Katharine Neill, the Alfred C. Glassell, III Postdoctoral Fellow in Drug Policy, explains what you should know about the Justice Department's plan to release 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders from federal prison during four days in October and November.
A new White House initiative to address rising U.S. heroin use will increase funds to pinpoint the sources of heroin as well as hot spots for drug overdoses. Baker Institute Blog: http://bit.ly/1h0W7r2
In this commentary, the authors examine the roots of the United States’ reluctance to embrace universal health care, concluding that it "is neither sound nor ethical in a nation that promulgates fairness and equal opportunity" to deny coverage.
Nonresident fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, pulls no punches in a blog on the escape of Mexican drug lord Chapo Guzman.
The core strategies of the U.S. War on Drugs are eradication, interdiction and incarceration. After a 40-year and trillion-dollar effort, illicit drugs remain available to meet a remarkably stable demand.
Drawing on decades of government-gathered and publicly available data, William Martin, director of the Drug Policy Program, and contributing expert Jerry Epstein contend that U.S. drug policy is premised on incorrect assumptions, aims at the wrong targets and can never succeed. But because these data run counter to a century of anti-drug propaganda, they play only a small role in public policy, mass-media presentation and popular perception. In this policy report, Martin and Epstein call for a reexamination of the data and sweeping revision of existing strategies. They urge formation of a politically independent national scientific commission, its members chosen by the National Academy of Sciences, in consultation with the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services, to facilitate open examination and honest consideration of alternatives to current failed or flawed policies.
In 1972, a National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, comprising establishment figures chosen mostly by President Richard Nixon himself, issued a report that declared that “neither the marihuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety” and recommended that Congress and state legislatures decriminalize the use and casual distribution of marijuana and seek means other than prohibition to discourage use.
President Nixon ignored the report and Congress declined to consider its recommendations, but during the 40-plus years since its publication, at least 37 states have acted to refashion a crazy-quilt collection of prohibitions, nearly always in the direction favored by the commission. The specifics vary by state, but most reform legislation has followed one of three formulas: decriminalization of marijuana possession, legalization of marijuana for medical use, or legalization of marijuana for adult recreational use. In this issue brief, authors Katharine Neill and William Martin examine the facts and fears surrounding each of these options.
Katharine Neill Harris, William MartinFebruary 4, 2015