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The IDPR conference
demonstrated
that there are
countless groups
and individuals
whose interests
can overlap with
psychedelic research
and drug policy reform
– but those links
require
reaching out.
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Building a Movement:
The 2005 International Drug Policy Reform Conference
Jag Davies
“Who are we?” questioned Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)
Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann, before a crowd of nearly
1,000 participants assembled in Long Beach at the Opening
Plenary of the DPA’s biennal International Drug Policy Refrom
(IDPR) conference. “We are the people who love drugs. We
are the people who hate drugs. And, we are the people who
don’t care about drugs.” Yet, dialogue at the conference revolved
around one common principle: the War on Drugs is doing
more harm than good.
“This movement is growing and being empowered by people
who care about our fundamental rights and freedoms, who care
about sensible and pragmatic use of government resources, and
who care about the 2.2 million people who will go to sleep behind
prison bars tonight just in this country,” explained Nadelmann.
This talk set the tone for a wideranging
and arousing look at the costs and
consequences of drug prohibition. For the
people suffering the collateral damage of
the War on Drugs, the growing drug
policy reform movement is “not merely
about the right to smoke a joint,” said
Nadelmann. Rather, for the tens of millions
of people who have been imprisoned or
debilitated by the Drug War, it is about
daily survival in the face of employment
discrimination, inadequate health care,
the prison-industrial complex, institutionalized
racism, and a failure to address the
root causes of addiction.
With such a range of urgent issues,
the conference drew an impressive array
of participants with diverse experiences
and backgrounds. Groups at the conference
ranged from current and former law
enforcement and prosecutors to the
formerly incarcerated fighting to restore
their rights, from religious leaders to
scientists, from politicians to medical
marijuana patients, from lawyers to needle
exchange workers, and of course, a
contingent of activists and researchers
working to reform the politics and practice
of psychedelic and marijuana research.
And this list hardly does justice to the
scope of a conference that featured 73
sessions over three long, energetic days.
Considering this was my first IDPR
Conference (which I attended thanks to a
generous scholarship program supported
by Robert E. Field of Common Sense for
Drug Policy), I felt both overwhelmed and
empowered by the breadth of passion,
resolve, and expertise that I encountered
among fellow participants.
Although the drug policy reform
movement, like MAPS, has achieved
unprecedented and once-unimaginable
success over the past decade, during the
course of the conference I realized that we
will not pacify the Drug War until a
critical mass of social institutions — such
as business associations, teacher-parent
groups, local governments, bar associations,
and religious organizations —mobilize in support of sensible drug
policy. At the 2005 IDPR conference, the
largest drug policy reform conference
ever, tantalizing inklings of this critical
mass surfaced. However, it was clear that
in order to build on the successes of the
past decade, the drug reform movement
must strive to be even more inclusive.
Reform From The Inside-Out
Inclusive, first of all, by seeking to
reform, from the “inside-out,” the institutions
that govern our daily lives. This
means educating others about the War on
Drugs and becoming an agent of change,
whether at the dinner table, at work, or at
a community meeting.
In a session entitled, “Forming
Coalitions and Transforming Institutions:
The Benefits and Challenges of Organizing
Key Constituencies,” Interfaith Drug
Policy Initiative (IDPI) founder Charles
Thomas urged, “Figure out who you are
and who you can work with ... The next
stage of the drug policy reform movement
is mobilizing major social institutions, and
to do this, people who understand the
harms of the Drug War need to become
the insiders of these institutions. To effect
change at an institutional level, you have
to know a particular group inside and
out.” Thomas has embodied this approach:
a dedicated Unitarian Universalist (UU),
he formed UU’s for Drug Policy Reform
(UUDPR), and has worked within his
denomination and with others to mobilize
religious support for alternatives to the
War on Drugs.
More broadly, Ethan Nadelmann
stressed that to be an effective leader, we
must know ourselves inside and out. “We
need to teach others but we also need to
keep teaching ourselves ... We need to
respect and understand people’s prejudices
and fears, and we can’t do this unless
we keep challenging ourselves and
confronting our own prejudices and
fears.”
Reform From The Grassroots
Furthermore, the drug policy reform
movement must strive to be more inclusive
by working with the communities
that have been hit hardest by the Drug
War: immigrants, low-income families,
and demographic minorities, particularly
Latin American and African-American
communities. Six session topics were
devoted to race, ethnicity, and class, and
overlapping topics included prison reform,
voting rights, narco-imperialism, and
education. The sessions addressing racerelated
topics were some of the most wellattended
and rousing gatherings for the
diverse, yet primarily Anglo-American,
conference attendees.
The Drug War’s role as a tool to
perpetuate racially-biased criminal justice,
disenfranchisement, and institutionalized
poverty was a common topic of discussion,
and no matter how many times the same
statistics were repeated, they seemed to
send a collective startle through the
conscience of the audience each time. Here
are a few*:
The US has the highest incarceration
rate and the largest prison population of
any country in the world, over 2.2 million,
thanks to the Drug War. There are more
drug prisoners in the US than there are
total prisoners in Europe, even though
Europe has 100 million more people. Eventhough African-Americans represent 13%
of the total US population, and 13% of
total drug users, they are seven times
more likely to be incarcerated on drug
charges. As a result, there are more black
men in prison now than there were black
men under slavery at its height in the US,
and there are more disenfranchised black
men today than there were at the height
of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation. In several major
cities such as New York City and Washington
D.C., nearly one out of two black
men are disenfranchised. Meanwhile, 75%
of US prisoners classified as “Latino” have
been sentenced on drug charges, and
Latinos, like African-Americans, are
disproportionately represented in the
criminal justice system—about onequarter
of total prisoners, totaling over
500,000—meaning that there are at least
375,000 Latinos imprisoned in the US on
drug charges.
Each time I heard these statistics, I
comprehended the incomprehensible a
little more tangibly: the Drug War is a
human rights catastrophe. At the end of a
stirring panel entitled “Race, Racism, and
the Drug War,” an elderly African-
American woman in the audience stood
up and said, “They used to hang my
people from trees and lynch them, I saw
it … Nowadays, they’re lynching more
of us than ever, but they’re smarter;
now they hang us in a courtroom
instead of from a tree.”
Where Does MAPS Fit In?
In the face of such monumental
injustice, where does MAPS fit in? For
me, the IDPR conference was an opportunity
to integrate the strategies of the drug
policy reform movement with MAPS’
struggles for scientific freedom.
One thing I realized is that MAPS has
a unique strategic advantage because of its
medical focus; the government, the public,
and the media are more comfortable with
psychedelics and marijuana when they are
placed in a medical context. Considering
that most legislative and judicial options
for drug policy reform have failed, particularly
the Supreme Court’s ruling in
Gonzalez v. Raich, scientific research may
be the best avenue for reform remaining.
Moreover, the obstruction of legitimate
and widely demanded scientific research
on marijuana underscores the irrationality
of the War on Drugs by revealing the
political contingency of scientific “truth.”
At the IDPR conference, Rick Doblin
represented MAPS in three session panels.
In “The Politics of Science,” he discussed
the distorting and destructive influence of
politics on government agencies’ research
agendas, particularly in relation to MAPS’
proposed medical marijuana production
facility at UMass-Amherst. In “Psychedelic
Therapy: MDMA, Iboga, and Psilocybin,”
Doblin, MAPS Clinical Research Associate
Valerie Mojeiko, and UCLA psychiatrist
Dr. Charles Grob discussed the history of
psychedelic therapy and reviewed the
latest research, highlighted by an inspiring
testimonial from Pamela, a woman with
advanced-stage cancer who was recently
treated in Dr. Grob’s psilocybin/anxiety
disorder study. And in “The Future of
Medical Marijuana,” Doblin joined four
leading policy experts to discuss long-term
approaches for protecting the rights of
medical marijuana patients.**
As a small branch of a small but
growing movement, the unique focus of
MAPS’ mission is both our greatest
strength and our Achilles heel. Interest
groups can become vulnerable when they
are isolated into discrete factions; they
become more effective when they share
resources and implement wholesale
reform that encompasses their common
visions.
The IDPR conference demonstrated
that there are countless groups and
individuals whose interests can overlap
with psychedelic research and drug policy
reform — but those links require reaching
out. As some speakers pointed out,
working for social justice necessarily
involves embracing and utilizing inclusive
narratives that appeal to the shared values
of people with different backgrounds and
political persuasions. By developing
inclusive narratives, movements for
individual freedom and social integrity
become interconnected and reinforce one
another by “working to confront people’s
fear, to show that by pandering to people’s
deep fears, we are actually creating them,”
as DPA Board Member and CODEPINK
co-founder Jodie Evans put it during a
conference panel.
Here again, MAPS’ work with psychedelic-
assisted therapy becomes relevant.
One of the most well-documented psychological
phenomena associated with
psychedelic therapy is the ability for
individuals to confront, accept, and make
peace with their deepest fears. By working
through deep fears, people can gain the
ability to approach the “Other” with an
open mind and an open heart.
Speaking of “Other,” when I returned
to the MAPS office, I found a copy of a
letter on my desk from conservative icon
Grover Norquist in support of MAPS’
medical marijuana production facility.
While I have some fundamental discrepancies
with Norquist’s vision of the world,
I still find it encouraging that MAPS has
found this common point of interest. Like
Norquist’s letter, the IDPR conference
reminded me that MAPS’ uniqueness will
be more of a strength than a weakness as
long as we continue to discover and
develop these common interests.
A Long Road
The strength of the 2005 IDPR
conference was that it not only united
various groups opposed to the Drug War
within a common narrative of “reason,
compassion, and justice,” it gave participants
a sense of the need to work continuously
as agents of change in all facets of
their lives. To end the War on Drugs,
people of diverse backgrounds must
generate the same sense of moral urgency
that inspired the civil rights movement of
the 1950s and `60s. Yet, that movement
also serves as a stark reminder that
working for social justice requires longterm
persistence. “Even if this movement
is successful, and prohibition ends, what
then?” asked Students for Sensible Drug
Policy Director Scarlett Swardlow. “We
probably won’t get it right the first time.
Even then we would need to keep working
vigilantly.” Charles Thomas added, “If
prohibition ends, other forms of problematic
discrimination against drug users and
abusers may continue, such as loss of child
custody rights, employment discrimination,
urine testing, and so on. Just by
changing a law, institutionalized patterns
of discrimination are not necessarily
affected ... For example, even after segregation
supposedly ended, institutionalized
racism still continued.”
Realizing the tremendous scope of
what drug policy reformers are struggling
for, I came away from my first IDPR
conference with the conviction that real
and lasting change in drug policy can only
be achieved by building on the common
interests of as many different types of
people as possible. I also saw how MAPS
has a special role to play in this movement,
not just by implementing scientific
research that establishes the medical uses
of psychedelics and marijuana, but also by
developing tools that help people work
through their deepest fears and form a
healthier society that values the full
potential of all human life. •
* For Drug War statistics, see
www.drugwarfacts.org
** To read more about the IDPR
conference sessions see
www.drugpolicy.org/events/dpa2005
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