In the 1980s and 90s, "tough-on-crime" legislators held enough sway to pass draconian sentencing schemes that exponentially increased the number of Americans behind bars — mostly by sentencing nonviolent drug offenders to lengthy terms once reserved only for violent criminals. However, despite an 1,100 percent increase of drug offenders in prisons and jails over the last 25 years, the use of illegal drugs has remained steady. (Not to mention that drug-related harm has increased dramatically, as overdose deaths more than tripled from 1990 to 2005.)

Today, the public’s attitudes about drugs have shifted. In 1989, when a Gallup poll posed the question, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Twenty-six percent of respondents answered "Drugs; drug abuse." From 2004-2007, only 1 percent gave the same answer. Meanwhile, according to a Zogby poll released yesterday, 76 percent of Americans believe the "War on Drugs" is failing.

But we’re still stuck with the same cruel and counterproductive policies. Unfortunately, too few leaders have had the political courage to take on the task of dismantling the vast prison-industrial complex that destroys millions of lives and pilfers hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year. It’s up to us to tell them how and why it is not only possible, but necessary.

A few recent reports by the ACLU’s allies offer valuable resources for those of us working for human rights in our nation’s criminal justice system:

• Correcting Course, a new report by Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), describes how Congress repealed mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses in 1970, yet weren’t punished at the ballot box. It also includes comprehensive strategies for how Congress can repeal these ineffective laws today.

  FAMM concurrently released a new poll finding that not only do a large majority of Americans oppose mandatory minimums, but that they will vote for candidates who would eliminate them for nonviolent crimes. The numbers speak volumes about the public’s appetite for sentencing reform:

• 78 percent of Americans agree that courts — not Congress — should determine an individual’s prison sentence
• 59 percent oppose mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders
• 57 percent said they would likely vote for a candidate for Congress who would eliminate all mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes
• The Justice Policy’s Institute’s sweeping new report, Moving Target: A Decade of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex, examines the relationship between government, private interests and the use of imprisonment in the U.S.. The report describes the vast expansion of the prison-industrial complex over the past decade, its failure as an economic development tool, and insightfully analyzes the criminalization of drug use, poverty, mental illness, and immigration. It also discusses the use of specialized police forces to target specific crimes and populations, the public’s growing support for police accountability, and the militarization of routine police work, which has been "largely driven by the drug war" (As cited in the report, there are more than 45,000 paramilitary "SWAT" deployments each year in the U.S. — most commonly to serve drug warrants — an increase of 1,400 percent over just the past 20 years.)

  The report also describes the societal effects of disproportionate rates of arrest and incarceration of African-Americans — such as the fact that even though white youth are more likely than African-Americans to report selling drugs, African-American youth are arrested for drug offenses at nearly twice the rate of white youth.

  Earlier last month, JPI also released a brief report demonstrating that in 2007 "areas with lower incarceration rates experienced greater crime reductions."

• Meanwhile, the Sentencing Project has just published a new edition of Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System, a comprehensive manual for criminal justice practitioners, policymakers, and community organizations that seek to develop effective solutions to address and reduce disparities. The manual identifies the most common causes of racial disparities in the criminal justice system, how disparities manifest at key points in the justice system, and provides strategies for addressing disparities at the law enforcement, pretrial, prosecution, sentencing, probation, and parole stages.

We’re at a moment in sentencing history that presents a tremendous opportunity for systemic change. At the federal level, the Supreme Court’s decisions in Kimbrough and Gall and the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s decision to retroactively apply the reduction in crack cocaine sentencing guidelines signals a return to judicial discretion in federal sentencing. In addition, the confluence of ballooning state prison populations, budget shortfalls, and a newfound political willingness to be "smart-on-crime" presents unprecedented opportunities to halt the ever-increasing prison population. Overall, between 2004 and 2007, 22 states enacted legislative reforms to reduce their prison population by modifying sentencing or parole and probation schemes.

While encouraging, these developments have hardly made a dent in our nation’s increasing prison population. At this period in history while we’re painfully aware of the lost opportunity costs of having over seven million Americans living under the control of the criminal justice system, let’s make sure these opportunities to undo the largest prison build-up in the history of the world aren’t lost.

Almost 40 years ago, perhaps sparking the Bush team’s bright idea to declare a "war on terror," President Nixon declared a "war on drugs." By the time George Bush Sr. entered the White House in 1989, a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 62 percent of Americans would be willing to give up a few of their freedoms in order to fight the war on drugs. And Uncle Sam has been more than willing to take them up on it. Most of the court cases within the past 40 years that have methodically abridged individual rights like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and property rights, have all concerned drugs. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall even coined a term for the growing practice of sacrificing constitutional rights in the name of the fighting drugs: the "drug exception."

It seems appropriate on this Constitution Day to take a few moments to mourn all that we’ve lost from the Bill of Rights and the Constitution due to these "drug exceptions:"

Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure: Perhaps the big loser of all has been the Fourth Amendment, which limits the power of the government to enter and search one’s private property. Think about it: Unlike other crimes, drug offenses do not often have complaining witnesses (i.e.: people who come forward to request police assistance). The parties who use, sell or manufacture drugs are consenting participants who likely wish to hide their drug activity. In order to unearth drug crimes, the police must engage in wiretapping, surveillance, undercover operations, the use of confidential informants, entrapment by offering to buy or sell drugs, and countless other practices that strike at the heart of what the Fourth Amendment is all about. In the name of the drug war, courts have allowed suspicionless drug testing of wide swaths of students and private employees, and the State of Michigan almost got away with conducting random drug testing of welfare recipients. The incidence of surprise, paramilitary-style raids on people’s homes – and courts’ approval of them – in the name of routine drug policing has skyrocketed in recent years. Similarly, courts have repeatedly given the stamp of approval to the ever-increasing use of police drug dogs to search homes, cars, bags and people.

Freedom of Speech: When it comes to speaking out against the government’s drug policy, the right to free speech has also fallen prey to the drug war. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court carved out a "drug exception" to one of the most central tenets of free speech jurisprudence: the government cannot discriminate on the basis of the viewpoints being expressed in speech.  In Morse v. Frederick the Court ruled that a student’s speech could be censored at a school-related event (even outside the school), not because it was disruptive or because it provoked imminent lawlessness, but because it contained the word "bong." The Court drew on other drug-related precedent to find that when it comes to students in the school context (and even students who are near a school, as in this case), the government can make exceptions to free speech rights when it comes to speech about drugs.

Freedom of Religion: In a 1990 case brought by Native Americans who use peyote for religious purposes, the U.S. Supreme Court shunned the longstanding rules protecting the free exercise of religion and ruled that all religious practices give way to the general laws of the land – in this case drug laws. In response, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which restored the rights of people to participate in religious activities even when their practices appear to be in tension with other laws. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently struck down RFRA protections as applied to state laws so that when state laws and religious practices conflict, the state laws essentially win out. The silver lining, however, is that courts have ruled that RFRA protections remain intact in matters of federal law, such as in the case of Gonzales v. UDV (involving a church’s use of ayuhausca tea as part of its ritual, in conflict with federal drug laws) and Guam v. Guerrero (involving Rastafarians’ religious use of marijuana, in conflict with federal drug laws).  Currently, courts are considering the legality of the Church of Cognizance’s religious use of marijuana.

Right to Vote: Because the laws of many states continue to deny voting rights to those with current or prior felony convictions – many of them for drug offenses – an entire class of citizens has been shut out of the democratic process. To date, an estimated 5 million Americans have lost their fundamental right to vote, and in 11 states you can be barred from voting for life.

These are just a few of the "drug exceptions" to the Constitution. To learn more about how our basic rights as Americans have been compromised in the context of the drug war, check out the excellent article, "This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs," by the director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, Graham Boyd, and writer Jack Hitt.

If you think the original drafters of the Constitution would be rolling over in their graves about now, you’re probably right. While it’s unlikely, in a time before the existence of heat-sensing surveillance, wiretapping and drug testing technologies, that they could have imagined the kind of power our government would someday have over our private lives, the drafters did include important, explicit rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights meant to shield individuals from just the kind of insidious government overreach we have sadly seen come to pass in recent years.

Constitution Day reminds us that all the good words written on a piece of paper (which, as some historians have suggested, may have even been made from industrial hemp, which is made of marijuana, now an illegal, Schedule I drug) don’t mean a thing unless today’s judges and policymakers interpret and enforce the rights that they accord to us all. This makes our role as the people to whom policymakers and elected officials are accountable all the more critical.

Let’s hope that public views on civil liberties and the drug war have changed since 1989 when 62 percent of us said that we’d accept a "drug exception" to the Constitution. There’s good reason to think the tide is shifting. Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans think the drug war is a failure and that resources should be shifted away from arrest, prosecution and prison and toward treatment and education. But the fact remains that the United States remains the world’s largest jailer of drug offenders, disenfranchises an entire class of people with drug convictions and even denies educational funding to would-be students with drug convictions.

If history is any lesson, our constitutional rights will continue to slip away in the name of the drug war unless we fight to keep them. Here’s to keeping up the fight. Happy Constitution Day!

This week has featured a few encouraging developments for those of us advocating reforms in the ways law enforcement works with informants:

• NPR’s Morning Edition ran a three-part series about problems with the FBI’s use of informants. The third story is about a bill that Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) plans to introduce “that would essentially hold FBI agents criminally responsible if they fail to share criminal activity of a confidential informant with other law enforcement agencies.”

  Last summer, in the wake of the Kathryn Johnston scandal, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on law enforcement’s use of drug informants. Perhaps the most revealing exchange of the hearing occurred when Assistant Director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence Wayne M. Murphy refused to reassure Congress that the FBI does not tolerate “serious violent felonies” by their informants. Murphy also could not ensure that local authorities would be notified when informants commit serious crimes.

  To get an idea just how unaccountable the FBI’s use of informants really is, consider this 2005 report by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, finding that the FBI violated its own rules for handling informants in 87 percent of cases.

  The FBI handles only a small fraction of all drug cases in the U.S. — the vast majority are handled by state and local agencies — so this is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg.

  Delahunt’s bill is a good sign, although more broad reforms will be necessary to address the root causes that lead to police work being placed in the hands of unreliable informants in the first place.

• Also this week, the Montana Supreme Court issued an excellent opinion in a case about the use of informants. The Court held that the Montana state constitution’s right to privacy prohibits the police from “wiring” informants and recording their conversations with suspects without a warrant. The Court said that a district judge should have suppressed evidence in two cases involving informants wired with secret microphones, one in a suspect’s home and another in an automobile.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering informant issues in two separate cases. Pearson v. Callahan presents the question of whether the Fourth Amendment is violated when police enter a home without a warrant after an informant inside signals to police that a crime, usually a drug deal, is taking place. Some lower courts have allowed this practice based on a legal fiction coined “consent once removed,” which holds that a person who unwittingly consents to an undercover police officer or informant entering is also deemed to have consented to other police officers coming in later to search or arrest. The ACLU submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the Pearson case arguing that whatever the rationale for applying the “consent once removed” doctrine to undercover officers, it certainly should not be applied to informants who are not even police officers.
• The second informant case pending before the Court is Van de Kamp v. Goldstein, in which Thomas Goldstein sued former Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp for the role he played in Goldstein’s wrongful conviction and 24-year incarceration. Goldstein was convicted of murder based on the word of a jailhouse informant named Edward Fink who falsely testified that Goldstein had confessed the murder to him. Fink’s perjury was possible only because the Deputy District Attorney prosecuting the case had no way of knowing about Fink’s history of deception in other cases, nor about the sweet deal Fink obtained in his own burglary cases in exchange for lying about Goldstein. The lawsuit alleges this information was unknown at trial because Van de Kamp had deliberately refused to put into place any information management system that would have enabled Deputy District Attorneys to access this type of information about jailhouse informants in their cases. The ACLU’s friend-of-the-court brief in the case describes the pervasive undocumented, unregulated use of informants today and the serious threat they pose to the fairness and integrity of the criminal justice system.

By implementing basic safeguards and regulations that ensure ample oversight and corroboration of informant testimony, we can begin to rebuild the broken trust between police and the communities they aspire to serve and protect. To learn more about the ACLU’s work to reform America’s informant system, please visit www.aclu.org/unnecessaryevil.

While California’s landmark 1996 medical marijuana law has mostly been upheld by the state’s courts, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s unfavorable ruling in 2005 it appeared the sun may have been setting on medical marijuana reform in the federal courts.

The outlook is a whole lot brighter after last week’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose, which denies a Bush administration request to dismiss a lawsuit by Santa Cruz city and county officials and the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), which was raided by federal agents in 2002.

More significantly, in a first-of-its-kind ruling, the court held that the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bars the federal government from targeting the enforcement of federal drug laws to intentionally subvert state medical marijuana laws. The court ruled that the 10th Amendment would be violated if the ACLU can prove, as it has alleged, that a calculated pattern of selective arrests and prosecutions by the federal government has been intended to render "California’s medical marijuana laws impossible to implement and thereby forcing California and its political subdivisions to recriminalize medial marijuana."

This ruling is especially significant because it recognizes the constitutional significance of the fact that the federal government has gone out of its way to arrest and prosecute some of the most legitimate doctors, patients, caregivers and dispensary owners that are working most closely with state and local officials.

WAMM, for instance, is widely recognized as a model medical marijuana patients’ collective. WAMM is fully supported by the City and County of Santa Cruz, and functions in strict compliance with city and county ordinances and California state law. (In response to the 2002 arrest of WAMM’s founders, Mike and Valerie Corral, the city of Santa Cruz even allowed WAMM to hold its regular meeting to distribute marijuana to its members on the steps of City Hall.) Founded over 15 years ago, WAMM has operated solely on a not-for-profit basis — it has not sold or purchased marijuana but rather its members have collectively cultivated their medicine and provided it free of charge to approved collective members with a physician’s recommendation. WAMM includes 250 seriously ill men and women, with more than 80 percent of members suffering from a life-threatening illness. Health permitting, members have been encouraged to contribute volunteer hours to the organization by working in the garden, assisting with fundraising, volunteering in the office, or helping each other with informal hospice care.

The ACLU lawsuit alleges that in addition to targeting medical marijuana providers who cooperate most closely with municipalities, the defendants — U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, DEA agents involved in the raid of WAMM, and administrators of the DEA and Office of National Drug Control Policy — also violated the U.S. Constitution by (1) threatening to punish California physicians who recommend marijuana; (2) threatening government officials who issue medical marijuana identification cards; and (3) interfering with municipal zoning plans.

So, we have a potential legal breakthrough on our hands. This ruling, combined with the issuance of medical marijuana guidelines this week by California Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the passage of a medical marijuana employment rights bill in the California legislature earlier this month, provide further indication that California’s medical marijuana law — which brings the state $100 million each year in tax revenue — is continuing to gain legitimacy in spite of the Bush administration’s best efforts.

Let’s hope that federal officials quit playing politics with medical science by bringing a merciful end to their cruel and counterproductive war on sick and dying medical marijuana patients.

NPR reported today on one program that could help solve America’s huge incarceration problem. Texas sends many people to "DIVERT" Court, a system that pushes first-time, low-level non-violent offenders—especially those arrested for minor drug possession offenses—through rehab and treatment programs instead of the through the criminal justice system and into prison.

Texas has a prison population of 157,000, a number that’s expected to balloon in the next few years if it continues to incarcerate at its current rate. NPR reports:

Two studies by Southern Methodist University show that DIVERT Court cuts the recidivism rate by 68 percent over the regular Texas criminal justice courts. For every dollar spent on the court, $9 are saved in future criminal justice costs.

…The expanding prison population is a financial red stain spreading across the state’s books like the Andromeda Strain, [Texas State Rep. Jerry Madden (R-Plano), Chairman of the House Corrections Committee] says. Each new maximum security prison costs Texas taxpayers $300 million to build and $40 million a year to operate.

State officials estimate that unless changes are made, Texas will need 17,000 more prison beds just four years from now. Releasing prisoners on parole is politically untenable — which makes "diversion" an increasingly appealing way to avoid what’s looking like a $2 billion invoice.

You can’t argue with numbers like that. The DIVERT Court has been such a success that officials are hoping to expand it beyond first-time offenders. Jody Kent, Public Policy Coordinator for the ACLU’s National Prison Project, says:

Too many non-violent offenders are sent to prison because of deeply flawed sentencing policies, which are costing taxpayers millions of dollars and not addressing the heart of the problem. Programs such as the DIVERT court provide a sound, less costly alternative that has proved to be successful in reducing recidivism, and should be adopted in every city in the country.

Thanks to the "War on Drugs," incarceration of non-violent drug offenders has increased 1,100 percent since 1980; the current population of such offenders stands at nearly half a million. That’s almost a quarter of the current total national prison population.

Jag Davies, Policy Researcher for the ACLU’s Drug Law Reform Project, says:

We are at a remarkable moment in history that presents an opportunity for systemic change. The confluence of ballooning state prison populations, budget shortfalls, and a newfound political willingness to be “smart-on-crime,” are presenting unprecedented opportunities to halt the ever-increasing population of incarcerated drug law offenders. Most of these individuals have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity, and do not belong in prison. With more humane and effective alternatives available, such as the DIVERT program in Texas, it is imperative that policymakers implement alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders as soon as possible. State and local agencies carry the brunt of enforcing, prosecuting, and incarcerating drug offenders, yet it is also state and local budgets that are being squeezed tightest by the current economic downturn. Both fiscally and in terms of overall public safety, the U.S. can no longer afford the status quo.

Texas taxpayers should be gratified to know that their policymakers are looking for innovative, responsible ways to keep the prison population low, while still keeping the public safe. Diversion programs save both taxpayer money now and in the future, and benefits those who need it most.

When you combine this disturbing trend with a concurrent shift over the past decades away from prosecutorial and judicial oversight of policing practices, you get lots and lots of tragic "isolated incidents" — resulting in preventable deaths of not just drug offenders, but also innocent suspects, bystanders, and police officers.

One of these isolated incidents occurred in the small city of Lima, Ohio, on January 4, 2008, when Sergeant Joseph Chavalia shot blindly into a room where unarmed 26-year-old Tarika Wilson was presumably hiding behind a closed door with her six children, including her one-year-old son Sincere Wilson. Tarika was killed immediately, and Sincere had a finger amputated after being shot in the shoulder and hand. Tarika was not even the target of the raid — rather, the officers had a warrant for Anthony Terry, her boyfriend.

During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed two dogs that belonged to Terry. Chavalia testified that when his fellow officers shot the dogs, he mistakenly presumed that hostile gunfire was coming from the Wilson’s bedroom. Chavalia then shot blindly in the direction of the bedroom, without first attempting to identify the Wilson and her six children.

On Monday, a jury in Lima ruled that Chavalia didn’t show a "substantial lapse of due care" and acquitted him of misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and negligent assault.

It’s a shame that the same considerations aren’t made when officers are shot by innocent drug suspects who reasonably mistake unannounced intruders for illegal home invaders (such as in the prosecutions of Tracy Ingle and Corey Maye, as I described in this recent DailyKos post.)

Since Wilson was biracial and Chavalia is white, many have seen the shooting as representative of the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws in African-American and economically disadvantaged communities. (I posted last week on a new report detailing shocking racial disparities in drug enforcement in nearby Cuyahoga County, Ohio).

The shooting even prompted Jesse Jackson, Sr. to pay a visit to Lima to meet with protesters, community members, and city leaders last February. Jackson called the shooting "unnecessary force, excessive, and illegal," and urged prosecution of Lima police.

The fact that all eight members of the jury that acquitted Chavalia were white — even though one-quarter of Lima’s residents are black — has only added fuel to the fire.

"We’ve got to do better. We’ve given people the license to kill," Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the NAACP, was quoted as saying in the Toledo Blade.

As negligent as Chavalia may have been in shooting Wilson and her son, it’s hard to chalk up responsibility to just one trigger-happy officer. Officers are often given little or no background information before taking part in SWAT raids, and thrown into dangerous situations unnecessarily by sloppy or disingenuous work on the part of their colleagues.

It’s shocking that more people are not urging their government officials to return SWAT policing to its intended purpose — neutralizing the rare, crisis situations when there is substantiated evidence that someone’s life is urgently threatened.

By merely tightening search warrant standards and implementing basic safeguards and regulations that ensure ample oversight and corroboration of informant testimony, we could begin to rebuild the broken trust between police and the communities they aspire to serve and protect. Until then, count on the steady parade of drug raids resulting in needless death and destruction to continue.

The new report by Mona Lynch, Ph.D., "Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County, Ohio: A Report on the Racial Effects of Geographic Disparities in Arrest Patterns" – published in January by Citizens for a Safe & Fair Cleveland (CSFC) and made public for the first time last week – lays bare the intricacies of how this dynamic has taken shape in Cleveland’s criminal justice system.

The report’s roots go back to a series of discussions dubbed "Incarceration Nation," where the ACLU of Ohio brought together a diverse array of voices on this subject. Through these discussions, community members realized that more needed to be done to monitor law enforcement policies to ensure safety and fairness in Cleveland and its surrounding areas. Thus, the participants created CSFC in March 2007 to discuss issues of law enforcement, judicial equity, and community relations. Organizational members of CSFC include the ACLU of Ohio, Cleveland Chapter NAACP, Cleveland Job Corp Academy, and 100 Black Men, as well as a number of community leaders, advocates and stakeholders.

Kudos to Dan Harkins, who published an insightful article on Lynch’s report and CSFC for the Cleveland Scene.

Lynch’s report explains the disparities in prosecutors’ charging decisions for drug possession violations in the different jurisdictions within Cuyahoga County. Lynch found that Cleveland prosecutors are more likely to charge low-level drug law violations – such as possession of drug paraphernalia containing infinitesimal amounts of drug residue – as drug possession felonies compared to their counterparts in other parts of Cuyahoga County, who are more likely to charge the same offense as a misdemeanor.

Lynch concluded that, "Since the city population is majority nonwhite, whereas the surrounding county population is overwhelmingly white, the differential enforcement practices disproportionately impact the non-white population of the county."

The result? In 2005, 81 percent of all county drug arrests involved black people, despite the fact that only 27 percent of country residents are African-American.

Let’s hope Cleveland’s leaders have the courage and common sense to bring an end to this blatant racial injustice. The time has come to make a systemic shift away from the arrest and incarceration of low-level, nonviolent drug users and toward a more efficient, effective model that frees up criminal justice resources to focus on serious, violent crime.

The “Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008,” also known as H.R. 5843, would remove federal criminal penalties for personal possession of up to 100 grams of marijuana or the nonprofit transfer of up to an ounce of marijuana. It would not change the federal statutes forbidding cultivation, import, export or for-profit sale of marijuana.

Co-sponsors of the bill include Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ron Paul (R-Texas) and William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.).

The sacrifices to public health and safety made in the name of marijuana enforcement and prosecution are horrifying. 829,625 people arrested for marijuana law offenses in 2006, 89 percent for mere possession. Taxpayers are stuck with the multibillion-dollar bill for these hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests, which consume 4.5 million law enforcement hours — the equivalent of taking 112,500 law enforcement officers off the streets. (See my previous blog post on this bill for further analysis.)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is unlikely that marijuana decriminalization would lead to an increase in marijuana use. As the World Health Organization detailed in its recent report, the U.S. has the highest rate of marijuana use in the world despite some of the most punitive drug policies. In the U.S., 42.4 percent of people have used marijuana, compared to just 19.8 percent in the Netherlands, where marijuana has been decriminalized for decades.

People seem to be paying attention. CNN posted a favorable story, which was ranked as the most viewed article on CNN’s site for most of the day.

The drug czar sure is paying attention. As Nick Juliano at The Raw Story reported, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was so troubled by yesterday’s press conference that they sent “chief scientist” David Murray and two aides to dispense materials to reporters and make a statement to the press immediately following the conference. One of the materials distributed to reporters was a “Marijuana Sourcebook” called, “Marijuana: The Greatest Cause of Illegal Drug Abuse.”

Federal drug law is so corrupted to the core that ONDCP is actually bound by statutory obligation to use taxpayer funds to lobby against any attempt to change drug laws within the U.S. Thanks to a little-known statute pushed through by Mark Souder (R-Ind.), Congress has mandated that the Director of ONDCP “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form) that—(A) is listed in Schedule I…; and (B) has not been approved for medical purposes by the Food and Drug Administration.”

While it is highly doubtful that Frank’s bill will pass this year or anytime soon, it could help bolster state-based efforts to decriminalize marijuana. After all, state and local agencies carry the brunt of enforcing, prosecuting, and incarcerating marijuana offenders, yet it is also state and local budgets that are being squeezed tightest by the current economic downturn.

In addition to the 12 states the decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s, several others are well on their way — Nevada came close to passing a ballot initiative in 2006, Massachusetts voters will decide the issue this November, and other states such as Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Montana have taken steps that could lead to decriminalization over the next few years. In addition, a number of cities such as Denver, Seattle, Oakland and San Francisco — as well as a handful of smaller towns and cities —have passed measures mandating police treat marijuana law violations as the “lowest law enforcement priority.”

Let your Congressional Representative know that this issue is a priority. Take a few seconds to urge him or her to co-sponsor and support this historic legislation by sending a personalized message to your Congressional Representative.

• We recognized "the human rights abuses against people who use drugs"
• We called for "evidence-based" drug policy focused on "mitigation of short-term and long-term harms" and "full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms"
• We called on the U.N. to report on the collateral consequences of the current criminal justice-based approach to drugs and to provide an "analysis of the unintended consequences of the drug control system"
• We called for comprehensive "reviews of the application of criminal sanctions as a drug control measure"
• We recognized harm reduction as a necessary and worthwhile response to drug abuse (harm reduction is a set of practical strategies that reduce negative consequences of drug use, incorporating a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use to abstinence; harm reduction strategies meet drug users "where they’re at," addressing conditions of use along with the use itself)
• We called for a shift in primary emphasis from interdiction to treatment and prevention
• We called for alternatives to incarceration
• We called for the provision of development aid to farmers before eradication of coca or opium crops

In other words, we voiced the need for a very significant shift in direction for drug policy at just about every level.

Of course, if the national governments decide to ignore this call from the grassroots, this could just be a grown-up version of the model U.N. club some of us did in high school.

If you read my earlier blog posts , you’ll know about the mysterious woman with the yellow badge — she worked hard to wreck the first day, but once she was gone on the second day, the more hard-line U.S. groups became fairly pragmatic and sensible. But the mystery woman showed up again today.

I decided to introduce myself to the woman with the yellow badge. Today, she had a red badge, like the rest of us — meaning that overnight she had become a delegate, not an observer. Scary thought for how the day might go. I offered her my card, and got hers. I asked that she, as an official U.S. representative, please include the ACLU in future delegations. It turns out that June Sivilli is indeed in the drug czar’s office. A quick Google search reveals that she’s a big proponent of student drug testing, which may explain why she already knew who I was (thanks to the ACLU’s heretical position that, because it’s invasive and ineffective, we shouldn’t drug test students.) She didn’t offer to include me in future delegations, but was entirely civil.

And then the day started with a bang: obstruction and delay from Drug Free America’s Calvina Fay and a couple of her colleagues. What was interesting, though, was that many of her original allies were no longer going along with her tactics. Joined only by the "Drug Free Schools Coalition" and a group called Sundial , she renewed the call to remove any suggestion that current drug policies cause harm. Sivilli seemed to be at work again, mobilizing her dwindling troops. Things quickly became comical: one delegate made a motion for all official government employees (i.e., Sivilli) to reveal themselves. The chair denied the motion, but the point had been made. Then another delegate asked the chair why the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (love the name!) was no longer filming the meeting. A rumor had spread that Sivilli objected to being caught on camera whispering in the ears of the "drug-free" representatives. And I learned from one colleague that the Drug Free Schools Coalition representative had threatened to sue her for taking his picture and "reported" her to the U.N. (whatever that means), forcing her to erase the picture from her camera. Can anyone think of any other examples of the U.S. government these days trying to do its dirty work with no accountability or scrutiny, especially in the face of overwhelming opposition from ordinary people? (Yes, Drug Free Schools Coalition and Drug Free America are not actually the U.S. government, but they clearly were working hand-in-glove in the one space where the U.S. government representative could not speak for herself.)

But I’m spending way too much time on the shenanigans and not enough on the tremendous promise that today brings. For almost half a century, world drug policy has focused overwhelmingly on "supply side" tactics — a euphemism for policies based on arrests and imprisonment. The U.S. has largely driven this process, in our name but without our consent and mostly without even our awareness. Other governments were initially dragged into this regime, and many have come to embrace it enthusiastically and viciously. Yet now, in this very official space, the people of the world have responded, and we say with one voice that things must change.

I’ll write one more time with some thoughts about how we can make sure our government listens. And I hope you’ll all chime in with your ideas in the comments section. One more thing: thanks for taking the time to read this far. I hope it’s been useful and maybe even a little bit fun.