November 17, 2005
MOVEMENT MOMENTUM
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REFORMERS: (L to R) Cordero, Wolfe, Clear and Colonna made up a panel on modern-day harm reduction witch hunts |
Fresh on the heels of The Campaign To End AIDS' own particular movement-building four-day D.C. whoop-de-doo, HW top dog Charles King and federal advocacy director Robert Cordero dashed to Long Beach, California, for a movement-building milestone of a different (though related) sort: The 2005 International Drug Policy Reform Conference, organized by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) in conjunction with dozens of local, national and international groups.
As diverse as these groups may be in their size and focus, they all have one thing in common: a conviction that the current federal "war on drugs"—based on keeping all drugs illegal and criminalizing drug users and sellers—isn't working to stop drug use in the U.S. and needs to be reformed. And at this weekend's conference, nearly 1,000 participants ranging from HIV/AIDS prevention activists and harm reduction specialists to drug-treatment providers and members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition came together for a jam-packed program.
Every aspect of drug-policy reform was explored, from medical marijuana, citizen lobbying and ayahuasca (to Brazil what peyote is to North America) to building speaker tours, preventing overdose fatalities, restoring to people with felony convictions the right to vote and drug laws and drug-law reform in countries around the world.
According to DPA executive director Ethan Nadelmann, the confab (a biennial event) lived up to its title, "Building a Movement for Reason, Compassion and Justice," because it comprised people from across the spectrum of drug policy with little consensus on the specifics of reform (except, perhaps, that most attendees agreed marijuana should be legalized).
"This was easily the biggest drug-policy reform gathering ever in the U.S.," Nadelmann told AIDS Issues Update between sessions last Friday, "and it's also the most international, diverse and best attended, with the most outstanding programs. Our major objective here is to connect the dots among the various strands of the growing drug-policy reform movement, whether the principle passion of folks here is HIV prevention, medical marijuana, racial justice or U.S. international drug policy."
DIVERSITY AMONG CONSENSUS
"Most people here aren't convinced that [total] legalization [of all drugs] is the answer," Nadelmann continued, "but they are convinced that it's crucially important to question the assumptions underlying the current prohibitionary approach. There are tremendous costs to relying on the criminal justice system to deal with drug markets," he added, citing HIV/AIDS and widespread incarceration as two.
Nadelmann says that officials from the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy—including its director, "drug czar" John Walters—were invited to the conference but weren't in attendance, except for "one person we think is reporting on it to the federal authorities." Nadelmann thinks that the lack of federal attendees—as well as the fact that the conference used no federal funds—spared it the scrutiny that harm-reduction opponent Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) brought to this summer's big crystal meth conference when the conservative lawmaker took HHS head Mike Leavitt to task for letting HHS be a sponsor. (HHS wasn't a sponsor, corrected Leavitt, while defending the presence at the meth confab of a handful of HHS staffers.)
HW PARTICIPATION
Speaking of Souder, his name came up often during a panel this weekend called "Modern Witch Hunts: The Persecution of Harm Reduction," which included Housing Works federal advocacy director Robert Cordero (talking about, in part, Souder's anti-needle-exchange hearing earlier this year that Housing Works clients and staffers crashed in protest), the Open Society Institute's Daniel Wolfe, the Harm Reduction Coalition's Allan Clear and the Harm Reduction Project's Luciano Colonna.
HW's King also participated in a panel investigating the role of civil disobedience in drug-policy reform. "I'd been arrested only five days before in a civil disobedience at the Family Research Council protesting abstinence-only programs," (see story in this issue) "so I'd felt I'd freshly earned my place on the panel," joked King, who has been arrested multiple times for civil disobedience. Of the conference in general, he said: "Coming off the movement-building of the Campaign to End AIDS, it's wonderful to see such a diverse, broad movement developing around ending the current war on drugs. It intersects perfectly with ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic."
As for Nadelmann, he's particularly proud of two things. One: DPA raised nearly $175,000 worth of scholarship funding to send people to the conference (with much of the funding, Nadelmann says, coming from Robert Fields, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy). The other: "There's more young people here, aged 19 to 24, than ever," he says. "We're really seeing the future of the movement."
He calls the young people part of a "growing, critical mass of people who see the war on drugs holistically as a fundamental evil in society."