What I Told a Committee of US Senators About the Need to End the War on Drugs
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I wasn’t sure at first what to make of the invitation to testify from Senator Ron Johnson, the Tea Party Republican from Wisconsin who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Some colleagues thought it was basically a set-up: a Republican senator in a tough battle for re-election this fall looking for an opportunity to dump on “the legalizers” and blame America’s opioid epidemic on drug policy reformers. But others suspected that Johnson’s libertarian streak made him sympathetic to anti-prohibitionist perspectives, and that he was sincerely curious to hear new ideas. That latter view turned out to be right.
I must admit that I’ve been waiting a long time to tell U.S. Senators exactly what I think about drug policy. This roundtable provided the perfect opportunity – to explain why the drug war has been such a monumental disaster for the country and the world, to make the analogies to alcohol Prohibition, and to frame reform in terms of the need to reduce the role of criminalization and criminal justice in drug control as much as possible while advancing public health and safety.
But more than that, it afforded abundant opportunities not just to present the evidence but also to reason with the Senators and teach them about drugs and drug policy. Most of their questions were about marijuana and opioids, allowing me to point to the growing evidence that easy access to medical marijuana reduces opioid misuse and overdoses, and that legal regulation of marijuana was resulting in less crime than before. I got to talk about why people get addicted to heroin and why heroin maintenance programs make so much sense. (It helped, of course, that my own testimony was preceded by that of Scott MacDonald, a Canadian physician working with the heroin (and hydromorphone) maintenance research project, SALOME, in Vancouver.) And I stressed repeatedly that the best investment Congress could make in responding to the opioid epidemic, and in particular the recent, dramatic increase in fentanyl-related deaths, would be to fund an army of researchers to find out what was really going on – before they legislated any new punishments or other costly interventions.