Dispatch From The War On Drugs - NY TIMES

Missed this one last week. Mr Tierney profiles Ethan Nadelman, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance (and one of my heroes) and his view of the global problems with the War on Drugs and then Rodney Balko's story about Dr. Bernard L. Rottschaefer, a doctor in Pittsburgh who’s serving a five-year sentence after being convicted of illegally prescribing opioids. His story is so important because the allegations and convictions were centered around the good doctor trading sex for drugs. The truth came out how the allegations were made up by patients in order to get out going to prison.

I recommend a couple of articles chronicling the unintended consequences of the war on drugs. One, by Ethan Nadelmann, is a global look at the damage done by prohibitionist policies. The other, by Radley Balko, is a look at a doctor convicted for prescribing opioids — and this case is in some ways more troubling than the Hurwitz case that I’ve been writing about.

Dr. Nadelmann’s article is the cover story of Foreign Policy magazine, which summarizes the article’s findings with large lettters on the cover: “Legalize It: Why It’s Time to Just Say No to Prohibition.” Dr. Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, shows how America has exported its preoccupation with drugs to the rest of the world, harming other countries and financing terrorists that pose a threat to America. (Not that this narco-financed threat seems to matter much in Washington. After 9/11, Americans were told that we had to revise our assumptions about the world — and about little things like civil liberties — but the drug prohibitionists in Washington don’t seem to have revised their thinking one whit.)

“Looking to the United States as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal with race,” Dr. Nadelmann writes in detailing the failure of prohibition at home. After surveying other countries, like Afghanistan, he concludes:
NY TIMES