room for "drug criminals" (see, for
example, Rasmussen and Benson's studies of the Florida criminal
justice system which were done under the auspices of the Policy
Sciences Program of Florida State University in 1990).  What we
have is public policy by hysteria.

     It is my hope that this message might start some kind of
dialogue on drug policy within the Clinton/Gore campaign.  Perhaps
people will be motivated to check some of my assertions and contact
some of the leading intellectuals in the anti-drug war movement and
listen to their arguments.  I believe that the case is so strong
that it practically argues itself.  In short, I believe if the
evidence is given a fair hearing, the ineluctable conclusion is
that current drug policy is a dead end and that it is in the best
interests of our society that it be abandoned.

     I look forward to any comments that the campaign may have on
the points I've addressed.

--paul
-- 
paul hager		hagerp@moose.cs.indiana.edu

"I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake."
                       --from _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt
Xref: sparky alt.drugs:15034 misc.legal:16417 talk.politics.drugs:5963