OSLO — “War on Drugs” opponent Ethan Nadelmann explained that while he’s still a regular pot smoker, he subscribes to what you could call the Yom Kippur rule with psychedelic drugs.
“As a Jew, I fast once a year on Yom Kippur, and I think that’s a good thing to do: It’s good for the soul,” the son of a rabbi explained to The Daily Caller outside Oslo’s Christiania Theater on a pleasant and sunny May afternoon.
“I think it’s good to just have those moments of reflection, and in the same way I actually think that doing a psychedelic once a year is a good thing to do. I think it stirs up the emotional sediment. I think it keeps you honest as you grow older.”
Nadelmann was in Norway for the Oslo Freedom Forum, a conference that attracted slaves and dissidents from the world’s most oppressive societies to share their tales of horror and terror. It also attracted Nadelmann, who attended the conference to speak about what he views as a similarly grave human rights abuse: America’s war on drugs.
“There’s half a million people locked up tonight in the United States for violating the drug law — not for violent crime, not for predatory crime, but for engaging in an activity which our grandparents or great-grandparents could have, and may well have, engaged in entirely legally,” Nadelmann said, arguing that his cause is every bit on the same level as those of other conference presenters.
“When you take people away from their families, when you put them behind bars, when you give them a number, when you may require labor from them for which they are paid little or no money whatsoever, when they are sometimes sent to places of incarceration that are far away from their homes, deprived of access to their spouses and their children, you know, deprived of any legitimate sexual relationships, all of that — that represents the closest thing to slavery in contemporary America.”
But isn’t it within the rights of a democratic republic to choose whether drugs should be legal or illegal, or what penalties should be imposed for consuming narcotics? Is that really morally out-of-bounds?
“[W]hen a majority is oppressing a minority, that can also involve human rights,” Nadelmann argued. “[I]t’s that basic notion of the discrimination against people based solely about what they choose to put in their body, rather than the harm they do to others.”
Nadelmann’s life work has been fighting to change America’s drug policy. A Harvard Law School graduate who also holds a Harvard Ph.D. in government, he focused his early academic work on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East before turning his attention to international criminal law enforcement and transnational crime.
This focus ultimately led Nadelmann to drug reform advocacy. He now serves as executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to ending the conflict Richard Nixon declared in 1971. But don’t misunderstand Nadelmann: He wants to reform America’s drug laws, not legalize all drugs, something he says the late drug-legalization advocate Milton Friedman used to tease him about.
“For me, the ultimate objective in drug policy should be two-fold,” he explained. “The first is to reduce the harms of drugs, to reduce addiction, disease, criminality, suffering for both individuals and their families. And the second is to reduce the harms of government policies.”
He said he doesn’t “have that confidence that full legalization of all drugs is the optimal policy.”
“I think the optimal policy,” he said, “lies some place where Milton Friedman and some libertarians would put it and between what I would call the sort of the harm-reduction public health-driven prohibitionists, the ones who want to treat addiction as a health issue, who want to decriminalize possession, who maybe want to legalize marijuana but don’t feel ready to do everything.”
Like most who oppose America’s drug laws as draconian, Nadelmann believes “people should not be punished for what they put in their bodies.” But he also adds that America’s failed “prohibitionist” policies have created a “climate of fear” internationally “where people cannot live under the rule of law, where they are intimidated.”
Finally, he added, “if another country had a rate of incarceration like ours, we would regard that country as a massive violator of human rights.”
Nadelmann said he hasn’t been encouraged by America’s leadership on drug policy. The White House, he said, “is basically ducking the issue, providing no leadership whatsoever.” (Though he did suggest that he’s heard Vice President Joe Biden is hinting to people at Democratic fundraisers that things will change if the Obama administration should win a second term.)
As for other elected officials, Nadelmann said they “are scared of their own shadows, scared of the drug issue as sort of the third rail of American politics.”
But he’s optimistic about where the public is heading on this issue and what some states are doing.
“Public opinion is way ahead of the legislators on many of these areas,” Nadelmann said. “I mean, look at what’s happening with marijuana right now: Seventy percent of the American now believe that marijuana should be legal for medical purposes.”
According to Nadelmann, there are several “Nixon goes to China” moments that could be game-changers for America’s policy towards drugs.
International leaders speaking out against the drug war is significant, he says.
“What’s happening in Latin America right now with [Columbia President Juan Manuel] Santos and [Guatemalan President] Otto Perez, and with, sort of, [Mexican President Felipe] Calderon putting his toe in the water, and others — that debate — if it pops up at the U.N. this fall, that could happen,” he argued. “Columbia and Guatemala are both in the U.N. Security Council this year —this debate could hit the big time in New York this fall” at the United Nations.
Nadelmann is also optimistic about ballot initiatives in Washington state and Colorado to legalize recreational marijuana.
“The second moment would be if the Washington state-Colorado ballot initiates win, the federal government will do everything they can to undermine it, but it would be a transformative moment,” Nadelmann said.
Finally, another major breakthrough, says Nadelmann, “would be for a sitting politician — whether it’s in the White House or a prominent respected member of the U.S. Senate, and a governor, something like [former New Mexico Gov.] Gary Johnson did 1999-2000 — but just somebody highly respected to step out and basically say the emperor has no cloths.”
Would it help if it was someone unexpected, like a conservative darling such as Sarah Palin?
“She’s not respected enough,” Nadelmann cautioned, before pointing to Pat Robertson’s support for marijuana legalization as an important moment for the cause.
But it is at the grassroots and local level that he believes the change he is longing for will ultimately come.
“The leadership is bubbling up in certain pockets around the country and eventually is going to make its way to Washington,” he said, expressing hope for a brighter day for his cause and, at least in his mind, the cause of human rights.
Editor’s note: The Oslo Freedom Forum sponsored TheDC’s trip to the conference.