Pubdate: Wed, 30 Mar 2016
Source: Seattle Weekly (WA)
Copyright: 2016 Village Voice Media
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Website: http://www.seattleweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/410

IT'S TIME TO START TALKING ABOUT LEGALIZING DRUGS

In August 1988, a middle-aged drug counselor named David Purchase 
started handing out needles to junkies in Tacoma. He thus began the 
first needle exchange program in the U.S.-and became a criminal, 
since distributing drug paraphernalia was a misdemeanor under state law.

As needle exchanges caught on, critics, including the first President 
Bush, objected that the program tacitly condoned illicit drug use. 
Purchase didn't care. AIDS deaths in the U.S. alone numbered in the 
tens of thousands. "We're going to keep doing what we do," he told 
The New York Times. "Our goal is to save lives," he said, even if 
that meant jail time.

It didn't, thanks to support from local officials including police 
and prosecutors. "Conventional law enforcement hasn't helped the AIDS 
problem," a spokesperson for Tacoma police chief Ray Fjetland said at 
the time. "Before you put the clamps on somebody trying to help, you 
better have an alternative. We didn't."

In the 28 years since, needle exchanges have become accepted 
public-health policy. The more they're instituted, the more studies 
show their efficacy at reducing disease transmission without 
increasing drug use. In hindsight, it's hard to empathize with the 
well-intentioned Puritans who have hindered the establishment of 
needle exchanges-or to guess how many AIDS patients died for the sake 
of their moral discomfort.

Today, Purchase's spiritual descendants are fighting for the next 
step in harm reduction: safe drug sites. Liz Evans, the co-founder of 
the InSite safe drug site in Vancouver, B.C., visited Seattle last 
week for a series of presentations on the efficacy of such sites. She 
explained to the City Council, the mayor's public-safety advisor, and 
city and county law enforcement how studies have shown that InSite 
has saved lives and taxpayer money in its 12 years of existence.

She also noted that such sites-which include medical staff, 
counselors, sterile rigs, and sharps bins-make life easier for 
everyone, compared to the use of public bathrooms and alleys as 
Seattle's de facto drug sites. "Certainly for the businesses and the 
community members that were most disrupted by the presence of people 
using drugs in the open, they were actually in the end [InSite's] 
greatest supporters," she says.

Official response to the idea of safe drug sites in Seattle is moving 
from lukewarm to enthusiastic. A majority of the City Council say 
they support safe drug sites, and Mayor Ed Murray has told Seattle 
Weekly that he's open to them in principle. Last week, King County 
Sheriff John Urquhart promised that his deputies would not arrest 
people going to and from safe drug sites. Meanwhile, the mayor's task 
force for the opioid epidemic is scheduled to take up the question of 
safe drug sites later this month. Audience questions at Evans' 
presentations, for what it's worth, were overwhelmingly concerned 
with when and how-not whether or why-Seattle should open safe drug sites.

Safe drug sites in Seattle are now a question of when, not if. Yet 
while safe drug sites are a necessary part of effective, humane drug 
policy, they're not sufficient. The sites are "a nothing thing, 
really, in the grander scheme of what needs to happen," says Evans.

Here's the grander scheme: We need to end the War on Drugs.

America's drug prohibition has accomplished two things. First, it has 
isolated addicts, preventing them from accessing the resources and 
support needed to stabilize their lives and treat their illness. 
Second, it has fertilized organized crime by creating an underground 
market controlled by whichever gang is most ruthless. Along the way, 
it's turned our police into paramilitaries and put millions behind 
bars, a disturbing percentage of whom are people of color.

This is no accident. Last week Harper's published a 1994 interview 
with John Ehrlichman, in which the aide to President Richard Nixon 
claimed that by criminalizing heroin and marijuana "heavily," the 
administration intended to vilify the antiwar left and 
African-Americans. This revelation alone should be enough to begin a 
very serious conversation about legalizing drugs.

But how to do so responsibly? One step at a time, says Alejandro 
Madrazo Lajous, Mexican delegate to an upcoming UN session on drug 
policy. "We should legalize even hard drugs," Lajous told an audience 
at Seattle University last week. "We should regulate them-legalize 
and regulate them-and ... we should do it timed in a fashion that is 
step-by-step, [so] that we can learn from different drugs that we 
legalize first, and then feed that into the system and then take the 
next step."

The War on Drugs isn't an eternal verity. It's a human convention, 
like slavery or alcohol prohibition, and it can be undone by mortal 
hands. Our city has already taken the first step by decriminalizing, 
then legalizing, marijuana. We can choose to take the next step, and 
the next one, until we've carefully retreated from our war against 
ourselves-until we've replaced the stick of prohibition with the 
carrot of social services.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom