Former ‘Drug Czar’ discusses drug policy in the United States

 

John Walters, former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), is speaking today on the state of drug policy in the country. The lecture will take place in DeBartolo Hall room 129 at 7 p.m. and is sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Culture and the Potenziani Program in Constitutional Studies.  Students for Child-Oriented Policy (SCOP) organized the event.

Walters, nicknamed the “Drug Czar” due to his oversight of federal anti-drug policies and their funding from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush, spoke with the Rover earlier this week.

Irish Rover: What are some of the major points of contention surrounding current drug policy in the US?

There are obviously great debates surrounding drug policy as it exists today. These range from the discussions about the distribution and marketing of marijuana to those in which people think we should legalize all drugs. Discussion about the costs of past and current policies have been impacted by the Obama Administration’s unwillingness to enforce federal law and allow the states to effectively craft their own drug policy. Currently, things are somewhat unclear because the federal law has typically had such a large impact on drug policy. We know more about the dangers of drugs than we ever have, yet much of that information is not in the hands of young people and even older people who are now given the opportunity to vote for politicians who want to radically change the law as it has been in the past.

Do you consider that the rhetoric surrounding the legalization of marijuana is flawed? There seems to be much misinformation about the actual effects of the drug; therefore, many people seem to have lukewarm support or opposition to its legalization.

Each day researchers publish another scientific report about the dangers of marijuana abuse, however the drug is often not considered a drug of abuse, like heroin, methamphetamine, or cocaine. Most people are not aware that it is the single biggest cause of people needing treatment for drug abuse, in fact government research shows that it is more of a factor than all other illegal drugs combined. Yet the view is that marijuana is not a serious cause of harm to people. Also, what you now see in places like Colorado is the creation of different forms of marijuana with very high levels of the psychoactive component THC that have never existed before. When the baby boomers generation was in college, the concentration was about 2-3 percent, but now marijuana is being marketed in the form of brownies, gummy bears, and juices with THC levels of almost 60 percent. These are sometimes referred to as the “crack” of marijuana and are available basically on an industrial scale because there is an enormous profit motive. Nowhere in the world has there been the legalization and marketing of drugs in this concentration, and unfortunately we will be testing their effects on the Americans who live in these states who choose to consume these products.

Why do you think the government has taken so many steps in the last few years to stigmatize tobacco use while allowing expansion of marijuana legalization? Is there simply a lack of information that is influencing their actions? It seems that the government has done much to reshape public opinion concerning tobacco.

I think that is an excellent point. We have been reducing the use of cigarettes with an extensive education campaign and re-stigmatization, letting people know that they are at a great risk of cancer from smoking. There are about 60 million people who still smoke cigarettes, but the numbers are going down. More importantly the number of youth smokers is declining. The rhetoric surrounding marijuana, however, is that we are going to legalize it and then regulate it. The fact of the matter is that we have been working against cigarettes because we know the dangers, and now we are coming to know more and more about the detrimental effects of marijuana use but the government is not enforcing current law. The Attorney General, Eric Holder, released a memo tolerating state’s legalization of marijuana despite the fact that the federal law has historically been the paramount enforcer of drug policy in the country. Also, the federal government has not subjected so-called “medical” marijuana to the same testing that all other pharmaceutical drugs must undergo to be labeled safe for use.

In a slightly different vein, what do you see the impact of border security to be on drug control policy in the United States?

Many Americans, especially young Americans, have a very distorted view about border control and what hampers border security. Multi-faceted drug trafficking criminal organizations control “plazas,” or the various areas where people and vehicles can be moved across the border. Basically, they create a criminal control structure in their geographic area, which allows them to move drugs and money from place to place. Many of these organizations and areas are now a concern for the movement of terrorists. Getting control of the border is especially important because we are seeing young children used as pawns by criminal organization to transport drugs. We are not effectively working with Mexico and Central America as we have in the past under George W. Bush. The current administration has not been visiting, or meeting with, these nations to establish cooperatives to work on these issues; we have largely abandoned this.

You briefly mentioned the use of children in the trafficking of drugs, and as SCOP is an organizer of this event, could you speak a bit more about the specific impact of the drug trade on children?

Yes, I think that is a very important point that is lost in the discussion of legalization because people think it is an individual issue with an adult choosing what they can and cannot put into their body. Drug abuse in the United States, however, is what medical people would refer to as an adolescent onset disease. If you don’t start using drugs at a young age, you have a vastly lower chance of using them later in life. A person’s brain continues to develop well into their 20s, and we can pinpoint changes in the brain with modern medical technology that show the impact of drugs on the cerebral structure. A more subtle impact is substance abuse’s destruction of the family. The argument that drug use is about the individual and their choices, this sort of libertarian argument, is flawed because the effects of drug use have a great ripple effect that especially impacts children. It is not an individual illness; rather, it is a cancer that eats at the relationships that hold our society together. This is precisely why the future of drug policy in the country will be so important as we move forward.

 

Kate Hardiman is a sophomore PLS major and PPE minor living in Breen-Phillips Hall. Contact her at khardima@nd.edu if you want to know the meaning of those acronyms.