home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3
/
HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso
/
drugs
/
hearings.1.1
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-05-06
|
304KB
|
10,779 lines
ASSOCATION OF THE BAR OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
42 West 44th Street
New York, New York 10036
COMMITTEE ON DRUGS AND THE LAW
PUBLIC HEARING ON DRUG POLICY
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1995
A.M. SESSION
BARBARA PAUL ROBINSON, ESQ.
President Association of the Bar of
the City of New York
KATHY H. ROCKLEN, ESQ.
Chair
2
1
2
3 P R O C E E D I N G S
4
5 MS. ROBINSON: Good morning everybody
6 and welcome, I am so glad to see you all here, it's
7 really important, important beginning of these
8 hearings on our drug policies and the future of our
9 drug policies.
10 For those of you who don't know me, my
11 name is Barbara Paul Robinson, I am President of
12 this wonderful association and I am delighted to see
13 you here and I know you will be joined today,
14 tomorrow and the next day by many others who will
15 come together to talk about this compelling issue,
16 really one of the most challenging issues of our
17 day.
18 I think it's tremendously appropriate
19 that these hearings are being held here at the house
20 of this association of the bar of the City of New
21 York.
22 It is as a result of a very
23 thoughtful, thorough report that has been published
24 by the association and was written over really a
25 long period of thought and work and really
3
1
2 wonderful, wonderful work by our committee on Drugs
3 and the Law and of course Kathy Rocklen, our chair
4 is here to conduct these hearings.
5 She has been really instrumental in
6 making this happen.
7 As you know, I am sure, that report
8 calls for the decriminalization of drugs.
9 But it more importantly calls for a
10 public dialog as to how to get there from here. How
11 to shape the right kind of policy for our country.
12 Today is a result of just that call
13 and you are really making it happen, so thank you
14 very much.
15 I think many of you know that this
16 year is our association's 125th anniversary year, we
17 are very proud of that, part of the reason we are
18 proud of that is because when the association
19 started, it started because lawyers had the courage
20 to come together to try to reform the problems of
21 their time and in 1870 that was Boss Tweed and
22 Tamany Hall and if you have a chance when you leave
23 this room right across the hall you will see some
24 historical references to that time.
25 Well those lawyers had that courage
4
1
2 and they tackled a very difficult problem of their
3 time and today we are here to try to tackle a really
4 compelling problem of our time.
5 I don't care what your views are about
6 the drug policy, we must all agree that drugs are a
7 major problem of our day.
8 I think that people describe it
9 differently but there really is no disagreement
10 about that.
11 Some call it an academic, they treat
12 it as a public health issue, others call for war
13 against drugs.
14 This is an association of lawyers and
15 so we have called for reason, for analysis, for
16 dialogue.
17 Without hyperbole, without politics,
18 it is the perfect place to have this discussion.
19 Because we really have no axe to grind, we want to
20 find solutions. And you are going to help us to
21 just that.
22 Now, whether you favor
23 decriminalization or not, I think everyone who has
24 thought about this question agrees, that prevention
25 and rehabilitation can work and should work.
5
1
2 I think I mentioned to Kathy that just
3 last week I hope you all saw that statistic that
4 came out in The New York Times, that terrible
5 statistic that one out of every three young black
6 men in this country are either in jail or under
7 police supervision.
8 That is a staggering statistic. We
9 are losing an entire population.
10 It is devastating not only for our
11 current cities and our country but for the future of
12 our culture.
13 So if we all agree that rehabilitation
14 and prevention are key and by the way if you think
15 about what we have achieved on smoking, I would
16 never have believed this house would be a smoke free
17 house.
18 When I first came to meetings here
19 they passed out cigars, of course there weren't too
20 many women at that point, but now there is no
21 smoking in this house.
22 So just think if we can do that with
23 cigarettes, why can't we do it with drugs?
24 And what Kathy's committee's report
25 says is that you need to commit the kind of
6
1
2 resources to that battle, you cannot succeed without
3 those resources.
4 I just want to introduce the program
5 can I just finish then I will turn it over to Kathy
6 because I just wanted to conclude but I thought you
7 you couldn't hear me.
8 Anyway let me just say that without
9 getting into smoking I hope that today's committee's
10 hearings will bring this group together to seek
11 solutions, to build the partnerships that are
12 necessary to achieve them and I would like to
13 especially thank Kathy because really she has been
14 indefatigable in bringing these reports out in
15 making these hearings happen and I know that thanks
16 to all of you we will find some solutions so thank
17 you very much.
18 Thank you, Kathy.
19 MS. ROCKLEN: Thank you, President
20 Robinson.
21 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and
22 honored guests.
23 Thank you for joining us at this
24 public forum organized to explore the subject of
25 drug policy reform.
7
1
2 For the next two and a half days,
3 prosecutors, government representatives, members
4 members of the judiciary and experts on drug policy
5 from the academic world, private foundations and
6 other interested organizations will give us their
7 views on the future direction of our nation's drug
8 policy.
9 As you know, last year the
10 association's committee on drugs and the law
11 published a report entitled a wiser course ending
12 drug prohibition.
13 After ten years of study, the
14 committee concluded that the costs of prohibition
15 are simply too high, and it's benefits too dubious
16 to warrant staying the current course.
17 The consequences of this country's
18 policy of drug prohibition are everywhere.
19 State and Federal Courts are jammed.
20 The principal population is burgeoning and violent
21 turf wars threaten our safety.
22 Civil liberties are being eroded and
23 respect for the law is waning.
24 Quality of urban life has declined and
25 public health is threatened.
8
1
2 There appears to be no basis for the
3 claim that a greater emphasis on enforcement makes a
4 difference.
5 Despite the billions of dollars spent
6 on law enforcement, criminal prosecution and
7 incarcerations, the drug problem rages on.
8 The association believes that patching
9 the current system won't work.
10 Increased attention to treatment and
11 education alone will not be enough to control this
12 country's and indeed the world's drug problem.
13 We must start from scratch with a
14 different perspective and a whole new attitude.
15 Prohibition must go and a new drug
16 policy premised on legalization and regulation must
17 take its place.
18 Failure to recognize this imperative
19 will mean a continuing plunge into violence.
20 The committee's 1994 report concluded
21 with a recall for wider public dialogue on new
22 approaches to drug policy. Including legalization
23 and regulation.
24 These hearings are designed to further
25 that dialogue.
9
1
2 Witnesses have been asked to comment
3 on the committee's report, as well as giving us
4 their views on the effectiveness of present drug
5 enforcement efforts, anti-drug educational programs,
6 drug treatment programs, arm reduction efforts and
7 legalization and decriminilazation proposals.
8 The committee is very pleased with the
9 broad spectrum of views represented at these
10 hearings, as well as the level of public interest in
11 this topic.
12 We are disappointed, however, by the
13 refusal of federal policy makers to participate in
14 this debate.
15 We believe their testimony is
16 absolutely critical to a balanced examination of the
17 competing concerns underlying this nation's drug
18 policy.
19 For that reason, we invite federal
20 policy makers to reconsider our invitation and join
21 us at this week's hearings or at further hearings to
22 be scheduled.
23 The format for these hearings are
24 straightforward.
25 Each witness will have an opportunity
10
1
2 to speak for fifteen minutes following which there
3 will be a question and answer period of equal
4 length.
5 Questions will be taken first from the
6 committee members and then from the audience.
7 The committee member acting as session
8 chair will introduce each speaker, keep track of the
9 time and recognize people with questions.
10 As you can imagine, we have a tight
11 schedule and we will appreciate everyone's
12 cooperation in maintaining that schedule.
13 Copies of the hearing scheduled, the
14 committee report and various papers that have been
15 submitted for these hearings are available right
16 outside the front door.
17 Again, we want to thank you all for
18 participating in these hearings, I also want to give
19 my special thanks to all of the Committee members
20 who have worked so hard to put these hearings
21 together, as well as my secretary, Lawrence Scott,
22 who has been instrumental in making this happen.
23 I am now going to turn the hearings
24 over to this morning's session chair, Ken Brown.
25 Ken.
11
1
2 MR. BROWN: Thank you very much,
3 Kathy.
4 Good morning everyone, thank you for
5 coming,
6 First, before we get started I would
7 like to thank the Court reporting service that's
8 here today, Rayvid Reportinging Service, we have
9 Stephen J. Moore who is reporting.
10 They are doing this pro bono for the
11 association.
12 Our first witness today is Eric
13 Sterling, he is the President of the criminal
14 justice policy foundation, a private not for profit
15 educational organization.
16 Mr. Sterling received his bachelor's
17 of arts in 1973 from Haverford College, majoring in
18 religion and his juris doctorate from from Villanova
19 University school of law in 1976.
20 Mr. Sterling has counsel to the U.S.
21 house of representatives committee on the judiciary
22 from 1979 until 1989.
23 In the 96th Congress he worked on
24 Congress rewriting federal criminal code for the
25 Chairman of the subcommittee my on criminal justice.
12
1
2 Mr. Sterling's opinion is regularly
3 sought by top federal officials, frequently reported
4 in national news media and he has served as an
5 expert witness in federal trials.
6 He frequently lectures in colleges and
7 universities has appeared on many national news
8 shows such as Donahue, Nightline, ABC 20/20, Eye to
9 Eye with Connie Chung, and so forth.
10 He is editor and chief of news brief
11 and the national drug strategy network.
12 Please, everyone welcome Mr. Eric
13 Sterling.
14 MR. STERLING: Ladies and gentlemen,
15 thank you very much for inviting me to address you
16 today.
17 I have brought my prepared statement
18 and there are copies outside for -- and for the
19 committee and as Thomas Jefferson said I'm sorry my
20 letter is so long, if I had more time it would have
21 been shorter.
22 It is lengthy and I apologize for not
23 making it shorter.
24 President Robinson began by discussing
25 the question of this committee's call for a
13
1
2 dialogue.
3 On October 3, U.S. Senator Chuck
4 Grassly in the Desmoine Register said that this
5 discussion of drug legalization is leading to more
6 juvenile drug abuse.
7 That is a red baiting of the worst
8 possible kind.
9 He of course cited the recent data
10 from the monitoring of future survey that shows that
11 marijuana use among teenagers is up, but so is
12 alcohol use and so is tobacco use.
13 And we are talking about tighter
14 controls on those drugs.
15 It is absurd to think that this
16 discussion is leading to a greater drug abuse
17 problem.
18 Prohibition is a failure and we have
19 to discuss ways to replace it, and it's a failure on
20 its own terms.
21 In February 1995, the Peter Heart
22 survey found that the American people would give the
23 federal government a grade of D or F for its work in
24 dealing with the drug problem at a ratio of fifty
25 percent.
14
1
2 Fifty percent of the public would
3 flunk the Federal Government or give them a D.
4 Only six percent of the American
5 public thought the drug abuse problem had gotten
6 better in the last five years.
7 In 1994, in July, the Lew Harris
8 survey for the national treatment consortium, found
9 that seventy-five percent of the American people
10 think that there will be more drug addiction over
11 the next ten years.
12 Prohibition is a failure on its own
13 terms.
14 Prohibition also cannot work as your
15 report points out in many respects.
16 Just briefly, and I traveled to Peru,
17 Columbia, Jamaica, Mexico and Bolivia in 1983 with
18 the house narcotics committee, I saw our efforts at
19 eradication of coke aand marijuana with my own eyes
20 and I can assure you that there isn't any way that I
21 believe that we can stop these very valuable
22 contraband crops from being cultivated by impvovered
23 camacinos in those countries.
24 Interdiction effort cannot succeed.
25 As I point out in my paper the drugs
15
1
2 become much more valuable when they come into the
3 United States and only tiny quantities of drugs
4 given the enormous amount of legitimate
5 international trade are necessary to supply the
6 American public's drug use.
7 On the order of several hundred tons
8 if is the quantity of cocaine or heroin that comes
9 into the country compared to billions of tons.
10 We are simply not going to be able to
11 stop the importation of cocaine, for example which
12 is twice the value of platinium on a dollar per
13 ounce basis.
14 Well can we enforce our way out of
15 that?
16 That's not going to be possible in any
17 realistic manner.
18 As the sentencing project made clear
19 last week, now one in three young blackmails is
20 under the control of the justice system.
21 Ninety percent of those in prison for
22 just possession are African American or Hispanic.
23 This is an effort that is going to if
24 we continue in the direction we are going, to
25 continue to lock up more and more people at an
16
1
2 enormous cost.
3 In the crime bill the President signed
4 last September, $7.9 billion has been authorized for
5 additional principal funding with no sense that
6 that's going to be an adequate amount to fully
7 imprison all of those involved in the use of drugs.
8 And then, of course, we have former
9 drug csar Irving Kaufman's recommendation, let's
10 take the profit out of it through asset forfeiture.
11 The asset forfeiture program of the
12 Federal Government brings in about $700 million a
13 year through Treasury and the Department of Justice
14 at a cost of several hundred million dollars a year
15 to operate.
16 If we are taking $1 billion from the
17 drug traffic customers in a year and if they
18 conservatively are making $20 billion a year, well
19 that five percent of their profits is not going to
20 put them out of business.
21 What we have to do is to replace
22 prohibition with a system of regulation and control.
23 Now, I am going to say that I believe
24 that drug use can be harmful.
25 Sitting here as an advocate of its
17
1
2 what is called legalization, I will concede that
3 drug use can be harmful and that we see the harmful
4 effects of drug use thought our society.
5 But I challenge those who would say we
6 must maintain prohibition, to concede that drug use
7 can be beneficial.
8 It certainly -- drugs are beneficial
9 as medicine, the government's cowardly and
10 scandalous refusal to make marijuana available for
11 people who are sick and dying is a moral abomination
12 in the name of politics.
13 But we should also recognize that drug
14 use is valuable for its recreational and it's
15 religious purposes.
16 I was fortunate in working with the
17 native American people in the passage of the
18 American Indian religious freedom act amendments of
19 1994 and the religious freedom restoration act of
20 1993.
21 Your report talked about the right to
22 alter consciousness and I discuss in your paper the
23 dissenters critique arguing that drug abuse is not a
24 right.
25 In this debate we have to begin to
18
1
2 stop using terms like drug abuse as the only way to
3 characterize drug use.
4 One must -- to say that there is no
5 such thing as drug use but all drug use is drug
6 abuse is to say that the term drug abuse itself is a
7 meaningless term.
8 It strips it of meaning if we apply it
9 to all circumstances and I think that that kind of
10 abusive language is inappropriate in a report of the
11 Bar Association.
12 There are principles that I think we
13 need to hold as we think about how to replace
14 business with a controlled regulated system.
15 Let me just highlight those
16 principles.
17 The first is to remember that drug
18 laws and drug policy should help people not hurt
19 them.
20 That's the whole purpose, is to help
21 people.
22 If our laws are hurting more people
23 than they are helping, that's a sign that they are
24 not working well.
25 The relief of pain is one of the
19
1
2 oldest of our medical traditions and heroin can be
3 used as effective pain relief by people who do not
4 get relief from Dilotive and other drugs.
5 That is not to say that heroin is a
6 good drug or that it's better than another drug,
7 it's to recognize the idiosyncratic nature of pain
8 relief and analgesic.
9 Canada joined the United Kingdom in
10 the 1980's to allow heroin to be used in pain relief
11 and it's scandalous for political reasons the
12 Congress in 1984 rejected legislation that the house
13 commerce committee sent forward to correct that
14 problem here on an experimental basis.
15 Second, we should adopt a public
16 health approach toward all drugs and drug users.
17 A public health approach is a way to
18 deal with the problems of drug abuse, rather than
19 simply criminalizing issues.
20 That recognizes then that alcohol and
21 tobacco are intrinsic parts of what our drug
22 discussion ought to be about.
23 I think as a point that we must be
24 comprehensive.
25 That treatment professionals recognize
20
1
2 there is cross addiction between tobacco, alcohol,
3 heroin, marijuana and other drugs.
4 That there is a relationship, there is
5 polydrug use and that the legal lines that we have
6 defined on such a political and arbitrary basis
7 don't make sense in medicine or in public health.
8 This requires that we look at our drug
9 abuse prevention programs on a more comprehensive
10 basis.
11 Prevention programs are critically
12 important, but for political reasons we should not
13 pour our treasury into programs that don't work
14 because we like the police.
15 The drug abuse resistance education
16 program at $700 million a year, $400 million of that
17 being federal money, is a waste when the evaluators
18 from the research trial institute and the national
19 institute of justice contract find it does not work,
20 it is ineffective.
21 That the students who complete the
22 DARE program are no more likely to be drug free
23 afterwards than controls who did not use the
24 program.
25 Third, we must insist upon drug and
21
1
2 alcohol user accountability and responsibility.
3 People who use drugs must be
4 responsible for what they do.
5 There is nothing controversial about
6 that.
7 So, drug and alchohol use should not
8 be an excuse for criminal conduct or for negligent
9 conduct.
10 People who are convicted of predatory
11 crimes, robbers and rapists, assaulters and burglers
12 they should be drug and alcohol abstinent while on
13 probation and parole.
14 Those are not radical ideas but there
15 is a system of regulation and control and those who
16 would suggest that legalizers are thought concerned
17 about that are engaged I think simply in name
18 calling.
19 Fourth of course we should insist that
20 vendors are responsible and accountable.
21 So that violence, corruption, product
22 adulteration, tax evasion, antitrust evasion,
23 antitrust violations by drug and alcohol and tobacco
24 companies should be investigated and punished and
25 the distribution of these compounds should be
22
1
2 policed in a way to protect the public health.
3 Convicted criminals cannot sell
4 alcohol now under Federal Law, they shouldn't be
5 allowed to sell drugs as well.
6 Fifth, we want to maximize the reach
7 of law and respect for the law.
8 We want to maximize the power of the
9 law in our society, and prohibition does the
10 opposite.
11 It guarantees that one of the largest
12 industries in America operates completely outside
13 law.
14 Our current law, somebody who wants to
15 stay out of the criminal subculture that supplies
16 drugs, for example, marijuana, who wants to grow
17 their own marijuana, becomes a felon, moving up to
18 the misdemeanor status of simply being a possesor.
19 It makes no sense to penalize more
20 harshly people who want to withdraw from the
21 criminal traffic that now exists.
22 Marijuana cultivation should be for
23 personal use should be a misdemeanor or a non
24 offense all together.
25 That's something we can do under
23
1
2 current law.
3 Sixth, as we think about all of this
4 in thinking about our priorities, we should set
5 achievable social goals.
6 This is 1995, in 1988 Congress passed
7 a law saying America was going to be drug free in
8 1995.
9 I helped write that law and like many
10 of the things I helped write, it's absurd it's based
11 on politics and it's not based upon achievable
12 social goals.
13 So, an achievable social goal would be
14 reducing the spread of HIV.
15 Cutting down the number of cases of
16 AIDS and hepatitis and other diseases.
17 So needles ought to be available for
18 adicts, that is common sense.
19 So we need to take the political
20 aspect that prevents us from looking at realistic
21 goals.
22 I have in my paper a number of
23 discussion suggestions for what we ought to do in
24 focusing domestic law enforcement in other areas to
25 deal with the question of how to achieve realizable
24
1
2 social goals.
3 In the short term, until we have an
4 effective and regulated system in place, I think the
5 U.S. treasury and U.S. justice's departments need to
6 increase their emphasis on international law
7 enforcement.
8 Probably the largest least corrupt law
9 enforcement agency in the world is the Federal Law
10 enforcement establishment.
11 And yet we know that there are
12 billions of dollars in illegal funds being moved
13 around the world and that is an appropriate area for
14 law enforcement.
15 Yet when you look at the outcomes of
16 the federal criminal establishment, fifty-five
17 percent of those going to prison for federal
18 offenses are street level dealers, body guides,
19 mules and couriers and only 11.2 percent are high
20 level traffic customers, that is a mistake, it is a
21 waste of our resources, even if we keep the current
22 approach.
23 Of course we need to raise revenue and
24 that's an important social goal.
25 Alcohol taxation generates at the
25
1
2 federal, state and local level $12 billion in 1989,
3 federal and state tobacco taxes raised $11 billion
4 in fiscal year 1992.
5 My estimate is that marijuana taxation
6 could generate $10 to $20 billion a year federal,
7 state and local if we were to do that.
8 I have a proposal in the back of my
9 paper which is on Page 51 which is a mock U.S.
10 treasury marijuana license.
11 The idea is that we have to develop a
12 policed and regulated form of dealing with these
13 drugs.
14 So let me move then quickly to some of
15 the specifics.
16 Like Doctor Mark Kleinman at the
17 Kennedy School I suggest that we use drug use
18 licenses as an interim measure.
19 He proposes alcohol use licenses and I
20 think that that has some merit as well.
21 Because I think in part what we want
22 to do is to change our cultural attitude to become
23 more sober about drug use all together.
24 I part company with the ACLU and argue
25 that we ought to stop the advertising of alcohol and
26
1
2 tobacco.
3 When six year olds recognize Joe Camel
4 as readily as they recognize Micky Mouse, that
5 testifies to the way in which tobacco advertising
6 more than $5 billion per year has penetrated the
7 young.
8 In a drug use license situation if you
9 think about alcohol use licenses -- am I out of
10 time?
11 MR. BROWN: Getting close.
12 MR. STERLING: Can I have two minutes?
13 MR. BROWN: Two minutes.
14 MR. STERLING: With alcohol use
15 license, ask yourself where do people learn how much
16 alcohol they can consume before it affects their
17 ability to drive.
18 The answer is they learn that behind
19 the wheel of their car.
20 What I would suggest is that people
21 who want to consume alcohol as part of it would be
22 that they would sit in a automobile simulator and
23 have measured amounts of alcohol and learn with
24 computer printouts and so on exactly how it affects
25 them, because people have different ideosyncratic
27
1
2 effects, to simply effect blood alcohol level and
3 talk about rough guidelines of so many so many
4 drinks per hour is an inadequate way.
5 I suggest we begin to look at
6 impairment from a measured sense I propose what I
7 call vehicle operating impairment levels in my
8 paper.
9 That standard levels for impairment be
10 established for individuals.
11 That if you are stopped and suspected
12 of being impaired you would be measured against your
13 own base line measure of impairment.
14 I think that we need to have what are
15 called wet shelters, that we have to recognize, I
16 will conclude in this sense, that in looking at
17 addiction and drug use, whatever we do there is
18 going to be a drug problem.
19 There is a scope and a range of self
20 control and behavior about addicts that our thinking
21 about drug addiction is highly stereotyped.
22 In the book Shooting Dope by Charles
23 Falpo he points out the different kinds of careers
24 that addicts have and he points out the different
25 ways in which they are involved in their drug use.
28
1
2 We have to tailor a system of
3 regulated drug distribution that is coupled with
4 interventions in order to deal with the different
5 classes of addiction use so I would suggest even
6 while we have many shelters that require you to be
7 drug free or to be abstinent run by churches, for
8 example that we also recognize inebriates need a
9 place they can pass out and not be at risk of being
10 mugged and preyed upon and not be disorderly in the
11 public streets the way James Q. Wilson talked about
12 in Broken Windows.
13 So, just to simply say there are a
14 whole range of approaches that we have to begin to
15 talk about to replace prohibition and that is the
16 challenge that it has.
17 There is no simple answer and we are
18 going to be proposing ideas which are going to be
19 very radical and challenging and offensive and
20 people are going to take offense at these ideas.
21 Yet we have to overcome that offense
22 if we are going to come up with effective solutions
23 to this problem.
24 Thank you very much.
25 MR. BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Sterling.
29
1
2 First I would like to take some
3 questions from the panel.
4 Does anyone have questions for Mr.
5 Sterling.
6 Starting with Eleanor Jackson *Peale.
7 MS. PEALE: Yes, I have a question. I
8 was impressed with what you had to say, however how
9 do you deal with the perception, particularly in the
10 black community, that drugs are wrong and laws are
11 made to enforce public perception of what is wrong?
12 How do you deal with that?
13 MR. STERLING: Mrs. Peale, when you
14 say drugs are wrong, you mean drug use is wrong,
15 drug use is immoral?
16 MS. PEALE: Yes, thank you for
17 defining what I meant.
18 MR. STERLING: I just wanted to
19 clarify.
20 It is perfectly legitimate for a
21 person to believe that drug use is immoral.
22 Many seventh day adventists and many
23 mormons believe that to use drugs is to profane the
24 body which is a temple of the holy spirit.
25 However to begin to pass laws to carry
30
1
2 out that religious dogma constitutes in some sense
3 an establishment of religion.
4 It also undermines religion.
5 For a church to say our teaching is so
6 we can, our doctrine is so flabby we have to rely
7 upon the policemen to enforce our doctrine is to say
8 we have a rather pale religion and our belief is not
9 very strong.
10 It is not the job of the state to
11 enforce the broad range of religious beliefs that we
12 have in 1965 there were laws in many states,
13 Connecticut, Massachusetts among them that said that
14 it's illegal to sell contraceptives to anyone, even
15 to a married couple.
16 In Griswald versus Connecticut, the
17 Supreme Court decided quite strongly even though
18 there is a strong moral sense that we would want to
19 prevent -- we want to enforce a kind of church
20 related doctrine concerning conception or we don't
21 want unmarried persons to engage in sex and we might
22 want them to be punished by disease or by unwanted
23 pregnancy in some sense, the Court recognized that
24 was not a sufficient basis for barring individuals
25 from making choices in this area.
31
1
2 The Court even talked about a penumbra
3 of First Amendment rights that include privacy in
4 that kind of situation.
5 What one has to say I think to the
6 African American community is that it is perfectly
7 okay for a mother and father to tell their children
8 that drug use is wrong and immoral and that it's
9 appropriate for churchs to teach that, but it's also
10 appropriate to point out that prohibition is
11 immoral.
12 That prohibition is immoral by
13 offering to African America youth who have
14 inadequate economic opportunities the opportunity of
15 selling drugs.
16 William Adler in his excellent book
17 about the Chambers crack cocaine gang a book called
18 Land of Opportunity which I commend to the
19 committee, Land of Opportunity was the story of poor
20 black share croppers from Arkansas who moved to
21 Detroit to the land of opportunity just at the time
22 the American auto industry goes down the toilet.
23 The Chambers brothers built a crack
24 cocaine organization involving hundreds of crack
25 houses and they only lasted for a couple of years.
32
1
2 But in their eyes and in the eyes of
3 the children they went to school with in Arkansas,
4 this was the glorious opportunity.
5 Prohibition is immoral. Prohibition,
6 if I can just conclude on the one point about this,
7 the essence of prohibition enforcement is that I
8 will, as a government agent, unbeknownst to you,
9 seek your trust in order to betray it.
10 The essence of prohibition enforcement
11 is to win the trust of citizens in order to betray
12 that trust.
13 That is immoral.
14 And prohibition is immoral in its
15 application and in its effects.
16 MR. BROWN: Another question, Mr.
17 Doyle?
18 MR. DOYLE: One question, Mr. Sterling
19 MR. BROWN: I would just ask to try to
20 make the questions and the answers as brief as
21 possible.
22 MR. STERLING: I'm sorry, Mr. Brown.
23 MR. DOYLE: Give us as specifically as
24 you can your model for regulation and whether it
25 would cover sale to minors and sale of crack.
33
1
2 THE WITNESS: I would not allow sale
3 to minors just as as I think enforcement and I
4 propose, for example, how I think juvenile drug
5 enforcement needs to be stepped up in the juvenile
6 section in the back of my paper.
7 We don't have to answer the question
8 of crack now. I am not in favor of it at this time.
9 It's important as we think about this
10 that we do not have to put forward a complete model
11 that handles all particulars.
12 That, it's in fact critically
13 important that we experiment.
14 Daniel Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller
15 in their book Undoing Drugs, suggest the value of
16 state experimentation in different ways of looking
17 at this.
18 Fortunately what's happening in
19 Switzerland and in Europe begins to allow us some
20 insight into what some of these experiments might
21 show.
22 That's my answer.
23 MR. BROWN: All right, thank you,
24 thank you Mr. Doyle.
25 Kathy?
34
1
2 MS. ROCKLEN: I would like to follow
3 up on John's question, because this is an issue that
4 the committee has struggle with quite a bit, which
5 is to say the subject of drug ingestion by minors
6 and by pregnant women.
7 I think it's fair to say the committee
8 is unanimous in its view that it cannot countenance
9 that kind of use.
10 The problem that that brings up for us
11 is that it still leaves an opportunity for illegal
12 sale of drugs which is one of the principal focuses
13 of our recommendations for decriminalization.
14 We recognize that there is no approach
15 for managing the drug problem that is a panacea, but
16 my question is do you have any ideas on how we would
17 deal with the minor problem and pregnant women as
18 well?
19 THE WITNESS: The first thing to sort
20 of recognize is that the objection is a bit of a red
21 herring.
22 To say that your approach is not going
23 to end the evils of prohibition because minors are
24 still going to get drugs misstates the approach,
25 which is to minimize harm and minimize the size of
35
1
2 criminal organizations.
3 Minors are a tiny fraction of the
4 total consumption of drugs at the current time.
5 If we are effective in eliminating
6 the -- by substituting -- if adult consumption
7 becomes legal and regulated, that becomes a
8 tremendous shrinking of the criminal organization,
9 that is progress.
10 If we cut the criminal market in half,
11 that is progress.
12 I mean it is not -- we don't have to
13 come up with one hundred percent elimination of
14 organized crime in order to satisfy somebody that
15 this is an improvement.
16 Minors involve a tiny, tiny fraction
17 of consumption.
18 In terms of how does one enforce
19 against minors and I suggest that when you have
20 instances of -- two things, A, I think that we think
21 about how dosage controls would have bar codes and
22 codes that would be assigned to consumers.
23 That you become responsible for the
24 drugs that are issued to you.
25 That that becomes a part of user
36
1
2 accountability and if drugs that are issued to you
3 get into the hands of minors, you are responsible
4 for explaining how that might have happened.
5 That we need to investigate these
6 kinds of matters much more effectively and I suggest
7 that in the juvenile portion of my paper.
8 MS. ROCKLEN: I just add one other
9 thought, which doesn't answer the question but maybe
10 helps answer our own question, I think that one of
11 the things we have emphasized is that by removing or
12 reallocating resources away from enforcement and
13 toward education and treatment, that that hopefully
14 will go a long way toward helping giving useful
15 guidance to minors.
16 I just have one housekeeping thing
17 before we turn back which is would every speaker see
18 me just for a moment after they are through.
19 I'm sorry, Ken.
20 MR. BROWN: We may have time for a
21 couple of more questions. Let me check with the
22 panel first.
23 Mr. Knapp, do you have a question?
24 MR. KNAPP: Just one, I will make it
25 brief.
37
1
2 Thank you.
3 Mr. Sterling, you were involved as you
4 said in federal regulations and legislation which
5 sought to declare by 1995 America would be drug
6 free, as you testified.
7 As a practical matter, I take it, that
8 one of the things you are suggesting is to remove
9 the Federal Government from the criminal law
10 process, set it back on to the states for state
11 experimentation, each state could be free to go its
12 own way.
13 What, if you would comment, as a
14 practical matter, how would you go about removing
15 the Federal Government from the criminal law aspects
16 of drug policy, other than, perhaps, following the
17 admonition of the former Vermont Senator who said
18 about the Vietnam war, let's declare victory and get
19 out, 1995 we said we would have a drug free America
20 so it's 1995, short of that, how do you recommend or
21 what would you do to remove the Federal Government's
22 arm?
23 MR. STERLING: To remove the Federal
24 Government is a suggestion of Benjamin and Miller,
25 that's not my suggestion, I don't think that that's
38
1
2 what we ought to do.
3 There is a -- I think there will
4 continue to be an urgent need for drug enforcement
5 in order to enforce the regulatory scheme, we have a
6 Securities and Exchange Commission, we have a whole
7 host of appropriate federal regulation of legal
8 kinds of industries and this is one where I think
9 there is an appropriate federal {roll|role} as well.
10 There will certainly be controls that
11 the customs service will have to bring concerning
12 importation.
13 My proposed mock license is a federal
14 license at the back of my paper.
15 MR. KNAPP: Thank you.
16 MR. BROWN: One question from the
17 panel by Mr. Salamon.
18 MR. SALOMON: Good morning.
19 MR. STERLING: Good morning.
20 MR. SALOMON: My question is simply
21 this, it addresses the last point that you made in
22 your testimony, which is to advance the dialogue on
23 the alternatives to prohibition.
24 How in the federal arena do you
25 propose to do so?
39
1
2 Other than by exercising your first
3 amendment rights to speak at forums such as this?
4 MR. STERLING: Mr. Salomon, is this
5 something that we can start debating on the floor of
6 the House of Representatives, is that the question?
7 MR. SALOMON: To eventually get there.
8 MR. STERLING: You are asking me then
9 a political question and the answer is the political
10 strategy is both for distinguished and responsible
11 groups like this association to continue the kind of
12 work that it's doing.
13 For groups like the drug policy
14 foundation and the Lindesman Center to do the work
15 that they do for NORML and for other groups that
16 they do, to do the work that they do.
17 It is a matter of continuing the
18 debate.
19 Congress listens to what's going on.
20 They don't like the debate because
21 they don't -- they don't like the debate, but the
22 point is that the public -- they are aware of it,
23 they are keenly aware of it.
24 The federal government has spent a lot
25 of money now to try to stop the legalization debate
40
1
2 by having a conference condemning legalization last
3 May in Atlanta and publishing booklets on how to
4 debate the legalizers.
5 From this state, Congress Jerry
6 Solomon the Chairman of the rules committee has
7 proposed that the tax exempt status of educational
8 organizations such as the drug policy foundation be
9 eliminated because they foster this kind of debate,
10 that's an unconstitutional proposal, but it gives
11 you a sense of how afraid they are.
12 In 1988 aside from declaring the
13 United States would be drug free in 1995, Congress
14 in two different places passed laws saying that the
15 discussion of legalization should be rejected.
16 This was in the anti-drug abuse act of
17 1988.
18 If Congress was passing the Navy
19 appropriation, they did not include language that
20 said it shall be forbidden to discuss or consider
21 the idea the earth is flat.
22 In the NASA appropriation they don't
23 say nobody shall discuss whether or not there are
24 UFO's or the moon is made of green cheese, because
25 those are not seriously powerful ideas.
41
1
2 The reason that Congress is
3 legislating against this is because it is a very
4 powerful idea and members of Congress are still very
5 afraid of this.
6 This is perhaps one of those third
7 rails of the political discussion right now, and it
8 will change, it will change as this kind of debate
9 takes place and I appreciate the opportunity to be
10 able to participate in it in this august forum.
11 MR. BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Sterling.
12 I would like to take a couple of
13 questions from the audience, the lady in the back
14 please if you could come to where the microphone is
15 and have it handed back to you.
16 THE AUDIENCE: I have two questions, I
17 am just a member of the general public.
18 Has anyone tried to get approval for
19 having heroin tested through the FDA or marijuana
20 tested through the FDA that it can be approved as a
21 drug for distribution on the same basis as any other
22 drug and the second question is alcohol can be
23 abused.
24 Why are we allowing the tax
25 deductability of alcohol for business if people want
42
1
2 to use it they can use it, but I don't think that it
3 should be tax deductible and I think that should be
4 retroactive for the last ten years.
5 MR. STERLING: Perhaps the way I could
6 respond to those questions is first I am not aware
7 of particular manufacturers attempting to bring
8 marijuana or heroin to the FDA.
9 There are research efforts underway to
10 test the efficacy and safety of marijuana in
11 different ways.
12 The multi disciplinary association for
13 psychadelic studies has financed some of those
14 research efforts and there may be discussion of that
15 later in the hearing.
16 With respect to your idea about
17 alcohol taxation, I think having suggested that to
18 this committee is worthwhile.
19 I don't know that I could be the best
20 person to comment on it.
21 MR. BROWN: One more question from the
22 audience the gentleman here in the front row.
23 THE AUDIENCE: Eric, you suggested
24 that for legal purposes driving impairment should be
25 measured with respect to one's unimpaired base line
43
1
2 performance.
3 Given that there are great disparities
4 in driving ability ordinarily and that there are
5 some people who can drive drunk better than some
6 other people driving sober, would it not be better
7 to measure absolute driving ability rather than
8 impairment?
9 THE WITNESS: That's a very good point
10 and I in my paper raise both of those as
11 hypotheticals and one of the questions that I had
12 was -- that everything not everything is good for
13 debate, rather than addressing everything
14 specifically and take a lot of time on it, you have
15 raised a very good question and it's one that this
16 committee and the public should continue to study
17 about how impairment testing should, in fact, be
18 set.
19 Whether on an individual base line or
20 on a kind of lowest common denominator basis.
21 MR. BROWN: Thank you very much.
22 We have no more time for questions
23 from audiences, thank you very much for coming today
24 Mr. Sterling, we appreciate your testimony.
25 MR. STERLING: Thank you, I have left
44
1
2 a few copies of my newsletter, news briefs outside
3 and I believe I have given copies to the committee.
4 And of a copy of my paper to the
5 Colorado Bar Association on the Bill of Rights.
6 Thank you very much.
7 MS. ROCKLEN: For those of you
8 standing in the back there are chairs available in
9 the front if you will like to see.
10 MR. BROWN: This morning there is
11 going to be a change in the program.
12 We had scheduled Robert Morgenthau to
13 be the first witness this morning, he was unable to
14 attend so Mr. Sterling who was the last speaker in
15 this morning's session was substituted and I
16 appreciate Mr. Sterling's willingness to do that.
17 We have now Mr. Mark Dwyer who is
18 appearing on behalf of Mr. Morgenthau, so all the
19 witnesses that were scheduled for certain time slips
20 we are just going to move you one-half hour forward
21 so that the 10:00 person will be at 10:30 and so
22 forth.
23 Does anybody have a problem with that
24 who is here now as a witness?
25 I hope not because we will just try to
45
1
2 be flexible with this and go with the next witness.
3 I would like to introduce Mr. Mark
4 Dwyer, he is the chief appeals bureau Assistant
5 District Attorney of the District Attorney's office
6 of Manhattan.
7 He's a long time member of the
8 District Attorney's office he went to Yale Law
9 School and clerked for now chief Judge Platt of the
10 Eastern District of New York.
11 Let's have a warm welcome for Mr.
12 Dwyer.
13 MR. DWYER: Thank you very much, first
14 of all Mr. Morgenthau apologizes for not being here,
15 I am sure you would -- I am sure you would much
16 rather hear from him in person I will ask if you
17 could to suspend imagination and imagine a silver
18 haired patrician respectable looking gentleman
19 reading their remarks, they are first person remarks
20 and I can guarantee you they do represent his views.
21 Thank you for the opportunity to share
22 my views with this morning on the future of our
23 nation's drug policy.
24 In particular the suggestion that
25 drugs should be legalized.
46
1
2 Let me begin by stating the obvious.
3 The illegal drug trade is wreaking
4 havoc in our city.
5 Each day's headlines write news of
6 gratuitous violence and unspeakable depravity.
7 For many citizens, domestic
8 tranquility has become a forgotten ideal.
9 I am convinced that legalizing drugs
10 will only aggravate these ills.
11 The answer to the drug problem is not
12 to legalize drugs but to enforce the laws that our
13 legislature has enacted against them.
14 Making narcotics cheaper and more
15 accessible, for that is what legalization
16 necessarily means, is a blueprint for social
17 catastrophe, it is a solution that promises more
18 malformed babies, more abused children, more
19 homeless persons wandering our streets and more
20 human misery.
21 Simply stated, it is no solution at
22 all.
23 When I became district attorney of New
24 York County in 1985, it was fashionable to consider
25 drug abuse a victimless crime.
47
1
2 The past twenty years have taught us
3 the folly of that view.
4 Drugs are not a victimless crime, but
5 a national pestilence.
6 Illegal drug use is a major cause of
7 infant fatalities and birth defects.
8 A 1991 study projects that more than
9 72,000 crack exposed babies will be born in New York
10 City by the end of this decade, requiring almost $2
11 billion in neonatal, special education and foster
12 care expenditures.
13 Drugs are also a prime cause of crime.
14 In Manhattan for the first six months
15 of 1995, eighty-four percent of the male and
16 eighty-seven percent of the female booked arrestees
17 tested positive for illegal drug use.
18 Seventy-three percent of the males and
19 seventy-four percent of the females tested positive
20 for cocaine.
21 These statistics debunk the notion
22 that anti-drug laws spawn more violence and crime
23 than drugs themselves.
24 Obviously some users commit crimes to
25 support their habits and while drug gangs do fight
48
1
2 over turf those crimes tell only a small part of the
3 story.
4 A far greater percentage of drug
5 crimes are caused by the effect of drugs on users.
6 It is drug use that fuels anti-social
7 behavior, not drug laws.
8 And drugs are a major contributing
9 factor in child abuse cases.
10 In three-quarters of such cases in our
11 city, one or both parents is addicted to drugs.
12 It is also shocking that the primary
13 cause of death for infants up to one year old is
14 homicide. Mostly by care givers.
15 Each week assistance in my family
16 crimes bureau receive reports of attacks on children
17 by their parents, child abuse and drugs go hand in
18 hand.
19 I am sure everyone here remembers the
20 case of Joel Steinberg and the atrocities he
21 inflicted upon his six year old girl Lisa.
22 A search of Steinberg's arrest
23 uncovered, cocaine, heroin and marijuana, as well as
24 a ether, a substance used in free basing cocaine,
25 not long after the Steinberg case my office
49
1
2 prosecuted an eighteen year old man who had raped
3 his one month old daughter after smoking crack
4 cocaine.
5 More recently a three year old baby
6 fell from its death from the window of a fifth floor
7 apartment, the parents rushing to make a midnight
8 crack purchase left the toddler alone in the
9 apartment with the window open.
10 The message from these and thousands
11 of cases like them are clear, drug addicts are
12 slaves to their next high, everything but the next
13 score is meaningless.
14 As Plato observed, far too great
15 liberty seems to change into nothing else than too
16 great slavery.
17 As for those who bemoan the cost of
18 fighting drugs in our country, look at the numbers.
19 Only $14 million has been requested in
20 the administration's budget to battle illegal drugs
21 next year, this is not a meaningful commitment.
22 Those who disagree fail to consider
23 the very real economic and social cost of drug use
24 in this country, costs that could be avoided with
25 the reduction of drug use.
50
1
2 Health care costs directly
3 attributable to illegal drugs exceed $30 billion
4 annually.
5 Given that each year roughly 500,000
6 newborns are expose exposed to illegal drugs in the
7 womb, this should come as no surprise.
8 Additionally, seventy percent of drug
9 users who work full or part-time and they experience
10 300 percent higher medical and benefits costs than
11 do drug free workers.
12 In 1991, lost productivity due to
13 illegal drugs totaled $50 billion.
14 Given these alarming statistics, how
15 can it possibly be said that we cannot afford to
16 wage war on illegal drugs?
17 The truth is just the opposite, we
18 cannot afford not to.
19 In the long run, I have no doubt that
20 the answer to the drug epidemic lies in educating
21 our children to the ills of illegal drugs and
22 offering them a future more promising and less
23 ephemoral than the euphoria of a crack high.
24 Education, however, is a slow process.
25 In the meantime, we require resources.
51
1
2 Resources for more police officers,
3 prosecutors and judges, more work camps and
4 treatment facilities.
5 The explosion of the prison population
6 is directly related to the lack of treatment
7 facilities, technically in prison.
8 Although sixty percent of all state
9 inmates have used illegal drugs regularly and thirty
10 percent were under the influence of drugs at the
11 time they committed the crime, fewer than twenty
12 percent of inmates with drug problems received any
13 treatment.
14 The solution to this problem, however,
15 is not to legalize drugs to achieve a short term
16 respite, rather we should use the criminal justice
17 system to force users into treatment.
18 I applaud the new sentencing
19 legislation in New York State that offers drug
20 treatment as an alternative to incarceration for
21 certain eligible Defendants.
22 Because of the nature of drug
23 addiction, few drug abusers seek treatment
24 themselves but many respond to the threat of jail.
25 When the criminal justice system is
52
1
2 used to encourage participation in treatment,
3 addicts are more likely to complete treatment and
4 stay off drugs.
5 I have addressed some of the tangible
6 consequences of decriminalization in my remarks
7 today, but I would like to end my remarks by
8 emphasizing one intangible but critical consequence,
9 decriminalization would send the message to our poor
10 and underprivileged, those most affected by our drug
11 epidemic that we don't care about you, your
12 communities or your children.
13 My experience in speaking with the
14 residents of various neighborhoods in New York have
15 underscored this point.
16 In fact, not too long ago, during an
17 East Harlem community meeting, a mother from the
18 neighborhood echoed this sentiment precisely.
19 When the subject of drug
20 decriminilazation arose, the mother asked, how can
21 you talk about making drugs legal?
22 How am I supposed to keep telling my
23 kids to study in school and stay away from drugs if
24 you go ahead and legalize them?
25 Why should my kids listen me when I
53
1
2 tell them drugs are bad if the government is saying
3 don't listen to your mother, drugs are okay.
4 That woman hit the nail on the head.
5 Law in a democratic society is
6 supposed to have a moral authority to send a message
7 that certain behavior is deserving of societal
8 punishment.
9 In the 1960's we passed civil rights
10 legislation, not only to affect legal change but
11 also to give notice that certain conduct is morally
12 unacceptable.
13 Recently we have been delivering the
14 same message through sexual harassment and hate
15 crime laws, likewise the law should support, not
16 undermine this mother and the millions of parents
17 like her.
18 It should help her send the right
19 message to her children, drugs are bad, they kill
20 and destroy lives.
21 At its core the legalization debate
22 raises critical questions about who we are as a
23 people, what values we embody and to what extent the
24 decisions we make today will reflect the needs of
25 our children.
54
1
2 Like racism, poverty, environmental
3 pollution and other intransigent social tragedies,
4 we have co-existed with rampant drug abuse without a
5 ready cure in sight yet we have never given up, nor
6 now with so much at stake should we resign ourselves
7 to passively accepting the chemical enslavement of a
8 generation of our people.
9 Such a posture would be heartless,
10 tantamount to consigning millions of parents and
11 children, scores of neighborhoods and communities to
12 a life of despair and disease.
13 Legalization would abandon whole
14 classes of Americans who suffer most from addiction,
15 specifically the young and the underprivileged.
16 We are all affected by the
17 consequences of drug abuse and addiction.
18 Because the costs are so high, the
19 problems so great and the damage so oftentimes self
20 inflicted the temptation to wash our hands of it is
21 tremendous, but because we live in a compassionate
22 and humane society our resolve to debate and defeat
23 drugs must be greater.
24 Still the solution to the drug problem
25 is not to stop fighting but instead to fight harder
55
1
2 and more creatively, there is too much at stake for
3 us to turn and walk away.
4 Thank you.
5 MR. BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Dwyer.
6 I am sure we have lots of questions
7 from the audience and from the panel for you.
8 I have one question from myself before
9 we go forward with any questions from the panel.
10 Do you know what percentages of the
11 drug cases that your office prosecutes are either
12 sale of marijuana cases or possession of marijuana
13 cases?
14 MR. DWYER: I don't have the
15 statistics on that.
16 MR. BROWN: Do you know the gross
17 numbers?
18 MR. DWYER: It's very small.
19 The percentage of cases, certainly
20 felony cases that involve marijuana.
21 MR. DWYER: Are you talking
22 prosecutions or arrests?
23 MR. DWYER: Prosecutions.
24 MR. BROWN: Do you know the number of
25 arrests?
56
1
2 MR. DWYER: No, I'm sorry, I do not.
3 Let me emphasize I am standing in at
4 the last minute for Mr. Morgenthau and therefore a
5 number of these questions questions involving
6 statistics I am just not going to be able to handle
7 for you, I apologize.
8 MR. BROWN: With that in mind and not
9 pressing you on that subject, let me see if I can
10 get some questions from the panel.
11 Eleanor?
12 MS. PEALE: I was overwhelmed by your
13 description of the horrors -- I was overwhelmed by
14 your description of the statistics of what drugs do
15 to crack babies, what they do to people and the
16 horrors of drug addiction.
17 My concern is since we have, as I
18 understand it, spent something like $100 billion in
19 the drug war since the twenties in trying to stop
20 drug abuse and all we have gotten is an increase in
21 the use, how does making drugs illegal help these
22 people who you have described are in such terrible
23 trouble and in our society?
24 MR. DWYER: Obviously those people who
25 have been addicted despite our efforts have not been
57
1
2 helped.
3 It's the people who are not able to
4 become addicted because the enforcement measures
5 have had some success that are being helped.
6 And it's the people who will become
7 addicted if we aren't more creative and spend enough
8 resources to make sure addiction decreases in the
9 future, it is the people who will become addicted
10 and their children who will suffer in the future.
11 Legalization would result in no
12 efforts to stop addiction and obviously no help at
13 all to anyone who might and their children, who
14 might become addicted.
15 MS. PEALE: This doesn't answer the
16 problem that I keep hearing that many addicts in
17 order to maintain their habit go out and solicit
18 more candidates for the use of the drugs.
19 I fail to see how we are being
20 creative when we create more prisons and have
21 prisons and have more prosecutions.
22 MR. DWYER: I think as Mr. Morgenthau
23 emphasizes in his remarks, we have to be creative in
24 not just sending people to prison, but in addition
25 to treating them and in educating children so the
58
1
2 future addicts decide not to become addicted.
3 MS. PEALE: Thank you.
4 MR. BROWN: Mr. Doyle.
5 MR. DOYLE: Mr. Dwyer, the committee
6 has been very concerned about resources and we all
7 agree I think there is a common ground of concern
8 about violence in the City cities.
9 The other concern is static or
10 diminishing resources to attack the problem and
11 specifically where is the funding going to come from
12 to increase both prisons, police, prosecutors,
13 judges and also to increase treatment facilities at
14 a time when the funds available for the entire
15 criminal justice system seem to be lessening rather
16 than increasing?
17 MR. DWYER: Obviously everywhere in
18 the criminal justice system we have difficulty
19 addressing the different sources for the funds that
20 will allow us to do the job.
21 It is shortsighted in the extreme not
22 to make those resources available when our society
23 loses so much more from drug abuse, in financial
24 terms, in moral terms, in purely human terms than
25 the amount we are spending on it.
59
1
2 It would only seem to me silly that
3 the Internal Revenue Service didn't higher more tax
4 enforcers, at least when I am in a public spirited
5 frame of mind, because every dollar spent on tax
6 enforcers produces $4 of revenue, $10 of revenue,
7 whatever the amount.
8 It seems to me similarly from a social
9 point of view it's ridiculous not to find the
10 resources to combat drugs when the cost of not
11 combating drugs is so much greater than the amount
12 of extra resources that we would funnel into the
13 fight.
14 MR. BROWN: Mr. Dwyer, could you try
15 speaking into the mike a little more for the
16 remainder of your answers to the questions.
17 Kathy?
18 MS. ROCKLEN: Yes, following up on I
19 think John Doyle's comments, our research suggests
20 that treatment and education are a dwindling part of
21 the drug program which is to say that what used to
22 get something like twenty-five percent of the total
23 available resources now gets fourteen percent of the
24 resources or less.
25 And one of your statements I found
60
1
2 pretty interesting, two sentences that you
3 juxtaposed which were illegal drug use costs infant
4 mortality and drug use causes crime.
5 Well, I don't think the legality or
6 illegality of drug use has anything to do with
7 infant mortality but I do think it's pretty clear
8 that prohibition has something to do with crime.
9 I think it's fair to say that this
10 committee would suggest that greater emphasis on
11 education and treatment would go a long way toward
12 helping addicted mothers and therefore alleviating
13 the problem of infant mortality as a result
14 mortality as it relates to infants and their
15 mother's and reducing illegal drug use as a result
16 of crime.
17 Do you have a comment on that?
18 MR. DWYER: It seems to me reducing
19 drug use is the answer, making drugs legal is not to
20 reduce drug use.
21 I certainly agree with you the amounts
22 of money available now for treatment and education
23 are inadequate in the extreme and that far more
24 resources should be put into education and
25 treatment.
61
1
2 But that is certainly not to say that
3 legalizing drug use would decrease drug use, far
4 from it, and to the extent drug use increases, to
5 that extent we have more addicts and we have more
6 crack babies.
7 MR. BROWN: All right, Mr. Knapp.
8 MR. KNAPP: Thank you.
9 Mr. Dwyer, I appreciate your standing
10 in for Mr. Morgenthau, so the questions I may be
11 asking you are somewhat unfair.
12 MR. DWYER: I would by the way make
13 note of all the questions that call for expertise
14 well beyond mine and we will see if we can get the
15 commission some answers from the people with that
16 expertise.
17 MR. KNAPP: I appreciate that.
18 One of the statements that Mr.
19 Morgenthau made in his remarks which you delivered
20 was linking the percentages of males and females who
21 test positive for illegal substances and those who
22 commit felonies who tested positively, particularly
23 for cocaine.
24 I would just and this is going to be
25 one of the questions which will require a subsequent
62
1
2 response, I don't know if right off the bat you will
3 be able to field it.
4 In our report at footnote 90, there is
5 a statement from researchers working with the New
6 York City Police Department who analyzed
7 approximately one quarter of the 1988 homocides in
8 our city, it was by Zelakin & Alexander and it was
9 published in new frontiers in drug policy.
10 They distinguish five different types
11 of relationships between drug and murder, the psycho
12 pharmocological refers to people who are actually on
13 drugs committing in this case murder and what they
14 call the economic compulsives are people who would
15 go out, commit violate crimes to get the money to
16 purchase drugs.
17 Systemic referred to in their words,
18 instances in which a dealer or user became violent
19 in order to compete within a violent black market.
20 Then there were two other categories.
21 Their conclusion was that the
22 overwhelming number of murders did not fit the
23 pharmocological model and did not fit the economic
24 compulsive model but indeed fit the systemic model,
25 namely that the link was not between being on drugs
63
1
2 and committing a crime, but I suppose what could be
3 more generally called the turf war to establish
4 outlets and those kinds of things, and that seems to
5 be in contradiction to the survey that Mr.
6 Morgenthau was relying on, though this deals solely
7 with homicide.
8 MR. DWYER: We have made a major
9 priority in our office to attack drug gangs in
10 Manhattan, I know that's not the focus of this
11 commission's work so I won't talk about the efforts
12 we have made with our homicide division to do that.
13 I think quite succesfully, if you are
14 talking homicide that's true or I will take your
15 word that's true, that drug gangs kill, but the drug
16 gangs kill and people who are on drugs do not
17 necessarily go crazy in homocidal rampages, but I
18 think we are not talking about just homocides which
19 are a very unique category of crime.
20 We are talking about the burglaries
21 and the robberies, we are talking about the
22 assaults, we are talking about the lesser grade
23 felonies where homocide -- where drug use seems to
24 be hand in hand with criminal conduct and again the
25 percentages of the arresting individuals in New York
64
1
2 City who are on narcotics at the time is amazingly
3 high.
4 I gave you the numbers, they were in
5 the seventy and eighty percent range, those numbers
6 are amazingly high and I think they show a definite
7 link between drug use and the commission of the
8 crimes, if not homocides.
9 MR. KNAPP: One final question and I
10 will turn it over to Mr. Salomon.
11 The -- as I recall the rule at common
12 law was that intoxication was no defense to specific
13 intent, that was changed at some point by our
14 legislature.
15 Would and again this might be an
16 unfair question because I am asking you to speak on
17 behalf of the District Attorney's office, would the
18 office be in favor of going back to a rule more
19 consistent with the common law where being under the
20 influence of either alcohol or drugs would not be a
21 defense to specific intent crimes?
22 I will just have you ponder that.
23 MR. DWYER: Let me say that's at least
24 one question where my experience in the District
25 Attorney's office has some relevance at least
65
1
2 because I see the appeals over the last eighteen
3 years from those who are convicted.
4 My impression is there are very few
5 Defendants who escape punishment on the theory that
6 they are so intoxicated or so much under the
7 influence of drugs that they cannot form a criminal
8 intent.
9 That by the way is the standard in New
10 York, you have to be so intoxicated that you can't
11 intend to tie your shoes and then when you kill
12 someone it will be said that you can't be said to
13 intend to commit murder or when you rob someone you
14 can't intend to rob, then again it's pretty hard to
15 pull off a robbery when you are so intoxicated.
16 I don't think that's been a major
17 factor in our efforts to combat these kind of
18 crimes, whether that -- that would be outside my
19 expertise and I would not state a position for the
20 District Attorney's office on that.
21 MR. BROWN: Thank you, Chester.
22 MR. SALOMON: Good morning, Mr. Dwyer.
23 MR. DWYER: Good morning.
24 MR. SALOMON: Just a couple of
25 questions.
66
1
2 You said that drugs are a major cause
3 of crime, but I would ask you to comment on whether
4 you believe that perhaps the drug laws, the
5 restrictive quality, the prohibitive quality of the
6 drug laws are themselves a major cause of crime?
7 MR. DWYER: If you mean if we
8 decrminilize drugs would we have fewer crimes
9 committed in New York City, I think the answer is
10 obvious.
11 I assume you have something beyond
12 that?
13 MR. SALOMON: You had also mentioned
14 that legalization would result in no efforts to
15 advance education and reduce addicts.
16 I am wondering if that just assumes
17 that there would be no effort done.
18 Is your idea of a world so polarized
19 it would be the current system as opposed to
20 absolute laissez fare, or is there a possibility
21 that there might be treatment and education
22 available with the resources that would not be used
23 on criminal enforcement?
24 MR. DWYER: Obviously again we think
25 devoting more resources to treatment and to
67
1
2 education is a wonderful idea.
3 It doesn't seem to me to make sense to
4 decrminilize drugs on the theory that law
5 enforcement budgets will fall and that money will be
6 allocated to education and treatment and that the
7 people who do not voluntarily seek treatment now
8 will suddenly voluntarily seek treatment because
9 it's not criminal to use drugs any more.
10 It seems to me more education and
11 treatment is definitely the answer, but that seems
12 to me also to be independent of the question of
13 whether you decrminilize narcotics.
14 In fact, as Mr. Morgenthau suggested,
15 the one thing that does seem to have an impact on
16 someone who is facing state prison time, the one
17 thing that does seem to have an impact on whether he
18 will get treatment or not is the ability to tell him
19 if you successfully go through a treatment program
20 you won't have to do the state prison time.
21 That's quite an incentive and
22 obviously by decriminilizing drugs you eliminate
23 that incentive.
24 MR. SALOMON: One last question, are
25 you familiar with the legislation that has been
68
1
2 proposed by Senator Galliber concerning the
3 controlled substance authority?
4 MR. DWYER: I can't say that I am.
5 MR. SALOMON: Thank you.
6 MR. BROWN: I think we have time for
7 maybe two questions from the audience, the gentleman
8 over here.
9 MR. BROWN: I would ask everyone not
10 to make speeches, just brief questions and brief
11 answers.
12 THE AUDIENCE: I will shorten this as
13 much as possible, I have a lot of questions about
14 what you said.
15 Would you agree first of all that if
16 you substitute alcohol for drugs in your numbers in
17 terms of use rates among people who commit crimes
18 and so forth that your numbers would come up very
19 similar and do you therefore -- does Mr. Morgenthau
20 therefore suggest that prohibition of alcohol may be
21 a way we can eliminate a lot of the problems of
22 society that are directly related to alcohol abuse?
23 My second is you talked a lot about
24 crack or a little about crack this morning and would
25 you agree or would Mr. Morgenthau agree that crack
69
1
2 is a product itself of prohibition, much as
3 moonshine whiskey or corn liquor was a product of
4 alcohol prohibition.
5 Once those prohibitions are lifted,
6 people will inherently look for a safer way to
7 selfmedicate or to intoxicate themselves, or do you
8 believe that drug users are so self destructive even
9 given a range of safe options they will absolutely
10 decide to destroy their lives and their futures and
11 their families and in which case if you agree with
12 that do prisons make a difference anyway?
13 MR. DWYER: I guess the short answer
14 is it I would probably disagree substantially on a
15 lot of the aspects of your question.
16 Certainly the question of alcohol
17 abuse and what should be done know about it is a
18 question independent of the crack problem.
19 I am not here to take a position on
20 whether alcohol abuse should or should not be legal
21 or illegal.
22 I am simply here to talk about crack
23 abuse, heroin abuse, other cocaine abuse where we
24 know the devastating impacts it has now on society,
25 impacts that we think would be increased if there
70
1
2 were legalization.
3 As to whether crack is a product of
4 prohibition, it seems to me that we are dealing in a
5 world now where crack is a reality, where people
6 have choices in the type of drug they take and where
7 people take crack.
8 I don't see how making all narcotics
9 legal would suddenly cause people who have some
10 choices now to say well no more crack for me, and by
11 the way if everybody then shifted to heroin or
12 simple cocaine use, I am not sure that's much of a
13 solution to the economic, moral and human problems
14 that drug abuse causes.
15 MR. BROWN: Because I know the
16 gentleman would like to follow up I would like to
17 try to clarify maybe a point that you would like to
18 make, would you give him the microphone one second.
19 THE AUDIENCE: I would very briefly
20 disagree in terms of the fact that crack is the
21 cheap and available substance, especially if you are
22 talking about poor communities in this country and
23 that it's creation was directly related to the fact
24 it's easy to sneak around, it's potent and it is
25 cheap.
71
1
2 So therefore between my analogy to the
3 moonshine alcohol problem, do you then believe that
4 crack is a choice of people, that people have
5 decided to destroy their lives regardless of the
6 consequences and have chosen to do the substance
7 which is inherently harmful?
8 If that's the case, then if that's
9 people's choice, what good is prison to do or the
10 threat of prison if these people have already
11 disregarded the consequences or any future they
12 might have?
13 MR. DWYER: Again, we face a reality
14 in which there are many crack addicts it may or may
15 not be that prison or treatment will help some crack
16 addicts, hopefully education and treatment will
17 prevent future crack addicts, not necessarily those
18 who are now in the habit.
19 I am interested in your notion that
20 crack use would disappear if all drugs were legal.
21 I certainly have no basis for thinking
22 that that's anything but a wish.
23 MR. BROWN: Okay, maybe one more
24 question from the audience.
25 How about the lady in the back.
72
1
2 THE AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Dawn
3 Day, I am interested in prosecutorial discretion.
4 Here is an example an adult places a
5 loaded gun on the television set in the presence of
6 an eight year old and a two year old, the adult
7 leaves the room and the eight year old shoots and
8 kills the two year old.
9 If the adult who put the gun on the
10 television set was -- can you tell me now whether
11 you would prosecutor the adult as a murderer?
12 MR. DWYER: Certainly not as a
13 murderer, and there is no particular reason for me
14 to tell the details of the criminal statutes but
15 there are homocide statutes that might cover that
16 situation and I suppose depending on all the
17 circumstances of the case there is a real
18 possibility that at least a criminally negligent
19 homocide charge would stand against that result.
20 THE AUDIENCE: Would there be a
21 difference whether that person was someone who was
22 alleged to have been selling crack versus a woman of
23 virtue who was defending herself and her family by
24 having a gun and keeping out intruders.
25 MR. DWYER: I am not quite sure but
73
1
2 you mean if someone sells crack and it ends up --
3 THE AUDIENCE: It is alleged the
4 person sells crack, there is no crack in the house
5 but the prosecutor is given the information by the
6 police that the police think he's on crack, versus a
7 woman who says I am afraid I might be raped?
8 MR. DWYER: I'm sorry, I still don't
9 understand.
10 In your crack example are we assuming
11 a crack dealer?
12 MR. KNAPP: If I might, I think the
13 issue is an exercise in your discretion the reason
14 the gun happens to be in the house scenario A is the
15 person is a crack dealer and that's why the loaded
16 gun is there, scenario B it's a woman who lives in a
17 dangerous neighborhood who has purchased a hand gun
18 to defend the house.
19 MR. DWYER: Obviously that's what I
20 meant when I said the facts of the particular case
21 which will be certainly unique in a situation like
22 the example you posit would all be taken into
23 account in deciding what the charge was.
24 I have to think the individual who is
25 protecting his crack stash would face much less
74
1
2 sympathy from prosecutors, grand jurors and jurors
3 than the woman of virtue who is merely protecting
4 her household.
5 MR. BROWN: We have time for one more
6 question.
7 I will take the gentleman in the
8 front.
9 THE AUDIENCE: One of the reasons you
10 gave for your problems with cocaine was the problem
11 of crack babies.
12 You said that cocaine is producing
13 these crack babies who have medical problems which
14 are of great harm total child and great expense.
15 I was at the American psychological
16 association meeting about a month ago and I spoke to
17 a researcher from I believe he was the from the
18 centers for disease control and he said that he had
19 researched the literature on the effect of cocaine
20 and fetuses and he couldn't find anything.
21 So he did research with rhesus monkies
22 and he gave rhesus monkies levels of cocaine equal
23 to that which would be found among the crack users
24 and he found out that the monkies which were exposed
25 prenataly to cocaine were about as healthy as the
75
1
2 monkies who were not.
3 He found in the first animal study
4 that cocaine didn't apparently harm fetuses.
5 MR. DWYER: Has he ever been to a
6 hospital ward in New York City and looked at crack
7 babies?
8 THE AUDIENCE: Well, that's all
9 anecdotal evidence and you can look at the medical
10 literature, it's been examined.
11 I spoke to prosecutors who told me
12 that yes, well maybe it's not cocaine but women who
13 use cocaine are going to take less care of their
14 children, that's the argument that prosecutors have
15 told me.
16 MR. DWYER: That he is not the
17 argument I have made.
18 THE AUDIENCE: The question for you is
19 is there any good scientific evidence that cocaine
20 absent the social context in which people have to
21 obtain and use cocaine, does any harm to fetuses?
22 The answer from the centers for
23 disease control researcher was according to the
24 medical researcher no.
25 MR. DWYER: We will certainly get you
76
1
2 information or get the commission information about
3 that.
4 I am a new father, I had a baby about
5 ten days ago and if my wife had wanted to take crack
6 during her pregnancy I would have knocked the vial
7 out of her hand.
8 I am certainly willing to keep an open
9 mind in the face of scientific research, but I think
10 it's silly to think that drug use does not affect
11 babies.
12 THE AUDIENCE: You could not know --
13 MR. BROWN: Excuse me, in the interest
14 of time let's move on.
15 Thank you very much, sir.
16 Mr. Dwyer, thank you very much for
17 coming today and we appreciate your presence.
18 The next person on our program is Mr.
19 Ethan Nadelmann.
20 Mr. Ethan Nadelmann is a doctor here
21 in New York which is a project of the Saurus
22 Foundation.
23 Mr. Nadelmann has written extensively
24 on drug policy and appeared in a wide range of
25 interest including science foreign policy the public
77
1
2 interest, headlines in the Washington Post, Los
3 Angeles Times and International Herald Tribune.
4 He wrote an article with Joan Warner
5 called Drugs in America, it was in Rolling Stone, he
6 is a coeditor of psychoactive drugs and harm
7 reduction from faith to science from 1987 to 1994
8 Mr. Nadelmann was Assistant Professor of Politics
9 and Public Policy in the Woodrow Wilson School at
10 Princeton University.
11 He was born in New York, attended
12 Magill University, received his BA from Harvard
13 University has a JD and PhD in political science
14 from Harvard and received his masters from the
15 Lonton School of Economics.
16 Everyone please give a warm welcome to
17 Mr. Ethan Nadelmann.
18 MR. NADELMANN: I want to thank the
19 committee for inviting me and also for having the
20 courage to hold hearings on this controversial
21 subject and to invite a number of witnesses who are
22 not defenders but critics of current drug control
23 policies.
24 Now I think in my presentation what
25 would be most useful is to talk about the lessons of
78
1
2 foreign countries, a subject which Eric Sterling
3 alluded briefly and to talk about what we might
4 learn from them and to talk as well about what
5 middle ground options exist in New York City and in
6 the country.
7 It is important, of course, to
8 understand that the alternative defenses are not
9 simply between a free market libertarian
10 legalization scheme on the one hand and a harsh war
11 on drugs approach, take no prisoners on the other
12 hand.
13 In fact there are a range of options
14 and those options are oftentimes labeled as the harm
15 reduction approach to drug legalization policy.
16 Now having heard the statement by Mr.
17 Morgenthau, it's important to say a few words about
18 that.
19 Mr. Morgenthau is obviously a very,
20 very distinguished New Yorker and American in his
21 position as a chief federal prosecutor and District
22 Attorney in New York.
23 He should be credited with the
24 dramatic improvements in crime rates in New York in
25 recent years, together with the Mayor and the police
79
1
2 chief.
3 He is right to speak about the horrors
4 that attend drug addiction, both legal and illegal;
5 the harms that result.
6 But what is so sad is to present to
7 this committee in 1995 a statement containing such
8 worn over, undated, unsubstantiated rhetoric as we
9 just heard here.
10 To speak about drug use as the cause
11 of all the drug related problems in New York City as
12 opposed to looking at the drug prohibition system,
13 the war on drugs, the inadequacy of alternatives to
14 incarceration, to fail to look at the social
15 conditions and the draining of resources into war on
16 drugs as opposed to the implementation of resources
17 into more productive areas, to offer facile comments
18 concerning more education and treatment while his
19 office no doubt demands more and more law
20 enforcement resources, to speak about child abuse
21 and the Steinberg case and a few other sensational
22 cases, tremendous tragedies no doubt as are many
23 hundreds like them, but to ignore the role that
24 alcohol, a legal drug has placed in far greater ways
25 in this city, in this country.
80
1
2 To talk about drug addicts as slaves
3 and therefore to deamonize hundreds and hundreds of
4 thousands of New Yorkers who use drugs but also do
5 try to take care of their children, do try to manage
6 their lives, to talk about them as slaves and user
7 rhetoric that only aids and abets the deamonization
8 of drug users and opposition to productive public
9 health policies.
10 These are all things that in some
11 respects the committee should regard as an insult.
12 To speak about the crack baby issue
13 when the most recent issue overwhelmingly shows that
14 it is almost impossible to distinguish children born
15 in the poverty the dreadful poverty of New York City
16 who have been exposed to crack from those who have
17 not been exposed to crack and therefore justify a
18 punitive public that incarcerates tens of thousands
19 is once again a farce.
20 To talk about drug related homocides
21 and violence but to ignore all the evidence, whether
22 it's the evidence of Paul Goldstein studies in the
23 late 1980's or the more recent study in The New York
24 Times about the relationship between gun ownership,
25 gun use and drug use and drug dealing is a farce.
81
1
2 There is tremendous evidence,
3 tremendous evidence yes to be sure there is no
4 absolutely certain evidence that shows that if we
5 legalize drugs whether as we legalize the way Milton
6 Freeman would like it with a free market or in a
7 much more regulated controlled way there is no
8 overwhelming evidence that drug abuse will not rise
9 in some significant way subsequent to today.
10 But there is also substantial to tout
11 that, evidence from our own historical expense,
12 evidence from looking at the experience of
13 decriminilazation in the United States and
14 elsewhere, evidence from looking at the ways people
15 respond to other drugs and other substances that
16 lend themselves to addiction.
17 To advocate no more than treatment in
18 prisons, something on which the evidence for
19 efficacy is remarkably flimsy, something which is
20 remarkably more expensive than treatment outside of
21 prison because prisons cost so much more money,
22 something which entirely ignores the recommendations
23 of the national Academy of Sciences, its institute
24 of medicine, of most of the leading social
25 scientists that are there are more cost effective
82
1
2 and more humane approaches to dealing with drug
3 abuse.
4 This is not the type of statements
5 that should come from the District Attorney of New
6 York City.
7 I was not aware of the extent to which
8 Mr. Morgenthau played a role in New York City's
9 dreadful drug policy.
10 When one goes to Europe, one sees in
11 some cities at least alternative models.
12 One sees a recognition, for example,
13 that drugs are here to stay, that drugs have always
14 been here and always will be here and that the
15 objective of government policy should not be to
16 eradicate drugs, because that cannot be done, that
17 the objective of government policy should not be
18 solely to reduce drug use no matter what the
19 consequences come hell or high water.
20 But that in fact the objectives of
21 government policy should be to reduce the negative
22 consequences of drug use and the negative
23 consequences of our drug policies.
24 That whether one is dealing with
25 marijuana users, alcohol users, heroin users,
83
1
2 cocaine users or what have you, the objectives
3 should be to reduce the death, the disease and the
4 crime associated with drug use.
5 That when one proposes incarceration
6 of drug users or minor drug dealers, that one needs
7 to understand that these come with dramatic costs,
8 they come with a dollar cost of putting people in
9 prison for one, five, ten, twenty years or lifetime,
10 they come with a dollar and humane cost of ripping
11 families apart so that family members can be sent to
12 prison while their children are sent into the social
13 welfare system or social care system are left
14 without parents.
15 They ignore the fact demonstrated in
16 the research of Peter Reuter and of the Rand
17 Commission that many small drug dealers also hold
18 legitimate jobs and moonlight.
19 They ignore the evidence that many
20 drug dealers would prefer not to be drug dealers and
21 they regard this as a means of earning income than
22 is reprehensible than engaging in predatory crime.
23 One sees at least in some cities an
24 alternative model.
25 I don't want to idealize it because
84
1
2 all European cities also have significant drug
3 problems, although virtually none have problems of
4 the magnitude of New York City.
5 In fact, let me correct that and say
6 none have drug problems of the magnitude of New York
7 City.
8 But there is a notion of cooperation
9 between the head of the Public Health Department,
10 the head of the police, the prosecutor, the mayor
11 that they should cooperate.
12 Let me give you an example.
13 We have known for a long time that
14 making sterile syringes available to drug addicts
15 rereduces the transmission of AIDS and also provides
16 some lure into drug treatment.
17 Some means of maintaining contact with
18 very down and out drug addicts.
19 In the early 1980's the Dutch
20 confronted not with AIDS but with a hepatitis
21 epidemic started making sterile syringes available
22 to drug addicts when they realized the connection
23 between drug aducks and HIV they made syringes as
24 available as possible to their injecting drug
25 addicts.
85
1
2 Virtually every other advanced
3 industrialized democracy followed quickly with the
4 exception of the United States.
5 Now last month the National Academy of
6 Sciences comes out with a comprehensive report
7 saying that needle exchange reduces the transmission
8 of HIV and it saves lives.
9 That confirms the conclusions of a
10 previous report sponsored by the center of disease
11 control, it confirms dozens of other social
12 scientific studies in other countries and it
13 confirms common sense.
14 It is so crucially important that law
15 enforcement officials be they prosecutors or police
16 be the ones to step forward and say our interest is
17 not only enforcing the laws mindlessly without
18 regard to consequence, but that our obligation is
19 the public health, is the preservation of life, is
20 the reduction of disease and death.
21 It should have been incumbent upon Mr.
22 Morgenthau to stand up with the mayor and the police
23 chief and say we support needle exchange.
24 We have no leg to stand on not to
25 support needle exchange.
86
1
2 We need to provide the leadership with
3 our prosecutors and our police officials so that
4 they no longer persecute people found in possession
5 of sterile syringes, people trying to prevent the
6 spread of disease even as they are beholden to an
7 aaddictive drug.
8 Last month many of you may have seen
9 on the front page of the New York Times a report on
10 the study out of Connecticut that demonstrated that
11 Connecticut in repealing the requirement for a
12 prescription to obtain a sterile syringe has
13 successfully contributed as well to an effort to
14 reduce the spread of HIV.
15 In other words that in repealing a law
16 that is on the books in New York and about nine
17 other states, a law that requires anybody to obtain
18 a prescription to get a sterile syringe, that in
19 repealing that law they were making positive steps
20 forward in the public health direction.
21 Is it not incumbent upon Mr.
22 Morgenthau and Mr. Braden and the mayor for that
23 matter to stand up and to say to the state
24 legislature, we need a change in that State Law.
25 We are burdened by the human and
87
1
2 economic costs of HIV and AIDS in New York City and
3 we need that change.
4 When Mr. Morgenthau spoke about
5 treatment, treatment in prisons he failed to mention
6 last year the National Academny of Sciences came out
7 with a report on that subject as well.
8 It found that methadone is the most
9 cost effective and most effective treatment for
10 heroin addiction that we have.
11 It's no panacea, it can be used and
12 implemented in all sorts of sordid and terrible and
13 destructive and manipulative ways, but the bottom
14 line is that making methadone readily available to
15 heroin addicts, even heroin addicts who also use
16 cocaine can reduce the death, disease and crime
17 associated with heroin addiction.
18 Should Mr. Morganthau stand up and say
19 it's time to expand methadone availability?
20 When neighborhoods say we don't want a
21 methadone clinic in our neighborhood, is he the
22 person who stands up and says that will help reduce
23 crime in your neighborhood, look at the evidence?
24 The panel asked before us the question
25 how can we move forward?
88
1
2 How can we move forward?
3 Well, I think you are doing the right
4 thing in convening a public hearing.
5 I think the only way we move forward
6 is by holding hearings and writing letters to the
7 newspapers and to politicians, by continually
8 putting this issue up before the American public
9 before five people, ten people, 1,000 people, 1
10 million people, whatever the medium, whatever the
11 fora maybe, the federal and other government
12 officials have been engaged in a fairly systematic
13 effort to withdraw from any participation in this
14 dialogue.
15 Let me just give you a few examples.
16 Let me back up what I say with
17 evidence.
18 In May of 1994 the World Bank had
19 convened a conference on the econometric aspects of
20 the drug trade in Latin America.
21 A young official there had invited the
22 prosecutor general of Columbia who captured Escobar,
23 who had reformed the criminal justice system but
24 also called for a debate on legalization and invited
25 him to speak.
89
1
2 Four days before the conference was
3 set to proceed pressures came from the State
4 Department on the World Bank we don't like the fact
5 that Mr. Degrape has been invited, do something.
6 The result, conference cancelled with
7 four days' notice.
8 With people having flown into the
9 United States and having prepared papers.
10 My colleagues at Princeton told me
11 they had never heard of a similar situation of a
12 world bank conference on the econometric aspects of
13 anything being cancelled with four days' notice as a
14 result of political pressure from the U.S.
15 Government.
16 In December of last year, the United
17 States drug control program convened a meeting in
18 Bangkok.
19 It was proposed that one among dozens
20 of panels be held on the subject of drug
21 legalization and other alternatives to
22 proprohibition.
23 Hold such a hearing the U.S. delegates
24 threatened and we withdraw all support for this
25 conference.
90
1
2 The panel was cancelled.
3 The next day it was proposed by a
4 delegate from Latin America that the resolution
5 should speak about efforts to demand reduction,
6 supply reduction and harm reduction.
7 We refused to sign any statement that
8 mentions harm reduction was the input of the
9 American delegation.
10 In the spring of this year the World
11 Health Organization started a multicountry study of
12 cocaine use around the world.
13 They came to two conclusions that are
14 not surprising based upon the scientific evidence
15 but that are controversial politically.
16 First that although millions of people
17 have serious problems with cocaine, the vast
18 majority of people who use cocaine have no problem
19 whatsoever.
20 Secondly, that the chewing of coca,
21 the leaf from the coca plant from which cocaine is
22 made is associated with few if any negative
23 consequences.
24 The response of the United States
25 Government to attempt to keep this report from being
91
1
2 officially released.
3 Eric Sterling spoke of the efforts of
4 the DEA to come out with booklet's to educate their
5 agents on how to hold their own in a drug
6 legalization debate.
7 Mind you, it's a rare DEA agent who
8 ever concedes, consents to debate me or many of the
9 other people who will speak before this forum.
10 The DEA agents feel they are losing
11 the debate without even debating it.
12 The reason being that ordinary
13 Americans not technically schooled in all the facts
14 and figures are standing up in public forums and
15 saying this war on drugs is absurd.
16 It's a farce.
17 You have had it for ten years, you
18 have had it for twenty years, you have had it for
19 much of this century and where is the evidence that
20 it works?
21 Let me stop there so I can open this
22 up to greater question and discussion.
23 MR. BROWN: Thank you.
24 Before we we take questions from the
25 audience let's go down the panel, Eleanor, do you
92
1
2 have any questions?
3 MS. PEALE: I do.
4 Mr. Nadelmann, you were very eloquent
5 in telling us about the problems that we face and it
6 seems to me that you made it clear that we have a
7 political problem with regard to people's approach
8 to the drug issue and you used as your stalking
9 horse our District Attorney and you mentioned the
10 use of the word demonization in regard to the drug
11 issue.
12 As a sociologist, how do you explain
13 and what can we do about it, the fact that the
14 United States is alone in taking the policies that
15 you have described at your national meetings, in
16 appropriating the money that it has appropriated in
17 the drug war to call it a drug war.
18 As a sociologist, what is the answer
19 to Americans understanding and perhaps taking a
20 different position?
21 THE WITNESS: Mrs. Peale, I actually
22 would be honored to be a sociologist but my degrees
23 are actually in law and political science.
24 But perhaps that enables me to explain
25 this just as well, because it does boil down to
93
1
2 politics and people's views.
3 There is no one single explanation.
4 The first issue, perhaps, is that
5 mainstream medicine has been barely at the sidelines
6 of drug policy in the United States.
7 Mainstream medicine, the American
8 Medical Association and others, can be enormously
9 powerful in this country, as we well know in looking
10 at the debates over health care problems and what
11 have you.
12 But they have been remarkably silent
13 in the issue of drug policy and drug policy reform.
14 I believe it is now the case that the
15 AMA has a resolution in favor of needle exchange,
16 but it has not spoken out in any way, it has not
17 assumed any responsibility for this.
18 I do not know why that is not the
19 case.
20 I do not know why that is not the
21 case, except to say that most doctors in America
22 don't deal with this population and don't feel any
23 ownership of it.
24 Secondly, our history is one of
25 treating drugs very much as a criminal justice
94
1
2 issue.
3 Although there were legitimate public
4 health rationales underlying the prohibition of the
5 recognition of open gates could be addictive that
6 cocaine could be dangerous, the moralistic impulse,
7 the racism impulses were far more powerful.
8 We have always had a drug policy
9 dominated by the criminal justice establishment.
10 In the Netherlands the person in
11 charge of drug policy is a public health person also
12 responsible for alcohol and tobacco.
13 In the United States, most drug
14 enforcement, most drug policy comes within the
15 purview of the criminal justice agency.
16 It is up to the drug enforcement
17 administration, a law enforcement agency, of police
18 to determine how drugs are made available and what
19 schedule they will be placed.
20 It is up to the DEA to determine
21 whether or not marijuana will be rescheduled to make
22 it available for medical purposes.
23 To some very good extent, medical
24 professionals are intimidated by the DEA.
25 They fear that if they prescribe drugs
95
1
2 in adequate doses for pain they may be persecuted
3 and prosecuted by the DEA.
4 Let me point to a third factor.
5 Some people say the United States,
6 like most societies but perhaps more than most,
7 always needs a scapegoat, we always need a
8 scapegoat.
9 Communists provided a very powerful
10 scapegoat for many decades, so do drug addicts, drug
11 users, drug dealers.
12 In fact, it's interesting to note that
13 these two often go hand in hand.
14 I believe it was in the early 1920's
15 that a commission what was appointed in New York
16 City, I believe by the mayor at that time, to look
17 at the twin threats of Bolshevism and drug dealing.
18 These are convenient scapegoats, there
19 is some understanding behind them.
20 After all the communist threat was
21 from abroad just as drugs do sometimes come from
22 abroad, but the communists were not lapping at our
23 boarders.
24 The drugs from abroad played only a
25 small role in understanding the drug addiction in
96
1
2 America.
3 After all, if there were no drugs
4 being imported into the United States we would very
5 quickly have domestic substitutes that were as
6 dangerous or perhaps more dangerous.
7 Domestically we did have problems with
8 communist spies and what have you but there was not
9 a communist under every bed.
10 Same in the United States with drugs.
11 Yes, drug addiction is a very serious
12 problem, very horrible problem, but our children are
13 not all drug addicts, we have far more severe crises
14 than this.
15 Now Eric Sterling also alluded to one
16 more factor, which is the African American community
17 Here it's important to be especially
18 precise.
19 There is no African American
20 community, singular, to speak of.
21 Some African Americans, the former
22 certain general, Jocelyn Elders the mayor of
23 Baltimore, Kirk Smoke, the State Senator from New
24 York, Joe Galliber, many other in addition to them
25 the first Congressmen to speak out for public policy
97
1
2 reforms, George Crockett have been leading
3 proponents to looking at alternatives to current
4 drug policies, but at the same time many African
5 American leaders notably in Harlem have been the
6 most outspoken opponents to any discussion or
7 movement in the way of drug policy reform.
8 Even as it is primarily or in a very
9 substantial way African American youth who are being
10 incarcerated, who are losing their futures, who are
11 being killed in the drug wars, who are getting the
12 HIV virus at rates far higher than anything
13 happening in the white American communities.
14 African American leaders have
15 oftentimes failed to step forward.
16 Mayor Dinkins when he entered office
17 took the tragic step of closing down a pilot needle
18 exchange program set up by the previous mayor.
19 He then reversed himself, he then
20 looked at the evidence and reversed himself.
21 But so few African American leaders
22 have taken a serious position on this.
23 When one looks at the fact, recently
24 just last week some of you may have seen mentioned
25 in the times a report by the sentencing commission,
98
1
2 young black Americans in the criminal justice system
3 five years later.
4 It pointed out that whereas
5 twenty-three percent of African American males were
6 under some form of criminal justice -- twenty-three
7 percent of African males between the ages of 23 and
8 29 were under some form of supervisory prison
9 probation or parole in 1990, it's now up to
10 thirty-two percent.
11 Estimates are that will go up to fifty
12 percent.
13 It seems to me there has been a real
14 lack of leadership within the African American
15 community and within the community at large.
16 Finally, why is it that Mr. Morgenthau
17 steps up in 1995 and issues such a statement?
18 Does he really not know better?
19 Is it just a matter of repeating the
20 same old rhetoric the fact that a Mr. Morgenthau can
21 make a statement like this unsubstantiated by
22 evidence, unbacked by any sort of serious systematic
23 causal analysis is very scary.
24 He is supposed to be a leader but the
25 only leadership he provided with this statement is
99
1
2 in helping to deamonize people involved with drugs.
3 I think that helps explain it.
4 MR. BROWN: Thank you.
5 In the interests of time we will keep
6 asking questions of the panel.
7 THE WITNESS: I will make my answers
8 shorter, I apologize.
9 MR. DOYLE: You mentioned some
10 possible middle ground approaches.
11 Could you be a little bit more
12 specific on what you might have in mind and also
13 comment on the Swiss experience in Zurich which I
14 understand may have had some negative consequences.
15 MR. NADELMANN: Very quickly first of
16 all these are middle ground steps aimed at reducing
17 death, disease and crime associated with drug
18 addiction.
19 First, needle exchange programs need
20 to be available throughout the country.
21 In Europe needles are even made
22 available in vending machines, drop a dirty needle
23 in, get a clean one out.
24 There are police substations where a
25 junky can go in, hand in a dirty needle and pick up
100
1
2 a clean needle.
3 These provide models.
4 Secondly repeal the state laws in New
5 York and nine or states regarding the restrictions
6 on availability of syringes without a prescription.
7 Thirdly, pressure the Clinton
8 administration to authorize federal funding for
9 needle exchange programs.
10 The National Academny of Sciences
11 report requested by Congress as the grounds for
12 reversing it's policy is now in its conclusions are
13 obvious, that needs to be changed.
14 Fourthly, expand availability of
15 methadone.
16 Not just by increasing the number of
17 slots but by transforming methadone and the ways to
18 deliver it in the United States if neighborhoods
19 don't want a methadone clinic because of NMBY
20 problems the answer may be to make methadone
21 available through doctors.
22 To be picked up in pharmacies, just
23 the way any other medication is made available, just
24 the way it's made available in many countries in
25 Europe and in Australia.
101
1
2 If methadone were far more readily
3 available without all the strings and punishing
4 attitudes that we have today, rather than having
5 115,000 people on methadone we might well have
6 hundreds of thousands of people on methadone.
7 One looks in the Netherlands with its
8 more liberal methadone policy and a far higher
9 percentage of its heroin addicts are receiving
10 methadone.
11 Fifth, experiment with drug
12 maintenance options beyond methadone.
13 That may include injectable methadone
14 as is now predescribed in Britain to five to ten
15 percent of methadone, it may also include heroin
16 prescription as is now being pursued in Switzerland
17 and as will probably be initiated in both the
18 Netherlands and Australia in 1996.
19 The story with the Swiss is this, it's
20 important to distinguish their very missed efforts
21 with respect to needle park which was an effort,
22 needle park very briefly during the 1980's the
23 police in Switzerland chased the drug addicts and
24 drug dealers all around the city infecting different
25 neighborhoods.
102
1
2 Finally by the late '80's the whole
3 settled down in a small island in the middle of
4 Switzerland behind the train station and everybody
5 the police, public health the addicts, the
6 neighborhoods breathed a sigh of relief it got
7 things concentrated it made them more accessible to
8 public health services.
9 But what happened was it became a
10 magnet.
11 After a few years the park began to
12 attract 1,000 and up to 2,000 people each day.
13 They were getting people not just from
14 Zurich from the outlying areas of Zurich, people
15 training in from Geneva each day because here was a
16 readily accessible area.
17 It got out of hand, finally the Swiss
18 officials shut it down, the scene moved around the
19 city once again, settled down another scene half a
20 mile away once again grew too large and finally the
21 Swiss shut it down again.
22 It's important to understand in
23 Switzerland that the shutting down of the open
24 scenes was linked to the initiation of alternative
25 drug policies.
103
1
2 It was linked to the expansion of the
3 heroin prescription program, which was initiated in
4 January of 1994.
5 It now enrolls hundreds of people,
6 most receiving injectable heroin, some smokeable
7 heroin, some injectable morphine, some injectable
8 methadone.
9 I will submit an article for the
10 record published in the national review in July 10th
11 on Switzerland's heroin experiment.
12 The initial results are promising.
13 Let me very briefly read the social
14 welfare department had a conference in 1994 and
15 issued it's preliminary findings, first heroin
16 prescription is feasible and has produced no black
17 market in diverted heroin.
18 Second, the health of the addicts in
19 the program has clearly improved.
20 Third, heroin prescription alone
21 cannot solve the problems that led to heroin
22 addiction in the first place.
23 Fourth, heroin prescription is less a
24 medical program than a social psychological approach
25 to a complex personal and social problem.
104
1
2 Fifth, heroin, per se, causes very few
3 if any problems when it is used in a controlled
4 fashion and administered in hygenic conditions.
5 Most Americans don't know that. Most
6 Americans need to know that.
7 Most Americans assume that anybody who
8 uses heroin must be a slave of some sort for reasons
9 that were explained this morning.
10 In a point of fact, when one is
11 dealing with a hard core population of drug addicts
12 who have been unable to benefit from methadone or
13 from therapeutic communities or from drug free
14 approaches of other sorts, it certainly makes sense
15 to make heroin and other powerful opiates legally
16 available to them in controlled hygenic conditions.
17 It can reduce the transmission of HIV,
18 reduce disease, it can improve their health and it
19 can reduce the black market in these drugs.
20 There are other small steps, the
21 Rockefeller drug laws can and should be repealed.
22 As quickly and as far reachingly as
23 possible.
24 The Governor of New York, Mr. Pataki
25 has already proposed this, it should be a bold move,
105
1
2 not a half step.
3 The leading research on the benefits
4 of incarceration by my previous colleague at
5 Princeton, John Delulo and others show that there is
6 no cost/benefit analysis that supports the
7 incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders,
8 including not just possesors, but nonviolent small
9 scale drug dealers.
10 It cannot be justified on cost benefit
11 grounds where the incarceration of predatory and
12 violent criminals can be justified, the
13 incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders cannot be
14 justified.
15 The mandatory minimum requirements,
16 mandatory minimum sentences and the harsh sentencing
17 guidelines at both federal and state levels need
18 also to be repealed.
19 The dramatic disparities between how
20 crack and powder cocaine are treated in federal and
21 many state laws need to be repealed as the
22 sentencing commission advised.
23 Marijuana and some other drugs as well
24 need to be made available for people who benefit
25 from them.
106
1
2 There also need to be studies to
3 demonstrate this but when one has legal Affidavits
4 from elderly grandmother's who have never smoked
5 marijuana but say that this helps them deal with
6 their pain and suffering, when one has distinguished
7 physicians willing to prescribe this, marijuana
8 should be made available as soon as possible.
9 These are just a number of steps, many
10 of the other witnesses will elaborate on these and
11 others.
12 MR. BROWN: Okay, Kathy do you want to
13 ask a question?
14 MS. ROCKLEN: I just want a
15 clarification, quickly.
16 I got a call last week from somebody
17 asking if the committee had specifically endorsed
18 opiate replacement therapy and it wasn't a term I
19 was familiar with.
20 As you went through the set of
21 alternatives you talked about methadone and heroin
22 prescription which I assume is opium replacement
23 therapy.
24 Is there more to that concept?
25 MR. NADELMANN: Opiate replacement
107
1
2 therapy essentially refers, yes, to dealing, taking
3 street addicts, remember when we speak about heroin
4 in America we are not talking about pure
5 pharmaceutical heroin, we are talking about street
6 heroin which may be eighty percent pure, sixty
7 percent pure, twenty percent pure or not heroin at
8 all.
9 We are talking about heroin that's
10 taken in doses of unknown potency and purity.
11 About heroin taken under conditions
12 where people have no reliable information about how
13 to take this drug.
14 Opiate substitution refers using
15 methadone which is a long acting opiate that can be
16 taken orally or injected once a day.
17 Using either longer acting opiates
18 like LAAM which is now emerging on the market or
19 deaming to use morphine or methadone in an
20 injectable form or heroin in smokeable or injectable
21 form or a range of other opiates.
22 Methadone has many advantages in terms
23 of its ease of administration, in terms of
24 stabilizing addicts because it can be taken once a
25 day.
108
1
2 Heroin is a harder drug to administer
3 in a controlled fashion.
4 But the fact of the matter is that
5 just because heroin is difficult to administer in a
6 controlled fashion, just because heroin does not
7 work as well as methadone for people willing to stay
8 in methadone programs, does not mean that we should
9 not attempt heroin maintenance, heroin substitution
10 with people who cannot succeed in methadone and
11 other drug treatment programs.
12 So, yes, opiate replacement, opiate
13 substitution means one last point should be made
14 very clear, it's a common myth in the United States
15 that people are put on to methadone so that
16 eventually they will be entirely opiate free.
17 That they will no longer use heroin or
18 methadone.
19 That is true in some cases, it's also
20 true that the vast majority of people who are
21 prematurely detoxed from heroin with methadone,
22 return to heroin addiction.
23 Virtually all of the evidence,
24 especially that by Mary Jean Creek of the
25 Rockefeller University and other researchers shows
109
1
2 that one can be maintained on methadone for ten,
3 twenty, thirty years or more so far as we can tell
4 based upon her thirty year experience with virtually
5 no negative health consequences.
6 When a methadone addict says I am no
7 different than a diabetic who has become an insulin
8 addict, he's basically right.
9 We have only bad scientific reasons
10 and bad moralistic reasons to take people off
11 methadone, to deprive them of adequate doses to
12 deprive them of some control of their own treatment.
13 It does appear to be an effective
14 approach, but it's not for everybody.
15 MR. BROWN: Thank you.
16 Mr. Knapp, do you have any questions?
17 MR. KNAPP: In the regime that you
18 foresee, is there a place at all for criminal law
19 application, either on the international scale or in
20 the United States?
21 MR. NADELMANN: Well, there definitely
22 is a role for criminal law.
23 First of all, most people who favor
24 drug policy reform favor a step by step moderate
25 approach.
110
1
2 In fact, the politics of the issue is
3 that it is unlikely to happen in any other way.
4 So it does seem that there would
5 inevitably be a role in the short term and even less
6 than short term for law enforcement in terms of
7 prosecuting the major drug dealers in terms of
8 prosecuting drug dealers, for example who are
9 disorderly.
10 A harm reduction approach to drug law
11 enforcement says focus on the drug dealers who are
12 disorderly, who are violent, who are predatory.
13 Deemphasize enforcement against drug
14 dealers who are integrated in the community in such
15 a way that they cause relatively little harm.
16 So law enforcement, yes, would
17 continue to play a role.
18 Secondly, virtually everybody I know
19 assumes that we will continue to have a
20 criminalization on drug use and drug sales by
21 children.
22 That would appear to be a very
23 important place for law enforcement to play a role.
24 One now sees undercover operations by
25 law enforcement agents going to stores to see
111
1
2 whether or not they will sell tobacco to underage
3 Americans.
4 Law enforcement might play a role
5 there as well.
6 Thirdly, remember, alcohol and tobacco
7 are now legal drugs, so to speak, but we have a
8 Federal Law enforcement agency known as the Bureau
9 of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.
10 Under a long range drug policy
11 alternative as I envision it, one might change the
12 name to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
13 Other Drugs.
14 One might want to improve the quality
15 of the agency, one might want to extend it's reach,
16 one might want to have more vigorous enforcement
17 than we now have with respect to alcohol and tobacco
18 because I do not believe that our alcohol and
19 tobacco control policies provide a model for how to
20 deal with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD and other
21 drugs in the future.
22 But I assume that inevitably there
23 will always be law enforcement agencies to play a
24 role.
25 I assume the FDA will play a role in
112
1
2 insuring the quality of the drugs that are made
3 legally available.
4 I assume that civil liability system
5 will ensure that manufacturers are responsible for
6 the quality and sometimes the consequences of their
7 products.
8 I assume that the IRS and other
9 agencies will be responsible for collecting tax
10 revenues on the sale of these drugs and on the
11 importation, the tarrifs and the importation of
12 these drugs.
13 So I do assume that law enforcement
14 has a very important role to play in drug policy but
15 I also assume that its role should no longer be
16 front and center.
17 MR. BROWN: Thank you.
18 Mr. Salomon, do you have any
19 questions?
20 MR. SALOMON: One brief one.
21 Are you familiar with Senator
22 Galliber's proposed legislation?
23 MR. NADELMANN: Yes.
24 MR. SALOMON: Would you care to
25 comment on its strengths and weaknesses?
113
1
2 MR. NADELMANN: Well, Senator
3 Galliber's legislation as I understand it proposes
4 to take the alcohol control statutes of New York
5 State and apply those to all illicit drugs.
6 I think that may be advisable for
7 cannabis.
8 So far as I understand it in New York
9 and other states one is allowed to produce small
10 amounts of alcohol for personal consumption without
11 a license but if you produce large amounts to sell
12 it you have to be licensed and pay taxes to the
13 government.
14 That does seem like a fairly
15 intelligent approach to dealing with cannabis.
16 I can imagine lower potency versions
17 of some of the other illicit drugs for which that
18 model might work as well.
19 For example if Coca Cola were to
20 restore the very low amounts of cocaine to it that
21 were in it before 1900 and take the caffeine out, so
22 far as I know the addictiveness of Coca-Cola with
23 small amounts of cocaine is as with the small
24 amounts of caffeine that are in it today.
25 One might either say that being
114
1
2 controlled in a similar way as Galliber's or more
3 liberally as is the case with Coca Cola.
4 Senator Galliber also I believe calls
5 for putting cigarettes under the control of alcohol
6 outlets, I'm not certain of that.
7 I'm not sure what I think about that.
8 I do think it makes sense to further
9 restrict the availability of cigarettes, especially
10 to keep it out of the hands of children but I'm not
11 certain if that's the right method.
12 And I do think that Senator Galliber's
13 model may well be premature when it comes to dealing
14 with heroin or cocaine in the forms that they are
15 desired on the streets today.
16 MR. SALOMON: Thank you.
17 MR. BROWN: We are running late. I am
18 going to take just one or two questions from the
19 audience.
20 Does anybody, the man in the front
21 here a brief question.
22 THE AUDIENCE: How do other countries
23 dealing with drugs compared to the United States,
24 what other methods are they using the United States
25 is not using because.
115
1
2 You said earlier and maybe I am not
3 wrong that the other countries have better methods
4 of handling people who take drugs, what kind of
5 methods do they use?
6 MR. NADELMANN: What I can quickly do
7 is elaborate and say they have much more extensive
8 drug treatment and public health systems available
9 for dealing with drug addicts.
10 That their approach to dealing with
11 drug addicts is more integrated into the current
12 health care approaches.
13 Methadone is made available through
14 interests and also methadone buses that get around
15 the NMBY problems.
16 In the case of cannabis there is the
17 case of the Netherlands which has made cannabis
18 available through what are called coffee shops,
19 essentially retail outlets where people can go and
20 buy cannabis in amounts up to I believe it is they
21 just changed it it's either five grams, five or six
22 grams at one time.
23 This is a fairly well regulated system
24 not technically legal, but barely treated as illegal
25 which the Dutch virtually across the political
116
1
2 spectrum with the exception of a few fanatics on the
3 right seem to find a very satisfactory approach.
4 Those are a few examples I think I
5 spoke about others in my testimony.
6 MR. BROWN: Rather than take any more
7 questions we are going to take a break this morning,
8 we will reconvene at approximately 11: 35.
9 Thank you very much.
10 (Whereupon, at this point in the
11 proceedings there was a recess, after which
12 the proceedings continued as follows: )
13 MR. BROWN: Let me again express the
14 thanks of the Committee to Rayvid Reportinging for
15 providing the pro bono services for the hearing.
16 Our next witness this morning is
17 Doctor Herbert Kleber.
18 Before coming to the seminar on
19 addiction and substance abuse in 1991, Dr. Kleber
20 was Deputy Director demand reduction.
21 Without much further introduction, Dr.
22 Kleber, thank you very much for appearing today.
23 DR. KLEBER: Thank you and thank you
24 for inviting me.
25 This is a topic that is a very
117
1
2 important one, I feel very passionately about it
3 having spent approximately thirty years now in the
4 field treating addicts, starting back from the early
5 '60's when I first did work treating individuals
6 with psychadelic use, then a couple of years at
7 Lexington, Kentucky then back to Yale in the
8 mid-60's where I spent the next 25 or so years
9 developing what hopefully we thought was a model
10 treatment programs for heroin and cocain addiction,
11 as well as pioneering a number of new approaches to
12 the treatment of both of those conditions.
13 What I am going to present to you very
14 briefly this morning are some excerpts from a white
15 paper concerning the issue of legalization that Joe
16 Califano and I put together at the center of
17 addiction substance abuse the document per se is a
18 much longer one and of course for the sake of time I
19 won't be able to go into many of the areas that are
20 covered there, so that I have tried to cover what
21 the committee asked me primarily to do, which is if
22 indeed there were a change in drug policy so that
23 the substances were legally available, what would
24 the effect be on use, on crime, and would any
25 efforts in terms of treatment or prevention
118
1
2 ameliorate those proposed increases.
3 So that is what I will limit my
4 testimony to, but of course I will be pleased during
5 the question and answer period to handle any
6 questions that you may all have.
7 That's the name of the white paper,
8 simply legalization, panacea or Pandora's box and I
9 thought a good quote to begin with is from Mark
10 Kleinman who in his book against excess talks about
11 changing the legal status of marijuana, but admits
12 that if you legalize marijuana there is one very
13 serious draw back, virtual irreversability.
14 If it goes badly wrong as Pandora
15 could have warned humpty-dumpty, not all processes
16 are reversible.
17 Who is in favor of changing the legal
18 status of our currently illicit drugs?
19 The discouraged.
20 Those who feel that nothing has worked
21 to date.
22 Libertarians and I see that you have
23 some well-known ones on your speaker's list, who
24 feel that people have the right to take what they
25 want.
119
1
2 Those who believe that yes these drugs
3 are bad, but the effect of criminilization make the
4 situation even worse and those finally and I have
5 met a lot of them who are sure it won't happen to
6 them or their children and what happens to the rest
7 of society is their problem.
8 If you deal with people who are close
9 to the problem on a daily basis, with clinicians,
10 who deal with addicts all of the time, families of
11 addicts, what you find is that the closer are to the
12 problem, the less one wants to make these substances
13 more available.
14 I would venture to say if this
15 committee took a poll of those people who actually
16 treat individuals who come into centers because of
17 being addicted to heroin, cocaine or marijuana, you
18 would find very few who would say let's make these
19 substances more available.
20 Part of the problem is that people are
21 very poor judges of their own addiction liability.
22 In all the years that I have spent
23 treating addicts, I have probably seen well over 5
24 or 6,000 at this time, I have seen probably less
25 than half a dozen who ever believed that they would
120
1
2 get addicted, including people who had family
3 members who were addicted, who had every reason by
4 their own vulnerabilities to believe they might get
5 addicted, they were sure they would not get
6 addicted.
7 It's important to realize you don't
8 need major psychological problems, you don't need
9 poverty to become addicted.
10 Anyone in this room could become an
11 addict, there is nothing mysterious about it.
12 In general the more people who try
13 drugs, the more who use on a regular basis, the
14 percentage stays remarkably similar at about six to
15 eight percent.
16 So the more who use, the more who
17 become addicted and so any proposal that increases
18 the number of individuals who are going to use is
19 going to increase the number who are going to get
20 into trouble and become addicted.
21 To give you some idea of the numbers
22 we are talking about, right now we have 50 million
23 individuals addicted to nicotine in its various
24 forms, 12 to 18 million alcohol addicts, marijuana
25 consider at least 5 million individuals take it more
121
1
2 than once a week, cocaine approximately 2 million
3 addicts and heroin approximately 750,000 addicts.
4 The heroin number is probably the
5 weakest.
6 Any time you have a number that small
7 in terms of the total population, the databases are
8 very bad and I think the best we can say about the
9 various studies of heroin is that the key thing is
10 to look at trend lines rather than absolute numbers;
11 I don't think we really have a terribly good handle
12 on the absolute number of heroin addicts.
13 What's happening to these numbers?
14 Well, nicotine is decreasing among
15 adults, unfortunately it's increasing among
16 adolescents, especially females.
17 One of the very interesting things
18 going on right now in a natural experiment is
19 California where they have passed this tax to
20 increase markedly education and advertising on
21 anti-tobacco.
22 What has been a result, well the
23 result has been a much larger drop in adult
24 cigarette smoking than elsewhere in the country,
25 unfortunately they haven't dented the adolescent
122
1
2 market.
3 In spite of all the money they put
4 into advertising there, adolescents in California
5 are not changing their cigarette habits any more
6 than they are in the rest of the country.
7 So we have not yet figured out how to
8 change new kids getting into tobacco and of course
9 with the 400,000 plus who die from nicotine the
10 tobacco companies have to addict, somewhere between
11 3 and 5,000 people a day in order to keep up the
12 market, and so far their efforts are much better
13 than our efforts, we really have not been able to do
14 a terribly good job in preventing nicotine use.
15 With alcohol we are seeing a moderate
16 decreases among both adults and adolescents what we
17 are seeing is fewer people drinking but of those who
18 are drinking, more to excess, so-called binge
19 drinkers, with marijuana there was a sharp decline
20 from 1979 to 1992 a decline of well over fifty
21 percent but with an increase in the last couple of
22 years.
23 Cocaine, there has been a decrease by
24 over fifty percent in the last decade, but that's of
25 nonaddictive, addictive use has remained steady to
123
1
2 slowly increasing I think that's due to two factors,
3 one the large number of people already in the
4 pipeline and the fact that we have not provided
5 adequate treatment.
6 We estimate we need at least two and a
7 half million treatment episodes a year, we have less
8 than 1.5 million.
9 Heroin use -- the final good news
10 about cocaine is new initiates to crack appear to be
11 decreasing.
12 When you talk to the street
13 ethnographers who work in our various innercity
14 neighborhoods they tell you there are far fewer new
15 initiates to crack.
16 So our hope is if we can control
17 through treatment and law enforcement those
18 currently addicted to crack that there will be fewer
19 new ones coming along.
20 Heroin appears to be slowly rising,
21 especially among the middle class.
22 What we are seeing is the very pure
23 heroin is increasing, those individual's, a lot of
24 people have this myth somehow you can't get addicted
25 or get into trouble if you only smoke or snort and
124
1
2 of course you can die from either of those routes,
3 you can get addicted from either of those routes.
4 Heroin is heroin and you can get into
5 trouble just as readily by smoking or snorting as
6 you can by injecting.
7 In terms of marijuana, one of the key
8 things we need to keep in mind is what increases
9 marijuana use seems to be a diminished perception by
10 adolescents that the drug is risky.
11 What you see is these are marijuana
12 trends among 8th graders.
13 What you see in 1992 is about seven
14 percent of them used marijuana and that by 1994 the
15 number has doubled and during that same two year
16 period the number of 8th graders who said that it
17 was risky to take marijuana dropped by about a
18 quarter.
19 Those who disapproved of its use
20 dropped and not surprisingly as that drops use
21 increases and that shows the same thing in a graphic
22 fashion, that during the years that perceived risk
23 was increasing that's the blue line, use was
24 markedly decreasing and only when risk turned up --
25 I'm sorry when risk turned down when people said
125
1
2 it's less risky its use turn up.
3 What's the current status then of the
4 so called war on drugs?
5 Good news is that drug users are
6 aging.
7 That is in 1979 ten percent of current
8 users were over the age of 35, in 1993, thirty
9 percent of current users were over the age of 35.
10 The nonaddicted use has sharply
11 dropped.
12 Imagine if we had not done the kind of
13 efforts we did in the '80s, how many more millions
14 of people in the '80s and '90's would have used
15 drugs like cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
16 In 1979 we have 24 million using any
17 illicit drug on a monthly basis, by 1993 that had
18 dropped by more than fifty percent to about 11.7
19 million.
20 That over 12 million Americans who did
21 not use illicit drugs through the '80s because of
22 our current policies.
23 Same is true with marijuana, same is
24 true with cocaine and that just shows graphically
25 the difference between those who used an illicit
126
1
2 drug in the last month by the peak year versus 1993
3 and you see the peak year for for marijuana was '79,
4 the peak year for any illicit drug was '79 and peak
5 year for cocaine was '85; all of that use is down by
6 well over fifty percent.
7 So individuals who say there has been
8 no progress should look at these numbers, because
9 the addicts come from the users.
10 It's a funnel, not everyone who uses,
11 of course, becomes an addict.
12 If everyone who used these drugs
13 became an addict we wouldn't be holding these
14 hearings.
15 It would be a waste of all of our time
16 because people would be using these drugs.
17 If everyone who tried cocaine became a
18 cocaine addict, if everyone who tried heroin,
19 either, everyone who smoked grass got into trouble
20 you wouldn't need these hearings.
21 If, on the other hand, if no one
22 became addicted or got into trouble you also
23 wouldn't need these hearings.
24 The problem is some people who use,
25 use and get away with it, some use and get into
127
1
2 trouble and as we said earlier, people are terrible
3 judges of their own proclivity to get into trouble,
4 so the more that's used, the more that are going to
5 get into trouble.
6 There are some of the problems that
7 remain, crime remains high, prisons remain crowded
8 and the increase both in heroin and marijuana use.
9 I am going to talk in the few minutes
10 remaining to me about what would happen if we
11 legalized.
12 I realize there are all sorts of other
13 proposals that have been talked about, but in a
14 sense they are not terribly useful.
15 That is if the -- the concern of this
16 committee is crime, people in prisons, et cetera.
17 If you don't legalize cocaine or
18 heroin, presumably you are not going to deal with
19 those kinds of crime.
20 If you legalize marijuana, marijuana
21 is not a big deal in terms of crime, you are not
22 going to do anything about the crime in the streets
23 by legalizing marijuana.
24 So that I am going to focus mainly on
25 what's going to happen if the country followed the
128
1
2 recommendations of those who say let's make cocaine
3 and heroin as freely available as alcohol to do
4 something about all these people in prison who are
5 there because they are arrested for just using the
6 drugs.
7 My predictions; use will sharply rise,
8 adolescent use will especially rise, crime and
9 violence will not decrease it will go up, social
10 cost will sharply rise and there will be no
11 financial peace dividend.
12 Why do I say this?
13 One, the market is not saturated as
14 you will see in the next slide.
15 As availability increases use
16 increases, as use increases addiction will increase
17 and since no one is really talking about making them
18 available for adolescents, you are going to keep a
19 forbidden fruit aspect.
20 There are three kinds of availability,
21 physical, economic and psychological.
22 Physical means access.
23 Legalizers argue that legal
24 availability would not increase use because drugs
25 are already available for anyone who wants to use.
129
1
2 Even if it were true, it ignores the
3 change in the economic and the psychological factors
4 which also determine use.
5 It's not true, less than fifty percent
6 of high school seniors and young adults and less
7 than forty percent of adults report that cocaine is
8 easily available.
9 Only one quarter report easy
10 availability of LSD, PCP or heroin.
11 Only eleven percent report drugs are
12 available where they live.
13 If you have these legal like alcohol
14 and tobacco you will have this in every
15 neighborhood, you will have drugstores everywhere in
16 the true sense of the word drugstore.
17 So that you are going to increase
18 markedly physical availability.
19 You are going to increase economic
20 availability because the price will sharply drop.
21 Cocaine right now costs about $10 if
22 you brought it into the country really it sells for
23 about $60 a gram.
24 Single doses if you lower it to $10 a
25 gram is about fifty cents putting it in the reach of
130
1
2 your children's lunch money.
3 Marijuana price would drop from $100
4 to $400 an ounce down to $10 to $20 an ounce a
5 single dose would cost much less than $1.
6 The legal industry will fight for
7 advertising and for keeping taxes low and if you
8 don't think they will be successful at this look
9 what happened in the last Congress to any of the
10 proposals to fund health care by increasing taxes on
11 nicotine or alcohol.
12 All you are going to do is create
13 another very powerful industry group and so you will
14 have nice ads like this pure Columbian cocaine,
15 light my fire with some sexy lady saying use our
16 brand of cocaine.
17 Psychological availability will also
18 sharply rise.
19 Legal status, influence and perception
20 of the morality of use, the risk of use and the
21 social desirability of use.
22 There was a wonderful picture in The
23 New York Times a month or so ago when the President
24 talked about changing the status of nicotine and
25 clamping down and one young fifteen year old said if
131
1
2 the stuff was that dangerous they wouldn't let it be
3 sold.
4 If you don't think that legal status
5 influences how things regard marijuana, cocaine or
6 heroin, think again.
7 Talk to adolescents. Of course it
8 influences what people think.
9 So with adolescent use you still have
10 a forbidden fruit, adults can use these drugs, use
11 it they are going to want to use it like they now
12 want to use alcohol and tobacco.
13 Use would increase to rival legal
14 drugs.
15 Look at high school seniors, less than
16 twenty percent use any illegal drug, thirty percent
17 smoke cigarettes, fifty-one percent use alcohol.
18 If illegal drugs rise to match alcohol
19 you have now doubled it.
20 The price will decrease and
21 availability will increase.
22 The conclusion is if you legalize
23 these drugs for adults, you are sharply going to
24 increase adolescent use and addiction.
25 What would happen?
132
1
2 Since cocaine and heroin are more
3 addicting than alcohol, since availability is a
4 crucial factor in addiction to these drugs, my
5 prediction is that if you make cocaine, let's stick
6 with cocaine for a minute, if you make cocaine as
7 freely available as alcohol and tobacco, the number
8 of addicts will rise to somewhere between alcohol
9 and tobacco, somewhere between 15 million and 50
10 million, my own guess is around 20 million and there
11 have been a number of econometric studies that
12 suggest the same thing that the rise will be
13 anywhere from five to twenty times.
14 What about the effect on crime?
15 People say well, use may rise but
16 crime is going to go town.
17 There are three kinds of crime, there
18 is distributive crime when dealers shoot each other
19 and innocent people get caught in the middle,
20 acquisitive crime which is a crime people commit to
21 support their habits and pharmocological, behavioral
22 toxicity, that's alcohol crime, that's spousal
23 abuse, drunk driving, et cetera. Which can happen
24 to all those crimes.
25 Distributive crime will go down,
133
1
2 acquisitive crime will go down for any individual
3 but if I am right and the number of addicts rise
4 acquisitive crime will markedly rise and
5 pharmacologic crime will markedly rise.
6 Look at the devastating effect that
7 alcohol has on this society.
8 Cocaine is more dangerous than
9 alcohol.
10 The paranoia that cocaine causes, the
11 irritability is much more likely to be associated
12 with desocialization, destabilization of a civil
13 society.
14 Look at the brains there, that's a PET
15 scan.
16 The top line is normal individuals.
17 Second is a cocaine abuser ten days
18 after his last dose of cocaine.
19 So this is someone who had been using
20 cocaine for a long period of time, as you can see
21 there what you want are the yellow back you don't
22 want the blue and what you can see, ten days after
23 he's quit using, the brain is not back to normal.
24 Well, okay, we will wait three months,
25 that's bottom slide, 100 days after the last use of
134
1
2 cocaine.
3 The brain is still sharply impaired.
4 Unfortunately it's hard to carry out
5 these studies over time and so I don't have any
6 slides past 100 days.
7 My own feeling from dealing with these
8 people clinically, at least six to nine months after
9 the last dose of heavy cocaine use the individual is
10 still impaired.
11 So it ain't easy to give up cocaine,
12 it's a very difficult drug, your brain is markedly
13 impaired.
14 I will wrap up in about three minutes.
15 Marijuana, see if I can sum it up very
16 quickly.
17 The legalizers argue that use would
18 not substantially increase since it's already
19 available, that it's not associated with violence,
20 it's not dangerous.
21 The reality is that it has lots of
22 physical effects, I am not going to run over them
23 because of time, it impairs short term memory and
24 energy levels, it increases auto accidents, paranoia
25 schizophrenic relapse, prenatal use is associated
135
1
2 with decreased IQ's of infants, adolescent marijuana
3 users are twice as likely to have unprotected sex,
4 it ain't the harmless giggle that John Lennon talked
5 about, it is a harmful drug which has lots of
6 effects.
7 If Kessler described cigarette smoking
8 as a pediatric disease, my own feeling is that legal
9 marijuana would be a pediatric epidemic.
10 Would there be a peace dividend, we
11 are going to save all this money.
12 Look at alcohol and tobacco.
13 We bring in $18 billion a year in
14 state and federal alcohol tax revenue, we spend $140
15 billion in health, motor vehicle and crime problems.
16 Foreign countries, what do we know
17 about foreign countries you have heard about these
18 models of Netherlands, what do we know about the
19 Netherlands between 1984 and 1992.
20 The use of cannabis among adolescents
21 rose 250 percent there was a twenty-nine percent
22 rise in cannabis addicts and a twenty-two percent
23 rise in total addicts between '88 and '93.
24 The Dutch government according to the
25 latest release plans on closing about fifty percent
136
1
2 of the coffee houses because of increased sales of
3 cocaine and heroin there and increase the minimum
4 age in the coffee houses to 18.
5 There has been a sixty percent crime
6 increase between '81 and '92 in Amsterdam, they have
7 twice as many police officers per capita than the
8 average U.S. city and the number of organized crime
9 groups there rose sharply between '88 and '93.
10 And they have approximately the same
11 number of heroin addicts, same percent of heroin
12 addicts as we do, it ain't the panacea.
13 What about England?
14 People talk about maintaining people
15 on heroin in England.
16 There are 150,000 heroin addicts in
17 England, how many of those are maintained on
18 methadone, roughly 17,000, how many are maintained
19 on heroin?
20 Over 100 physicians can prescribe
21 heroin to addicts in England if they choose,
22 probably less than one dozen do so, there are less
23 than 100 addicts maintained on heroin legally in all
24 of England.
25 So people who say there was one
137
1
2 wonderful quote from John Marks that "The heroin
3 dealers are leaving the streets" if only 400 out of
4 150,000 are being maintained on heroin, any heroin
5 dealer whose leaving the streets is going inside for
6 a cup of coffee, it's not because he doesn't have a
7 market out there.
8 Switzerland, Mr. Nadelmann referred to
9 it, the numbers of heroin addicts are going up
10 there, violence in crime are rising, their heroin
11 related death rates are now the highest in Europe,
12 et cetera.
13 Italy decriminilized heroin for
14 personal possession, they now have the highest
15 heroin adistinction rate in all of Europe and one of
16 the highest HIV rates, seventy percent.
17 Sweden went the other route of
18 Netherlands and Italy, their use is sharply
19 dropping.
20 So when am I going to conclude?
21 Drug epidemics are cyclic, the cocaine
22 epidemic is already winding town, legalization of
23 these drugs would lead to institutionalizing it at
24 unacceptably high rates and there are no successful
25 models worldwide for us to immitate.
138
1
2 I would finally like to end with a
3 quote, Billy Sunday the famous preacher said when
4 prohibition was about to begin for alcohol, the rain
5 of tears is over, the slums will soon be a memory,
6 we will turn our prisons into factories and our
7 jails into storehouses, men will walk upright, women
8 will smile and children will laugh and hell will be
9 forever rent."
10 That was 1919, he was wrong.
11 Kevin Seas in 1991 said if we legalize
12 these drugs that are currently illegal, "We would be
13 able to walk virtually any street at night as crime
14 would be significantly reduced, our criminal justice
15 system would no longer be in gridlock our police
16 could spend their time becoming members of the
17 community, Courts would not be forced to plea
18 bargain."
19 Billy Sunday was wrong in 1919, Kevin
20 Seas and his colleagues are wrong in 1995.
21 Thank you.
22 MR. BROWN: Thank you very much, Dr.
23 Kleber.
24 We are going to reverse how we are
25 conducting this to get some more questions from the
139
1
2 audience.
3 Are there any questions from the
4 audience?
5 THE AUDIENCE: Dr. Kleber, on the one
6 hand you have talked about how treatment works and
7 that we need to put more resources into treatment.
8 So I will grant you the fact that if
9 drugs are legalized there may be an increase in use.
10 But on the other hand, it seems that
11 if we do have resources to put into treatment, it
12 seems the consequences of use, the consequences of
13 abuse would be minimized to a great extent.
14 So I am wondering how do you balance
15 that out?
16 It seems it very well may be an
17 increase in use could result in a decrease in drug
18 use problems with adequate resources to treatment.
19 DR. KLEBER: As I said earlier, if
20 these drugs caused no one to become addicted I
21 wouldn't be here.
22 If our treatment were as successful as
23 I would like it to be, I probably wouldn't be here
24 either.
25 The reality is that treatment works,
140
1
2 but you always need to hear the rest of my line, but
3 not as well or as often as we would like.
4 The Rand study in comparing treatment
5 versus supply reduction it its defense surveyed much
6 of the treatment literature and their conclusion was
7 that with cocaine, for example, if you took one
8 hundred people who entered treatment January 1st,
9 the following January 1st, approximately thirteen
10 percent would be abstinate from cocain.
11 I think that's too conservative, I
12 think the number is substantially higher.
13 I think it's probably closer to twenty
14 or twenty-five percent.
15 But it is not nearly as high as we
16 need to get if you are talking about the short term.
17 If you are talking about five or ten
18 years later, then I am much more optimistic, five
19 years later I think almost half the people will no
20 longer be using, but in the short term, one, two,
21 three years, unfortunately our current methods
22 aren't as good as they should be, nor are our
23 current prevention methods.
24 They are okay, and they need to be
25 strengthened, but they ain't perfect.
141
1
2 Anyone who does treatment or
3 prevention will tell you it's much harder to do them
4 when drugs are sold on every corner, when drugs are
5 sold in every school, it's harder to do prevention
6 when drugs are sold on every corner it's hard to do
7 treatment.
8 Not impossible, certainly as our
9 alcohol treatment shows, but it's difficult as hell.
10 MR. BROWN: Another question.
11 THE AUDIENCE: In -- it sounded very
12 important to you to prevent people from number one
13 using drugs, number two becoming addicted to drugs.
14 I am interested in two things, one is
15 the effect of various types of social conditions on
16 terms of how many people or what percentage of the
17 population get addicted, including a climate in
18 which people are put in prison.
19 The other thing I would like to know
20 is sort of on a cost benefit analysis perspective,
21 how many people is it a fair trade off to put in
22 prison to prevent a single person from using a given
23 drug or from becoming addicted to a given drug?
24 DR. KLEBER: There has been a lot of
25 myth about whose in prison and hopefully there will
142
1
2 be people who testify over the next three days who
3 are more expert in that than I am, but certainly my
4 reading of that literature is that the large
5 majority of people in prison are not there because
6 of simple use. Simple possession.
7 That the vast majority are there
8 because of crime committed to support such use.
9 Often violent crime, so that I don't
10 think I can engage in that arithmetic of how many
11 people are put in prison, that's sort of like people
12 who are in prison are innocent to save one person
13 from using drugs.
14 I think a better way of approaching
15 that is to say are there ways of trying to figure
16 out to keep the nonviolent criminal from just
17 spending time in prison, can we markedly expand the
18 number of therapeutic communities, for example, to
19 give people alternatives.
20 Really it's not alternatives to
21 incarceration, if you look at it, most of the time
22 it's alternatives to nonincarceration, that is most
23 of the people who commit crimes don't go to prison,
24 you have all these horrendous figures about how many
25 are in there, for example in Texas a ten year felony
143
1
2 sentence is equal to about ten months actually
3 served, you have all these people going in the front
4 door then people rapidly coming out the back door.
5 I don't think I can answer that last
6 equation.
7 The reason I don't want people to use
8 is a certain percentage of them will become
9 addicted.
10 Not all of them, although social
11 control certainly has an important role to play.
12 That's why we have 50 million nicotine
13 addicts and 15 million alcoholics and 2 million
14 cocaine addicts, because of the social controls and
15 a major part of that social control are the
16 sanctions given by the law.
17 If you ask teenagers one of the major
18 reasons they don't use is they could go to jail or
19 their parents don't approve, one of the reasons
20 their parents don't approve is because it's illegal.
21 About five and a half percent of
22 people use illegal drugs, suppose we say under
23 legalization that would only triple to fifteen
24 percent, those are millions and millions of people
25 who will then be in major trouble and I think that
144
1
2 is the more important thing.
3 How many people are you willing to see
4 die of drug abuse drug abuse in order to change a --
5 justify a change in the law.
6 MR. BROWN: Two more questions from
7 the audience.
8 THE AUDIENCE: Dr. Kleber, in
9 reference to one of the charts in legalization
10 panacea or Pandora's box, the one where it showed
11 marijuana use among adolescents between 1992 and
12 1994 increasing as disapproval of the drug use
13 decreased, I just wanted to ask about the causal
14 relationship that you painted between the decrease
15 in disapproval and the increase in use.
16 I was wondering if that causality came
17 from the interview subjects themselves and how you
18 were able to interpret the use increase as following
19 from the decrease of disapproval as opposed to say
20 disapproval decreasing as it was as use increases as
21 evidence of use around these adolescents was more
22 and more available.
23 So how did you get to causality?
24 DR. KLEBER: Those figures were
25 derived from Lloyd Johnson's study of high school
145
1
2 students called monitoring the future, it's been
3 carried out since the mid-70's and each year as part
4 of that study it's an anonymous study, kids fill out
5 the survey form then they drop them into a box at
6 the front of the room with no identifiers, et
7 cetera.
8 They ask about use and they also ask
9 about perceived risk, disapproval, et cetera and
10 Lloyd has been tracking those for roughly fifteen,
11 twenty years.
12 So clearly it's not a one to one
13 correspondence, I can't show that everyone who said
14 increased risk or decreased risk changed their drug
15 use accordingly.
16 What you are dealing with thousands of
17 individuals filling out these surveys and the key
18 thing is to look at the trend lines.
19 As long as risk was increasing use was
20 going town.
21 Having worked in many, many schools
22 and during the '70's I worked in a number of high
23 schools in the New Haven area helping set up drug
24 prevention programs.
25 What you saw with marijuana there was
146
1
2 a perception "everyone is doing it."
3 Everyone new people who had gotten
4 into trouble or people wandering around high school
5 stoned all the time flunking out, et cetera, part of
6 that had a feedback inhibition so when I see someone
7 stoned all the time I may be a little more reluctant
8 to use it.
9 As fewer people use you see "fewer bad
10 examples."
11 At some point you reach a point where
12 people again say gee this drug must be safe because
13 everyone I see using it is getting away with it
14 because so few are using it.
15 So it must be safer because people
16 aren't getting into trouble, therefore it's okay to
17 try it, more people try it, more people get into
18 trouble.
19 I think the best example of that are
20 the psychadelics, they never go away, they never get
21 very high because behavioral toxicity is such that
22 it's readily apparent if too many people take acid
23 you are going to see much more dramatically than
24 with marijuana the behavioral toxicity, the bad
25 trips, et cetera.
147
1
2 MR. BROWN: You have a question, Mr.
3 Wilson?
4 THE AUDIENCE: I have a question about
5 a confusion that I have about an apparent
6 contradiction in your logic concerning the legal
7 status of drugs and the level of use in society and
8 the contradiction I note is this.
9 Your argument is that because illegal
10 drugs are illegal there is less use in society and
11 if we change their legal status use would increase.
12 Wouldn't it follow what we should be
13 doing is making alcohol and tobacco illegal because
14 the reason why they are so commonly used is because
15 of their legal status?
16 But I assume you are not advocating a
17 return to the Volstadt Act.
18 I was just wondering how you
19 rationalize or deal with that contradiction.
20 DR. KLEBER: Remember the drugs that
21 were illegal was legal, cocaine was legal at the
22 turn of the century, not just in Coca Cola as Ethan
23 mentioned, but in all sort of patent medicines you
24 could buy in the drugstore for about fifteen cents
25 the equivalent now of about twenty dollars worth of
148
1
2 cocaine.
3 Cocaine use got so out of hand that in
4 1910 precedent Taft said the use of cocaine is the
5 worst public health problem the United States had
6 ever encountered.
7 That's when cocaine was legal and
8 freely available in every drugstore in a variety of
9 forms.
10 What do I think about alcohol and
11 tobacco using your paradigm?
12 Well the problem with alcohol,
13 prohibition was repealed not because it didn't work,
14 it did work, if you look at terms of decreasing
15 alcohol use, decreasing consequences like sirrhosis,
16 drunken driving et cetera, all those things markedly
17 decreased, I have all that data if you want to see
18 it, it's in our white paper.
19 Prohibition was repealed because a
20 majority of Americans said I can handle alcohol and
21 I don't want to be deprived of use of it.
22 If you saw what happened in Barrow,
23 Alaska maybe you saw that article in the times a
24 couple of weeks ago, Barrow totally made alcohol
25 illegal and apparently the closest place you could
149
1
2 go to buy it was like 150 miles away. And a fifth
3 of vodka was over $150.
4 What happened in that year, crime
5 sharply dropped, the number of ER episodes dropped
6 by ninety percent, spousal abuse dropped, drunken
7 driving stopped, all sorts of crime and accidents
8 dropped.
9 What is the response of the citizens,
10 they are petitioning now for a referendum to reverse
11 it and to put alcohol back.
12 The reason we can't make alcohol
13 illegal is because a majority of Americans say I can
14 handle it.
15 And I think most do, we have 100
16 million drinkers, 15 million who are alcoholics or
17 problem drinkers who get into trouble.
18 Am I in favor of making alcohol
19 illegal, absolutely not because I think the average
20 American who uses it can use it in moderation.
21 Tobacco is another, it's a totally
22 different story.
23 If tobacco came on today I would be
24 the first to say let's not let this drug be put on
25 to the market.
150
1
2 It is the only drug around that uses
3 advertised will kill you.
4 It's a dreadful drug, 50 million
5 addicts, it's my addiction, I smoked two packs a day
6 for twenty-five years I have now been clean for
7 twenty years.
8 It was one of the harder things I have
9 ever done in my life, it's one of the most difficult
10 things to give up.
11 If you ask my opinion we should try
12 and wean society away from it.
13 You are not going to make a drug
14 illegal when 50 million addicts exist in society.
15 And we can't get our kids to stop
16 doing it.
17 One of the things that breaks my heart
18 is my daughter who started as a teen at thirty is
19 still addicted to tobacco in spite of everything I
20 know and have tried and all that.
21 I worry given death rates.
22 So tobacco I feel very differently
23 about, but I would turn your argumentment around and
24 say my God we have 50 million nicotine addicts and 2
25 million cocaine addicts let's not do anything that
151
1
2 will increase that number of cocaine addicts, let's
3 do everything we can to decrease the number of
4 nicotine addicts.
5 MR. BROWN: Before we bid fare well to
6 Dr. Kleber, any questions from the panel.
7 Mr. Doyle, Eleanor?
8 MS. PEALE: I do have a question that
9 has to do with we are convened here as a committee
10 of the Bar Association and we started our inquiry at
11 least one of our motivations had to do with the fact
12 that our criminal justice system is really breaking
13 down not just criminal, our civil justice system
14 because we are devoting so much time to prosecuting
15 drug cases and that goes on.
16 We now have, this country has over 1
17 million people in jail, many of whom are there
18 because of not just drug offenses having to do with
19 drugs, but because of possession of drugs and
20 because of mandatory sentencing.
21 Now you have not addressed that issue,
22 I know you are a psychiatrist so perhaps it don't
23 concern you, but we as a committee here are
24 extremely concerned about the fact that prosecutions
25 are increasing, our civil justice system is breaking
152
1
2 down, judges are getting very cross about the whole
3 thing, cross is perhaps too light a word yet you
4 have not addressed that in any way in your remarks.
5 DR. KLEBER: I didn't address it
6 because I was I was asked not to.
7 I was asked being a psychiatrist to
8 limit my remarks to the effects of what would happen
9 in terms of use, what would happen can we present
10 something of that by treatment and prevention.
11 I was not asked to address, if you
12 would like me to I will give you my thoughts on it,
13 remember they are from a psychiatrist, not from a
14 criminal justice expert.
15 I think that there are ways of
16 improving what's going on without legalizing these
17 substances.
18 One way would be even with treatment
19 being as flawed as it is, and not being as
20 successful as we would like it, we have two and a
21 half million people a year who need treatment, 1.5
22 million treatment episodes, if we could increase
23 that so that that gap were met, I think many of the
24 people who go to prison would be not end up going to
25 prison.
153
1
2 Those who are coming out of prison
3 wouldn't be recitvists, treatment in prison can be
4 quite effective, a number of studies have shown
5 that, yet that's been a bipartisan failure.
6 When I worked under President Bush he
7 did not ask for enough money for treatment and the
8 democratic Congress gave us one-third of what we
9 asked for.
10 When President Clinton asked for $300
11 million to treat the hard core addict the Congress
12 which at that point was democratic zeroed it out.
13 So that funding for treatment has been
14 a bipartisan failure and I think that would be one
15 of the major ways if we could markedly increase the
16 availability of treatment both in prison and out of
17 prison, I think many fewer people would go to prison
18 and I think the mandatory minimums need to be
19 reexamined.
20 I testified in front of the sentencing
21 commission about the -- about that 100 to one
22 dispair pair at this between crack and powder
23 cocaine and I felt there should be some difference
24 recognized between the two but instead of 100 to one
25 or a 100 to one it should be more like five to one.
154
1
2 I think there are ways to fine tune
3 the system without throwing out the baby with the
4 bath water.
5 MR. BROWN: One more question from the
6 panel, Mr. Knapp.
7 MR. KNAPP: Just a clarification of
8 your statistics.
9 You had 50 million nicotine addicts
10 approximately 15 million alcohol addicts on
11 marijuana you referred to them as users at least
12 once a week and then when you discuss marijuana in
13 the Netherlands you referred to them as addicts.
14 Leaving that aside, what is the
15 overlap starting with the 50 million addicted to
16 nicotine, how many of those 50 million are also
17 among the 15 million alcohol addicts, the 2 million
18 cocaine, addicts, what's the overlap of all of that?
19 DR. KLEBER: The easiest way to
20 approach it is the other way, one of the things that
21 anyone who has dealt with addicts will tell you is
22 that practically all of them smoke, so about ninety
23 percent of our heroin addicts, probably eighty-five
24 percent or more of our cocain addicts, probably
25 eighty or ninety percent of our alcoholics, smoke.
155
1
2 Probably the same is true of
3 marijuana.
4 So that there is enormous overlap
5 there, nicotine is one of the gateway drugs par
6 excellence that leads to use of other drugs.
7 In terms of marijuana, the discrepancy
8 in the numbers sometimes I use use, sometimes I use
9 depends, clearly not everyone who uses marijuana is
10 an addict.
11 The 5 million are individuals who use
12 at least weekly, I consider in my practice when I
13 see someone who is in trouble with marijuana they
14 are usually individuals who are using anywhere from
15 two to ten joints a day, have been unable to stop,
16 are paying enormous prices in terms of their life
17 and they are clearly as dependent upon that as
18 individuals are on alcohol.
19 It is a dependence inducing drug.
20 Do most people who use marijuana get
21 addicted, of course not, do most people who drink
22 become alcoholics? No, so we are not talking about
23 an all or nothing phenomenon.
24 MR. BROWN: All right, we could
25 probably go on for much longer but in the interests
156
1
2 of time I think we need to move on and I would like
3 to thank Dr. Kleber for coming here to speak with
4 us.
5 MR. BROWN: We will take the next
6 speaker now, Theodore Kheel.
7 Mr. Kheel he's a lawyer, he has been
8 engaged in the past conflict prevention and
9 resolution for over half a century.
10 MR. KHEEL: I am pleased to be here
11 and to speak on the special committee's report even
12 though it is an hour and a half after I was
13 scheduled to speak.
14 But apart from that, I am pleased that
15 I heard this morning the testimony of Dr. Kleber and
16 the testimony of Professor Nadelmann because it
17 helps illustrate the one point that I propose to
18 make here today.
19 You can tell from the brief
20 description of my background that I have not written
21 on drug policy and that I am not an expert in the
22 field.
23 I want to make that clear because I am
24 not going to be talking about the subjects that were
25 discussed specifically by either Professor Nadelmann
157
1
2 or Dr. Kleber.
3 I do have some experience in resolving
4 disputes and there is a major national dispute
5 underway and it is being framed in very general
6 language as legalization versus prohibition.
7 What interested me about the report,
8 which I think is an excellent indictment of what it
9 calls the failed policy of drug prohibition, what
10 interested me was the report also says that it's
11 call for ending drug prohibition cannot be the end
12 of the Committee's inquiry or the sum of its
13 recommendation, and that what forms of governmental
14 regulation, if any, are appropriateness of
15 prohibition has to be answered.
16 The discussion today indicated that
17 both Mr. Sterling who spoke first and doctor -- and
18 Professor Nadelmann, recognized that abolishing --
19 eliminating drug prohibition is not the end of the
20 problem and that the question of what comes in its
21 place particularly in the form of regulation and
22 control has to be tried.
23 It is not I imagine it's a matter of
24 time, but also the complexity of the subject, it is
25 not addressed in the committee's report.
158
1
2 Now, I think from the point of view of
3 conflict resolution, which is a subject on which I
4 have experience if not expertise, that is
5 unfortunate, because at the present time the word
6 legalization is being misconstrued in terms of what
7 would follow from legalization and it was
8 illustrated here today by Dr. Kleber.
9 Dr. Kleber is, together with Joseph
10 Califano, former Secretary of Health, Education and
11 Welfare, the author of the report the editor and
12 reviewer of the report legal panacea or Pandora's
13 box about which he spoke this morning, but merely
14 told you what he thinks, what the committee -- the
15 center for addiction and drug abuse at Columbia
16 University which put this out, called it a white
17 paper, which of course means that it's intended to
18 be very impressive and it does have a lot of
19 impressive directors and officers in addition to Mr.
20 Califano, the wives of two former Presidents, there
21 is the former head of the United Automobile Workers
22 whom I know quite well and is a very fine man and so
23 forth.
24 The fact is that the report of the
25 white paper of the center undertakes to define what
159
1
2 it thinks legalization means and it's definition is
3 a far cry from what Professor Nadelmann said would
4 follow in the wake of legalization.
5 I have included in my brief paper
6 which you have in your book but I have also as usual
7 made some changes after I submitted it and I have
8 copies here and I would if you care to read it,
9 refer you to it.
10 But the interest paper in the absence
11 of any specific regulatory regime that is being
12 proposed by proponents of legalization, and that is
13 the fact and indeed there was a study in the Hofstra
14 Law Review in 1990 by a Mark Kleinman and a Ron
15 Sager in which they observed that perhaps the most
16 prominent inadequacy of current legalization
17 arguments is their failure to specify what is meant
18 by legalization.
19 That while legalization advocates do
20 not deny that some sort of controls will be
21 required, their proposals rarely address the
22 question of how far on the spectrum a given drug
23 should be moved or how to accomplish such a
24 movement.
25 Now what the center it is in the
160
1
2 absence of a definite significance of what
3 legalization would mean, particularly with regard to
4 legalization and control in its place, the center
5 undertakes to say what they think it means and then
6 having defined the definition of legalization, they
7 proceed to give the statistics that you heard today
8 from Dr. Kleber in which he concludes that drug
9 utilization would go up.
10 Now that's a speculation.
11 Professor Nadelmann would argue
12 exactly to the reverse, you argue to the reverse, we
13 are all talking about what would happen under a set
14 of circumstances that don't exist at the present
15 time.
16 The center lists as what they construe
17 legalization to mean as making marijuana cigarettes
18 as available as tobacco cigarettes, establishing an
19 open and free market for drugs.
20 Making drugs legal for the adult
21 population but illegal for minors, having only the
22 government produce and sell drugs and allowing a
23 private market in drugs but with restrictions on
24 advertising, dosage and place of consumption.
25 Now, when the committee I think it was
161
1
2 Mr. Daly asked Professor Nadelmann what would you
3 propose as the middle ground in place of
4 legalization, I counted nine things that he said
5 would be introduced and he said and there are many
6 others.
7 You do have this debate taking place
8 over legalization versus prohibition and the
9 question of what is legalization and what controls
10 if any the committee says if any, leaving open the
11 possibility that there would be none, would exist
12 and then on the terms of different interpretations,
13 all kinds of dire consequences are predicted or
14 beneficial results.
15 Now I think a good example of that
16 sort of thing is the many articles, I counted 21,
17 that A.M. Rosenthal, the former editor of the New
18 York Times has got very distinguished credentials,
19 equal to those of the board of directors of the
20 center on addiction and substance abuse.
21 He has written 21 articles I got it
22 from Lexis Nexis, that's one of the privileges of
23 being a lawyer and I have a couple of quotes from
24 what he said and these are all on the assumption and
25 Dr. Kleber repeated it today, that drugs would be
162
1
2 freely available in the same manner as tobacco.
3 That is not in the report itself, nor
4 is that generally considered to be part of what
5 legalization means.
6 The vast majority of the people,
7 according to Abe Rosenthal, construe legalization to
8 mean that anybody could get drugs at any time and
9 that is what he says in effect in his articles.
10 Just let me give you two quotes.
11 One from an article he wrote, it's the
12 column is called on his mind and you can figure out
13 what is on his mind from the articles.
14 In January of this year Mr. Rosenthal
15 characterized legalization as one of the most cruel
16 and selfish movements in America and he freely
17 predicted without giving any statistical support
18 that legalization would create more addicts, more
19 abused children, more victims or muggings and
20 robbery, millions more every single year.
21 His first column on April 22, 1988, he
22 said legalization would create a pusher parties in
23 which the government would dole out or sell drugs a
24 couple of doses at a time.
25 And that if addicts could only get
163
1
2 those weak shots you buy at the government crack
3 parlor, pushers would urge them to come right over
4 to us, the pushers for the rest, saying that we have
5 got the stuff for the real highs, just go get the
6 money and what's more you don't have to worry about
7 drug possession because it is legal, man, legal, can
8 you believe it?
9 I end the quote there.
10 Now if you make that the national
11 issue and you have the former editor of the New York
12 Times on the column of the Op-Ed page of the New
13 York Times at least once a week saying things like
14 that, you have a problem of conflict resolution.
15 The most important first step in
16 resolving any conflict and I have been in a lot of
17 them, principally involving labor, is to define the
18 issues.
19 It is amazing how many serious
20 disputes exist in which the issue in conflict is not
21 defined.
22 I submit that the issue legalization
23 versus prohibition has not been properly defined and
24 that as long as it is allowed to be argued in terms
25 of the dire consequences that will flow from drugs
164
1
2 becoming freely available without getting into the
3 details that the committee says it has to address of
4 a substitute system in place of prohibition, that
5 the battle to accomplish what the committee
6 recommends, ending drug prohibition and the title
7 doesn't say anything more about the alternatives,
8 although they are mentioned in the body of the
9 report, but without including any recommendations,
10 of course that issue continues to be the issue, the
11 cause of legalization is doomed.
12 I have suggested a slight modification
13 that doesn't change the main thrust of your report
14 which is entitled a wiser course ending drug
15 prohibition and I would suggest, respectfully that
16 it -- a title a wiser course focusing on education
17 treatment and regulation in place of drug
18 prohibition, may not be as catchy.
19 There are advantages to the use of the
20 word legalization, because it attracts attention.
21 When Abe Rosenthal writes an article
22 it gets a lot of people terribly disturbed and there
23 are answers to it and a lot of people believe that
24 it is correct what he says.
25 I think that in a national debate of
165
1
2 this importance, the definition of the issue is
3 vital and that is the main point and the only point
4 that led me to accept your invitation to testify
5 here today.
6 Thank you.
7 MR. BROWN: Thank you very much.
8 MR. BROWN: I will start with Mr.
9 Salomon, since he lost out last time.
10 MR. SALOMON: Good morning, Mr. Kheel.
11 One question, apropos of the misuse
12 and misunderstanding of the word legalization, do
13 you have any views on the term war on drugs as it
14 has been used?
15 MR. KHEEL: I dislike it as much as I
16 dislike the use of legalization standing by itself.
17 I frame the issue that is being
18 debated nationally as legalization versus
19 prohibition.
20 The war on drugs assumes prohibition
21 is the key to it.
22 I don't like that phrase either.
23 Now what do you do about it, catchy
24 phrases stick and they are easy to use because
25 instead of saying, as Professor Nadelmann did today
166
1
2 when he was asked what do you propose and he spoke
3 for about five or ten minutes and he had nine
4 proposals then he had more to come.
5 So that if you could just say
6 legalization, it's a lot easier.
7 And it does attract attention, but it
8 does mislead; that's the trouble with the term
9 legalization unaccompanied by a program for
10 regulation and control in place of legalization.
11 The same thing is wrong with the war
12 on drugs.
13 When you are fighting a war you are in
14 there to win and you waive the flag and get all
15 emotional about it.
16 It is not a precise issue.
17 The discussion today by Professor
18 Nadelmann was right on target, he said there is a
19 middle ground, and that you can't just simply say
20 legalization and tomorrow anybody could go out and
21 buy drugs, you have to have a well thought through
22 program.
23 The committee, the special committee
24 is on the right trail but you didn't finish the job.
25 MR. BROWN: Mr. Doyle, would you like
167
1
2 to ask a question?
3 MR. DOYLE: If we had a model that
4 incorporated Dr. Nadelmann's ideas of the syringes
5 and the methadone maintenance, the injectable
6 methadone, he stops short of heroin and cocaine
7 becoming available even on a regulated basis, at
8 least he didn't say he was ready for that.
9 But let me just ask you, if we had a
10 very tightly controlled model that did include the
11 availability of heroin and cocain, heroin available
12 perhaps as in England and Switzerland on a very
13 medically controlled basis and cocain distributable,
14 regulated even as poison but at least made available
15 to the public and some of the resources used in the
16 war on drugs if you will pardon the expression,
17 being reallocated to education and treatment, is
18 that an approach that would be attractive to you?
19 MR. KHEEL: I was afraid you would ask
20 that question.
21 That is why I said in the beginning I
22 am not an expert on drug policy.
23 I do not know, I am not qualified to
24 answer that question.
25 I think that the very many options
168
1
2 that were mentioned and others that follow are
3 certainly things that should be made part of the
4 package.
5 There is while I am at that, you do
6 have a statement in your report that I think can be
7 challenged.
8 You say very early on the committee
9 believes the necessary inquiry cannot begin, inquiry
10 into drug policy which it calls upon to take place,
11 cannot begin in earnest so long as our nation
12 remains committed to the illusion that drug use can
13 be prohibited at an acceptable cost.
14 And that only by recognizing that this
15 is no longer true can we fashion a method for
16 controlling drugs.
17 If you could convince the public that
18 this is an illusion, that drug prohibition is an
19 illusion, then you would have time to go on and say
20 now this is what we should have in substitution.
21 But you -- but it can be equally said
22 that an earnest discussion of drug policy cannot
23 begin as long as people think that legalization
24 means that drugs would be freely available.
25 And you have got to disabuse the
169
1
2 public of that to prevent the kind of attacks you
3 get from Abe Rosenthal, and he's not alone.
4 He happens to speak in the vernacular
5 of the drug user, that I am sure he knows so well,
6 and that the report, the center's report is cut from
7 the same cloth, but it does it in a little more
8 polite language.
9 But it deliberately -- not
10 deliberately, I don't know why they did it, I think
11 the proponents of legalization are partly to blame
12 because they don't include a program, a detailed
13 specific program of regulation and control in place.
14 What that should be I decline to try
15 to answer, I just don't know enough.
16 MR. BROWN: All right, I think we can
17 take a couple of questions from the audience before
18 we move on for the day Mr. Sterling, you testified
19 earlier today.
20 MR. STERLING: I was just going to say
21 I encourage people to read the report, I prepared a
22 fifty page paper which I did not read aloud and you
23 are not here for my testimony so you didn't have an
24 opportunity to hear that there were proposals about
25 what I call a consulting pharmacist, taxation, about
170
1
2 ways in which shelters would provide drugs, which
3 drug users would be licensed and so on.
4 Speaking as a former legislative
5 counsel, trying to draft a very detailed legislative
6 program is extremely difficult and the advocates of
7 legalization represent a broad range from the
8 libertarians, the people like myself who would favor
9 very strict regulation.
10 So it's unlikely there is going to be
11 a consensus, because there are philosophical
12 differences among those critics of prohibition.
13 MR. KHEEL: I think you are absolutely
14 right and I did know, although I hadn't mentioned it
15 that you did say you favored a regime of regulation
16 and control and I haven't had the pleasure of
17 reading your statement, but I do think the problem
18 of trying to define a program of regulation that can
19 be used in the catchy way like the term legalization
20 is very difficult, and I don't know the answer to
21 it, but I to think the way the thing is going now
22 you are going to be on the short end of the stick in
23 recommending legalization.
24 There must be or there should -- you
25 should try to define some standards of regulation
171
1
2 without necessarily getting into every detail and
3 you should only say and that's why I suggested the
4 focus of the report should be on education treatment
5 and regulation in place of drug prohibition.
6 MR. BROWN: All right, we won't take
7 any more questions now just so we can move on we are
8 really running behind, we wound up having him on an
9 hour and a half later than he should have been.
10 I thank you for appearing today on
11 behalf of the Committee.
12 MR. BROWN: Our next speaker this
13 morning will be Mary M. Cleveland.
14 While we are waiting I will briefly
15 introduce Ms. Cleveland, she's a Graduate of Harvard
16 Radcliff with a BA in physics, she graduated from
17 the university of Berkley with a PhD in economics,
18 she is an Executive Committee member of the
19 partnership for responsible drug information and
20 there is too much more here let's just move on to
21 the program.
22 Everyone welcome Mary Cleveland.
23 MS. CLEVELAND: Thank you, it's a
24 pleasure and honor to be here and I think you have
25 done a magnificent job in reviewing what is an
172
1
2 enormous and complicated issue.
3 I am going to speak as an economist I
4 am going to address the economics of the issue and
5 respond a little bit to some of the points made by
6 the dissenters on the committee.
7 My title is ending drug prohibition
8 while controlling drug use and protecting children
9 which I think can be done simultaneously as long as
10 we don't think in absolutes.
11 There were -- these are the first
12 three objections of the dissenters to the wiser
13 course legalizing drugs would reduce the cost,
14 increase demand and addiction, a failure to provide
15 a concrete proposal and what is essentially the same
16 thing as one, a concern that you relax controls you
17 will get a lot of extra use.
18 While these are reasonable objections,
19 they reflect what I think is a major problem with
20 thinking on drug issues, which is a tendency to all
21 or nothing thinking.
22 A tendency to think in extremes.
23 So this is -- my recommendation as we
24 continue this debate is to avoid this kind of
25 either/or, all or nothing thinking.
173
1
2 I put a few examples up, they should
3 look familiar.
4 In response to the issue of whether we
5 have a concrete proposal, I think at this point we
6 need to be trying a lot of small alternatives,
7 rather than no one end all solution to the whole
8 thing and one of the most obvious alternatives that
9 are before us without any change in law at all is to
10 shift resources to treatment and away from
11 enforcement and this is data from the Rand study in
12 1994 on supply versus demand control on cocaine.
13 If you look at this pie, seven percent
14 of the cocaine pie is devoted to treatment and the
15 rest of it is devoted to various forms of control.
16 According to them, the top bar graph
17 is source country control is very inefective, very
18 costly for the dollar and treatment is relatively
19 much more effective.
20 If you slide it up, the inverse of
21 that is that per dollar spent on treatment you get a
22 much bigger bang for your buck than you do for
23 source country control.
24 By their calculations, source country
25 control interdiction and domestic enforcement don't
174
1
2 even break even, that is the costs exceed the
3 benefits.
4 So so I am saying that's an example of
5 stuff that can be done right now without any changes
6 in the laws.
7 This is a statement by -- the fear of
8 drug prohibition is that if you let loose a little
9 bit on the controls you will get an explosion in use
10 and an explosion in addiction.
11 This is Dr. Kleber's estimate. I mean
12 I think it's more a guess than anything with an
13 economic basis but in any case I am going to address
14 this fear as an economist, what do we really know
15 about what happens in drug markets.
16 Historical, socialogical, economic
17 evidence all of it indicates that drug use like
18 other consumption is primarily determined by taste,
19 norms, fads, fashions, rather than laws or costs.
20 I mean costs and laws have an effect
21 at the margins, but not overall.
22 I think we will start with an example
23 of alcohol consumption during prohibition, it fell
24 dramatically at first by the time prohibition was
25 over, thirteen years later, alcohol consumption was
175
1
2 up to an estimated seventy percent of what it had
3 been preprohibition and then it stayed there,
4 amazingly enough for another ten years when
5 prohibition was lifted.
6 My sense of what happened is light
7 drinkers stopped drinking all together then they
8 just didn't pick up again when prohibition was
9 lifted.
10 While the heavy drinkers soon found
11 their alcohol and kept right ongoing, prohibition or
12 not.
13 Again another illustration of what has
14 of how much more important tastes are to laws,
15 prisons are full of illegal drugs.
16 If you can't keep them out of prisons,
17 prisoners who like drugs will get their drugs even
18 if it means smuggling them past the guards.
19 On the other hand, most people even
20 given the opportunity will not try drugs.
21 And that's the third example up there
22 which comes from a Casa report survey of drug use in
23 a survey of 6th through 12th graders, thirty percent
24 said they could easily get cocaine or heroin however
25 eighty percent of the same group, none of their
176
1
2 circles of friends used hard drugs, thirteen percent
3 less than half, five percent said more than half and
4 again CASA as you know defines any drug use as
5 abuse.
6 So the point is most people with easy
7 access to drugs won't touch them but people who are
8 committed to using drugs are going to get them
9 anyhow, regardless of what the laws are.
10 These are some national statistics,
11 again, people also prefer safer drugs.
12 I am not going to go into that here,
13 but the marijuana is much more prevalent than
14 cocaine which is between much more prevalent than
15 heroin and on the other hand alcohol is vastly more
16 popular than the other drugs.
17 The second thing is from the Harvard
18 survey of drinking in colleges and they in passing
19 surveyed the other drugs.
20 But again and I don't know where Dr.
21 Kleber gets his figure on 2 million cocaine addicts,
22 even -- these are the numbers the national
23 households survey, even 1.3 once a month is not
24 addiction and that's not 2 million.
25 So, as an economist I am going to look
177
1
2 at characteristics of drug users to see how drug
3 users behave, who they are and what that means for
4 policy I have divided drug users up into three
5 categories here for purposes of understanding
6 behavior, experimenters are very, very light users,
7 there are lots of them.
8 Regular users, that is people who use
9 drugs on a regular basis but their use is not out of
10 control then heavy users, abusers, over at the right
11 and you can see some of the comparisons there, the
12 heavy use, the heavy users are the smallest group
13 but of course they consume most of what gets
14 consumed.
15 The entry to the group will come back
16 to but that's curiosity, peer pressure, easy
17 opportunity, is most important to becoming a light
18 user then you move on to being a heavier user if you
19 enjoy the experience you escape problems and in each
20 case you are moving on to a much smaller group.
21 What's most interesting down at the
22 bottom there is how people are likely to respond to
23 public policy.
24 Treatment, regular users are going to
25 be resistent, their use isn't out of control,
178
1
2 addicts may be more perceptive, public information
3 depends on credibility.
4 Law enforcement has some effect on
5 light users, minimum effect on the others, response
6 to price is not important to either light users or
7 regular users and the reason for that is that
8 regular users often deal and in dealing drugs they
9 are essentially paying for their own use by passing
10 it on to their customers who will either be the
11 heavy users or the experimenters.
12 However, a response to convenience,
13 convenience is very important for a light user, not
14 so important for the other user, the heavy users who
15 are connected.
16 In any case the effect of prohibition
17 on the drug market is to create what I call a
18 Tupperware market.
19 Everybody who is out there using at
20 all regularly is also out there selling.
21 The sellers are everywhere, most of
22 them sell very little and they don't make much money
23 at it, but they are out there everywhere, they are
24 in the schools, they are at work, they are in homes,
25 they are in the playgrounds, everywhere you go there
179
1
2 are dealers and this is a direct consequence of drug
3 prohibition.
4 I cited up at the top a Rand study of
5 Washington, D.C. in which an absolutely staggering
6 number of young black men and teenagers are involved
7 in dealing drugs.
8 Most of them started out dealing
9 without using, then they become users.
10 As they get a little older, they are
11 out there dealing, they are both working at low wage
12 jobs and they are dealing to support their habits.
13 This is very consistent with the
14 sentencing project findings, too.
15 The numbers are astounding, there you
16 have the figures from the urban institute survey,
17 sixteen percent of -- these are kids around 15, 16,
18 had sold drugs and eleven percent had used drugs,
19 there is actually not too much overlap between the
20 two, that is the sellers are generally not the
21 users, but again the figures are staggering.
22 This is dividing up our three kinds of
23 users again to see what the effect of policy will
24 be, low income heavy users are most affected by
25 price.
180
1
2 Which means if the price falls their
3 consumption will increase but you are talking about
4 a very small group.
5 The other two groups control their
6 use, they are not much affected by price.
7 For light users it's access that's
8 important and that's a very critical issue because
9 if you are talking about children encountering drugs
10 for the first time, it's access that counts for more
11 than anything else.
12 If their friends are passing them out
13 they may try drugs, if their friends aren't they
14 won't.
15 Our middle group which is actually the
16 key group the regular users are not affected either
17 by convenience or price because they can balance
18 off-price fluctuations by dealing.
19 This is a little bit of information
20 from the Rand study again on supply and demand
21 control for cocaine, the first graph just shows the
22 plummet of price in cocaine right in the midst of
23 the drug war the price of cocaine was going down,
24 down, down, down which shows just how effective the
25 drug war was, so the real price of cocaine plunged
181
1
2 and yet at the same time I think for reasons of
3 health and a whole variety of other reasons, casual
4 use declined, let's go on to the next one.
5 Is very interesting, the top graph
6 shows that during that same period that the price
7 was plunging the number of light users was going
8 down dramatically, too while the number of heavy
9 users remained about constant and probably per
10 capita almost exactly constant.
11 But if you the heavy users consumed
12 more and between you are talking about a very small
13 group and they consumed more I would say basically
14 because the price went down.
15 But in terms of this fear that if the
16 price goes down people are going to start taking
17 cocaine all over the place, look at what happened.
18 The price went down at the same time
19 that the light users reduced their use.
20 So now I am coming on to policy and I
21 think these are three sensible limited objectives of
22 policy.
23 Obviously no one disagrees, help heavy
24 users and abusers, control their use and avoid
25 endangering their health, no disagreement with that
182
1
2 at all.
3 The second one I think is critical
4 which is to reduce the population of user dealers,
5 especially teenage user dealers because they are the
6 source of drugs for under age people and third,
7 minimize the access and appeal of drugs to
8 teenagers, which as you will see amounts to pretty
9 much the same thing.
10 I am referring the teenage dealer user
11 connection.
12 The CASA survey asked teenagers why
13 they think someone gets started on drugs and two of
14 the responses were because friends use drugs and to
15 be cool, if you put those together you have got a
16 very strong impact of peer pressure.
17 So what you have going on here, if you
18 have teenage dealers sell to heavy users to make
19 money, teenage dealers become users if they aren't
20 already, teenage user dealers turn other teenagers
21 on to drugs.
22 So at the very least if we want to
23 protect teenagers from being exposed to drugs before
24 they don't have much judgment, we've got to get the
25 teenage user dealers out of the market as best we
183
1
2 can.
3 This is very well-known, it's
4 discussed in the Rand study.
5 The reason teenagers deal is they have
6 very low earning opportunities elsewhere, even if
7 they are middle class, if they have a poor education
8 this is doubly true because they don't have much
9 prospects either, they are less risk averse and they
10 face lower criminal penalties.
11 What follows from this as long as
12 there exists a large illicit market, teenagers will
13 dominate low volume retail sales, that means
14 teenagers are going to be out there selling or
15 offering drugs to other teenagers.
16 So now getting down to more specifics,
17 if we want to reduce the numbers of teenage user
18 dealers, we have to shrink the black market in which
19 they operate.
20 That means number one you want to get
21 their primary customers out of the market.
22 If we want to get heavy users and
23 addicts out of the market, because those are the
24 primary customers of the teenage user dealers and
25 Ethan has gone through a lot of different proposals
184
1
2 for that, nobody disagrees, provide treatment to
3 anyone who wants it.
4 Upgrade methadone treatment, even
5 provide hard drugs in a very limited fashion, just
6 to get the market off the streets.
7 Secondly, between this is what the
8 Dutch are doing or the British are doing, is if you
9 give adult users some limited access to these -- to
10 the drugs, it again reduces the opportunities for
11 teenagers in an illegal market.
12 So in other words Dr. Kleber is
13 talking about how you don't -- how a certain number
14 of people if they are exposed are going to become
15 addicted and so forth, if you want to stop underage
16 exposure to drugs, you have got to get rid of the
17 teenage user dealers.
18 I don't see any other opportunity to
19 do that except by trying to minimize the black
20 market in this fashion.
21 It looks like The New York Times has
22 sort of gotten the message, this is their editorial
23 last Saturday on the report of the sentencing
24 project which is the absolute devastating effect of
25 the drug markets on low income black neighborhoods.
185
1
2 There again you have these young men
3 out there selling drugs, most of them work they make
4 a little extra money they smoke a little dope for
5 recreation and next thing they know they are in jail
6 for ten years.
7 I am saying to some extent I am not
8 making a new argument, here one of the arguments
9 made by the opponents to alcohol prohibition was
10 that alcohol prohibition endangered children.
11 Quite apart from the gunfire in the
12 streets, there was a concern that as this woman
13 stated, that when you banned alcohol, you couldn't
14 control access of children and children were going
15 to the speakeasys when they never would have gone to
16 the saloons beforehand.
17 So that prohibition, certainly if it
18 was intended to protect children it was backfiring
19 and that's sort of the gist of my message here, it's
20 the duty of economists to proclaim the law of
21 unintended consequences and that's exactly what we
22 have here in trying to protect children we are
23 actually exposing children to drugs far more than
24 under some sensible system of control and
25 restriction.
186
1
2 Do you have questions?
3 MR. BROWN: We have time for some
4 questions from the audience.
5 This young lady in the front row.
6 THE AUDIENCE: As an economist I was
7 wondering if you could answer a couple of questions
8 for me, if you could maybe talk a little bit about
9 the prison boom and construction on the U.S.
10 The relationship between our surplus
11 population and the crime drug rates and our
12 imprisonment rates if there is a relationship
13 between our unemployed surplus population and our
14 imprisonment rates little more of the relationship
15 between drug use and socio-economic factors of those
16 people who are using and selling drugs.
17 I was wondering if you ever thought
18 about the effects of decriminalization on those
19 hundreds of thousands of people who do make a living
20 by selling drugs, what will happen to these people
21 when they become a little bit more unemployed, will
22 crime rates then of course go up even further?
23 MS. CLEVELAND: I am not sure what you
24 mean by surplus population, I hope there isn't any
25 surplus population here.
187
1
2 THE AUDIENCE: They are in the
3 prisons.
4 MS. CLEVELAND: Surplus population is
5 in the prisons.
6 I doubt the occupants of the prisons
7 would consider themselves surplus, but to start with
8 your last question, yes, this is a problem that the
9 legal markets of all sorts not just drug markets
10 provide employment for marginal people, but we are
11 dealing -- that's a problem with the economy and
12 it's something I have dealt with elsewhere in terms
13 of questions of distribution of wealth and
14 opportunity.
15 However I don't think providing people
16 with dangerous life threatening jobs is really a
17 solution to the problem of marginal people.
18 I mean you are talking about a much
19 broader problem of education, obviously our schools
20 need to be better, I am sort of at a loss as to how
21 to answer it further.
22 Can you be more specific, what in
23 particular?
24 THE AUDIENCE: You are sort of
25 touching on it but basically what I was trying to
188
1
2 ask and convey is the problem of -- for me being a
3 young person especially, the lack of hope of me
4 getting a job and I have a college education for
5 people who are perhaps not even out of high school,
6 the problems of employment are very real and
7 feelings of hopelessness.
8 I think that's all related to our drug
9 problems, our crime problems, our prison populations
10 and by unemployed surplus population that's what I
11 meant, the people who are underemployed or
12 unemployed with very little hope of anything,
13 especially with manual labor and other jobs being
14 pushed out of the country or taken over by say
15 computers of some sort.
16 Does that clear it up for you?
17 MS. CLEVELAND: I mean you are
18 talking -- drugs are just part of just one part of
19 the economy, yes, there is unemployment and I would
20 argue that our tax system creates much less
21 employment at the lower end than there would be if
22 there wasn't such a biased tax system, but yes, it
23 doesn't have anything to do with drugs and yes if
24 people are hopeless, you get a lot of not hopeless
25 people in Hollywood taking a lot of drugs.
189
1
2 MR. BROWN: Does anyone else have any
3 questions?
4 From the panel?
5 MR. DOYLE: Going to your focus on
6 teenage user dealers or the user dealers that
7 distribute to teenagers, what specifically would you
8 do to get them out of neighborhoods and schools, do
9 you have a specific proposal for that?
10 MS. CLEVELAND: To get teenage user
11 dealers out of neighborhoods and schools, I see no
12 alternative but to take their market away.
13 What keeps them going is that they are
14 selling into a very large black market and they have
15 what we call a comparative advantage in operating in
16 that market because they are willing to work for
17 very low wages.
18 So the only way to stop this -- these
19 are kids, these are kids who are ruining their
20 lives, the only way to get them out of this activity
21 is to take their market away.
22 Now, if you follow the tentative
23 directions in Europe of providing drugs to addicts
24 in clinics, prescribing methadone, our methadone
25 programs in this country are an absolute disgrace,
190
1
2 they are so tied up in red tape that they are almost
3 totally ineffective.
4 The only way to substantially reduce
5 the number of teenage user dealers is to dry up the
6 black market and that means getting most of the
7 heavy drug use out of the black market.
8 MS. ROCHLEN: But you are not talking
9 about making drugs available to minors, are you?
10 MS. CLEVELAND: On the contrary, I am
11 trying to make drugs available not to minors.
12 If you to have a black market you
13 aren't going to have teenagers starting off dealing
14 drugs then of course you know they sample the
15 merchandise and the next thing you know they are
16 regular users.
17 Are you asking about what you do about
18 underage addicts?
19 MS. ROCKLEN: I think as I said
20 earlier one of the biggest issues we have struggled
21 with is getting rid of the black market as far as
22 adults are concerned doesn't address the problem of
23 teenage interest in drugs or alcohol or anything
24 that may be new, exciting and sexy and that seems to
25 imply there will continue to be a black market at
191
1
2 least to supply minors.
3 MS. CLEVELAND: You are absolutely
4 right and this is of course there will continue to
5 be a black market and that's why we don't want to
6 look at this problem in terms of absolutes or
7 either/or but if you get the black market very small
8 so that it's sort of disintegrates, then -- and when
9 you recognize that most of the people to do the
10 selling or at least the retail end of the selling
11 are under age, you have accomplished something.
12 If you've got the black market down to
13 ten percent of what it was before, then that -- and
14 most of the people who were dealing in the black
15 market were under age, you have gotten an awful lot
16 of young people out of the black market, out of
17 operating in the black market.
18 There is no such thing as perfect.
19 MS. ROCKLEN: I suppose maybe it's
20 fair.
21 MS. CLEVELAND: It's better, it's not
22 perfect, but it's better than what we've got now.
23 MS. ROCKLEN: By analogy it's not my
24 impression there is a black market in making
25 alcoholic substances available to teenagers, I have
192
1
2 to assume there is some but I'm not aware there is
3 an organized black market delivering alcohol to
4 teenagers.
5 MS. CLEVELAND: That's correct, you
6 don't see for what it's worth, you don't see alcohol
7 being smuggled into schools and sold in schools so
8 that if you are a parent, you have a better chance
9 of keeping your kids away from alcohol if you make
10 sure you know what sorts of parties they are going
11 to than you have a chance of keeping your kids away
12 from drugs because the drugs are being dealt in the
13 schools and alcohol is not.
14 No program is airtight and it also
15 depends upon the cooperation of adults.
16 There is a massive amount of underage
17 drinking and smoking but the basic reason for that
18 is that adults tend to look the other way.
19 Kids who drink in high school get it
20 from their older siblings or older friends or from
21 their parents.
22 For any system to work to keep drugs
23 or alcohol or cigarettes from children, you have to
24 have adult cooperation.
25 If you don't have adult cooperation,
193
1
2 yes then of course the kids are going to get it but
3 the idea is just to make it harder you can't make it
4 impossible but you can make it harder.
5 MR. BROWN: Are there any more
6 questions from the audience?
7 THE AUDIENCE: It seems one of the key
8 issues is whether drug abuse itself is something
9 negative, you want to reduce kids if you don't want
10 to access for them or whether the effects, the
11 social effects that come with drug abuse you know a
12 kind of prohibition system which is drug users
13 selling to kids becoming involved in the whole
14 criminal justice system so that it clogs up the
15 system that people are ineffective.
16 How do you propose to separate those
17 two issues, make one a health care issue, saying
18 just say no drugs are bad have parents involved.
19 So alcohol there is still a whole
20 movement to try to educate kids on when to drink,
21 wait until you are 21, you don't have crime, you do
22 have teenage Mafia, the issue is you make money out
23 of judges, you become part of a gang so you don't
24 work at McDonalds, there is a whole system to put
25 money in your pocket then you become addicted but
194
1
2 that's a health issue, I have to feel like the issue
3 has to be separated.
4 I am wondering how you propose to
5 separate it.
6 MS. CLEVELAND: I don't understand
7 quite what your question is, can you put it in terms
8 of a question?
9 THE AUDIENCE: The teenage drug user
10 and you are say he sells drugs then he becomes a
11 user because he's dealing.
12 I think that's two separate issues,
13 why he's becoming a user and why he's dealing.
14 MS. CLEVELAND: Yes.
15 THE AUDIENCE: You can't have a one
16 tier attack, I think you have to separate either
17 he's going to become an user anyway whether it's
18 with alcohol --
19 MS. CLEVELAND: Teenagers may become
20 users anyway, but the point is they are much more
21 likely to become users if they are dealers than if
22 drugs are very hard to get.
23 It's not impossible, anybody who wants
24 drugs badly enough can get them, even in Barrow, but
25 this is why I want, we don't want to look at things
195
1
2 in extremes.
3 It's better if it's harder for
4 children to get them, you can't make it impossible
5 and no, a lot of teenage marijuana, experimentation
6 is probably pretty harmless for most of them, but
7 you would rather they waited until they had more
8 judgment.
9 But again it's always a matter of
10 degree rather than of an either/or.
11 MR. BROWN: We are going to have to
12 cut short for now I would like to thank you very
13 much for appearing on behalf of the Committee and we
14 will reconvene at 2:00 for the rest of the witnesses
15 for this afternoon.
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
196
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
