Obama lifts federal ban on funding needle exchanges

The Obama White House has launched its new website, www.whitehouse.gov. Under the header "The Agenda - Civil Rights", the site highlights various relevant issues including; homophobia and its affect on HIV/AIDS, contraception (including in prisons), the need to empower women to prevent the spread of HIV, and notably: needle exchange. The relevant text is below. Aside from a small mention for drug courts and eliminating the cocaine/crack sentencing disparity there isn't much else about drug policy yet, but lifting the disgraceful needle exchange funding ban is a good start considering we are only in day one - and the generally pragmatic tone bodes well. Can we be cautiously optimistic? Yes we can.

"*Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.

* Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections."

See also:

• Obama on ending the drug war (Rolling Stone interview)
  
  
• US poll finds 76% believe war o drugs is failing, 27% support legalisation
  
  
• Obama supports cannabis decriminalisation

Former US Drugs Cop Highlights the Racial Impact of the Drugs War

Jack Cole, Executive Director of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and a former US police officer (who recently visited the UK and appeared on the Today program) has spoken out about the link between the war on drugs and race.

In an article in the Boston Globe, 'The Solution to the failed war on drugs' he argues,

'War and race dominate the presidential campaign, but one nation-shaping war with profound racial consequences eludes the political radar: the drug war...

But while no other country locks up as large a percentage of its citizens, the specific impact on minority families has been one step short of the reinstitution of slavery: from media portrayals of marijuana-crazed Mexicans, opium-crazed Asians, and cocaine-crazed blacks, this war has always been about race.'

He says that whilst '33 percent of whites received a prison sentence and 51 percent of African-Americans received prison sentences', the amount of black people using drugs is in direct proportion to the amount of ethnic minorities in the USA, 'So, for example, blacks, who are 13 percent of our population, account for 13 percent of our drug use. '

Bill Clinton has admitted the negative impacts that these laws have on ethnic minorities, particularly blacks. Earlier this year he acknowledged his administration's failure to end the racial disparities in sentencing of powder and crack cocaine offenses despite the pharmacological similarities between both substances.

There's more on Clinton's stance on the drugs war, and Obama's views on marijuana here - 'Barack Obama supports cannabis declssification'.

Barack Obama has also spoken out on the crack versus cocaine issue calling for a closing of the sentencing disparity which stands at 100 to 1.

Cole further emphasises the failures of prohibtion for racial minorities by saying,

'Inner-city communities are devastated not by drug use but by the same turf-war street violence that accompanied alcohol prohibition and that dramatically decreased once that drug was legalized and regulated. Almost one in seven African-Americans are denied voting rights largely because of drug arrests, and countless minorities are denied intact families, college loans, driver's licenses, and jobs because of selective enforcement of a prohibition that, even fairly enforced, prevents no one from using drugs.'

Obama TV ad spoofs 90s anti-drug campaign

A new ad for the Obama 08 campaign has recently appeared on US TV that mocks some of the glossy anti-drug ads from the 80s and 90s, notably the much derided 1987 'this is your brain on drugs' fried egg Public Service Announcement (PSA).



It is worth noting that this ad is produced and funded by the grass roots MoveOn organisation, and not by the Obama campaign itself, but none the less it surely represents the first time a mainstream presidential campaign has mocked the silliness of the drug war in order to bolster credibility. This is not of course suggesting that drugs prevention / education is a bad thing per se (or that it is incompatible with a progressive drug law reform position) , rather that some of the ill-considered but iconic campaigns of the 'just say no' era have now become the staple of mainstream satire.

Tipping points are notoriously difficult to predict, but in hindsight often seem obvious and inevitable (e.g., the fall of the Berlin Wall). I saw the ad on Comedy Central late last night (reaching what the Daily Show calls the 'stoner demographic'), but if it continues to be aired on other channels/times (MTV is up next) and resonates with voters, we could be witnessing a watershed moment. Now that's change I can believe in!

Thanks to Sanho Tree

Rolling Stone: Obama on ending the drug war

An interview with Barack Obama is the centre piece of this month's Rolling Stone magazine. Unsuprisingly, given the the magazine's youth culture niche and long history as vocal critics drug war (see brilliant feature articles here, here and here), they hit the likely next US president with a serious question about its failure and what he plans to do about it:

RollingStone: The War on Drugs has cost taxpayers $500 billion since 1973. Nearly 500,000 people are behind bars on drug charges today, yet drugs are as available as ever. Do you plan to continue the War on Drugs, or will you make some significant change in course?

Obama: "Anybody who sees the devastating impact of the drug trade in the inner cities, or the methamphetamine trade in rural communities, knows that this is a huge problem. I believe in shifting the paradigm, shifting the model, so that we focus more on a public-health approach. I can say this as an ex-smoker: We've made enormous progress in making smoking socially unacceptable. You think about auto safety and the huge success we've had in getting people to fasten their seat belts.

The point is that if we're putting more money into education, into treatment, into prevention and reducing the demand side, then the ways that we operate on the criminal side can shift. I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives — it's expensive, it's counterproductive, and it doesn't make sense."

The language of Obama's response is very positive - first up he is talking about change, more significantly, a paradigm shift towards a greater focus on public health, implicitly away from the criminal justice focus of the past four decades 'war on drugs'. Interestingly he uses as examples of policy success; smoking and seatbelts, where sensible regulation (using civil rather than criminal law) combined with public health education has delivered remarkable outcomes. He does not use criminal justice crackdown examples, and the tough punitive language of zero tolerance, and rhetoric of war that has dominated the political discourse on drug policy in the US is conspicuously absent.

The policy positions he actually identifies address some of the more egregious negative outcomes of the drug war's long term systemic failure - namely the horrendous human and financial cost of mass incarceration of non violent drug offenders. 'It's expensive, it's counterproductive and it doesn't make sense' he concludes, hopefully - even if he is not saying it at this stage in his political journey - an analysis he will be able to apply to entire prohibitionist paradigm. We wouldn't realistically expect him to advocate for, or even bring up as a debate, the idea of progressive moves towards legal regulation and control of drug production and supply at this stage, but he has shown a willingness to think, to change and to lead.

The significance of a more rational voice in drug policy based in the Whitehouse cannot be underestimated. The US utterly dominate the international drug policy arena, and where they go others follow so maybe we can be cautiously optimistic that a significant global paradigm shift really is on the horizon.

As long as that other bloke doesn't win in November.

see also: Barack Obama supports cannabis decriminnalisation