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CRIMINALIZE AND CONTROL

"Drug policy should be grounded in health, science and human rights," Ethan Nadelmann told a roomful of drug-policy reformers last Monday at Alan Wong's Pineapple Room.  "The war on drugs is about a government driven by its own moral prejudices," he said. 

Nadelmann's host, the Drug Policy Forum of Hawai'i ( DPFH ), was marking its 10th anniversary.  DPFH officers Pam Lichty, Karen Umemoto and Dick Miller presented president Donald Topping with the Ho'omaluhia Award.  Topping admonished the audience that the drug war is a "serious oppressor of a minority that needs our help."

Nadelmann was no equivocator, either.  In a fast-paced talk, Nadelmann, founder and director of the national Drug Policy Alliance ( the "point man" in the war against the war on drugs, wrote Rolling Stone ) reviewed the last decade of small victories against the war on drugs, and said that, last year, "we took a licking," referring to the several states that rejected proposed progressive drug laws. 

Nadelmann spoke about the usefulness of studies regarding drug use: "Honest academic research in America is like it was in Soviet Russia - it's now ideologically restrained.  People can't write grants anymore for government funding using terms like 'harm reduction.'"

The Bush administration, Nadelmann said, his voice quaking with urgency, is zeroing in on marijuana and drug testing as an effective way to criminalize and control the largest number of citizens. 

"Front and center is the criminal justice system, and next to that is the ideology that the only permissible relationship between drugs and a human being is abstinence," Nadelmann explained.  "But there has never been a drug-free society on the planet, and probably never will be."

He added, "We sure are criminalizing a lot of people for a state that we cannot attain."