PointCast showed me this from The New York Times: ( www.nyt.com )
    New Voice in Drug Debate Seeks to Lower Volume
    September 1, 1997
    By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
    When Robert MacCoun, a psychologist at the University of California at
    Berkeley, set out to analyze American perceptions about illegal drug
    use, he found himself treading a political minefield.
    "I was stunned at how emotional the debate is," MacCoun said. "The
    emotions are very understandable -- drugs can cause a lot of serious
    harm to society. But I think the emotions have made it hard to talk
    about solutions in an effective way."
    Now a group of 34 scientists, drug-policy experts and public
    officials, MacCoun among them, is moving to stake out the middle
    ground in the drug debate by asserting that while drugs should not be
    made legal, the policies adopted to prevent their use have sometimes
    done more harm than good.
    The polarized words of the debate have upset drug researchers and
    policy experts who find themselves caught in a crossfire between those
    who say the war against drugs has failed and should be abandoned in
    favor of more liberal policies and those who believe that
    reconsideration of existing policies is tantamount to a sellout.
    "It's impossible to talk about any other alternatives without one side
    accusing you of being a traitor and having a hidden agenda," MacCoun
    said.
    The polarization has been illustrated by the refusal of Sen. Jesse
    Helms to let the Foreign Relations Committee that he leads consider
    the nomination of William Weld as U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
    Helms, R-N.C., accuses Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, of
    being soft on drugs because he favors making medicinal marijuana
    available for seriously ill people. In fact, Weld, as a federal
    prosecutor, put drug traffickers behind bars.
    The 34 professionals advocating a new look at drug policy plan to
    announce 14 "principles for practical drug policies" at a news
    conference in Washington on Tuesday. Their move constitutes the first
    attempt in years to bring pragmatism as well as civility to what has
    degenerated into a shouting match.
    "It's being done to make clear to people that the argument between the
    legalizers and the drug warriors isn't where the action is, if what
    you're really trying to do is reduce the damage that drugs do to
    American society," said Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at
    the University of California at Los Angeles. "What we'd like to do is
    make it politically safe to say something sensible about drug policy."
    Though the people who have signed the statement are generally known
    for their work on issues like drug addiction, most have not publicly
    spoken out about drug policy before.
    To avoid partisanship, none of the prominent personalities on either
    side of the drug debate were invited to sign the declaration, which
    also avoids much of the language of the current heated debate. For
    example, it speaks of reducing the damage of drugs to society rather
    than "harm reduction," a phrase that connotes cutting down on the harm
    addicts do to themselves.
    The signers said: "The current drug-policy debate is marked by
    polarization into two positions stereotyped as 'drug warrior' and
    'legalizer.' This creates the false impression that 'ending
    prohibition' is the only alternative to an unrestricted 'war on
    drugs,' effectively disenfranchising citizens who find both of those
    options unsatisfactory."
    In such a climate, the statement continued, "every idea, research
    finding or proposal put forth is scrutinized to determine which agenda
    it advances, and the partisans on each side are quick to brand anyone
    who deviates from their 'party line' as an agent of the opposing
    side."
    The signers included the former New York City police commissioner,
    William Bratton; Detroit's prosecuting attorney, John O'Hair;
    criminal-justice experts like John Dilulio Jr. of Princeton, and
    Francis Hartmann, Mark Moore and David McLean Kennedy of Harvard, and
    economists like Glenn Loury of Boston University and Philip Jackson
    Cook of Duke.
    The signers known for their scientific research into drugs included
    Avram Goldstein of Stanford, George Vaillant of Harvard, George
    Bigelow and Solomon Snyder of Johns Hopkins, Lewis Seiden of the
    University of Chicago and Marian Fischman of Columbia.
    "I oftentimes think that elected officials never hear from those of us
    who espouse moderate principles," said one of the document's signers,
    Charles Schuster, a former director of the National Institute on Drug
    Abuse under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
    "It's very important to have spokespeople for the moderate positions,"
    said Schuster, who directs clinical research on drug abuse at the
    Wayne State University School of Medicine. "All they're hearing from
    are the two other extremes."
    Several of the signers said that they had begun drafting the
    principles after voters in California and Arizona approved the ballot
    initiatives endorsing marijuana for medical purposes last November.
    Those referendums triggered heated exchanges between government
    officials and supporters of more liberal availability of marijuana.
    Jonathan Caulkins, a drug-policy analyst at Carnegie-Mellon
    University, said he signed the statement because he favored a "smarter
    prohibition" of illegal drugs. His recent analysis of mandatory
    minimum sentences for drug offenses, published by Rand Corp.,
    concluded that tax money would be more effectively spent on treating
    minor offenders for drug abuse than on locking them up for long
    periods.
    "One of my frustrations is that the drug-legalization groups are
    intellectually irresponsible in a lot of their thinking, except they
    raise valid criticisms of the current regime," Caulkins said. "And the
    current regime is intolerant of criticism. It feels that even
    constructive criticism is an act of treason."
    The signers said: "We cannot escape our current predicament by 'ending
    prohibition' or 'legalizing drugs."' Lifting controls, they contended,
    could increase drug use. But they said that law enforcement and
    punishment should be designed to minimize overall damage. "The use of
    disproportionate punishments to express social norms is neither just
    nor a prudent use of public funds or scarce prison capacity," they
    said.
    Other principles make these points:
    -- Policies to curtail drugs should be judged by the results they
    produce, and not by their intentions.
    -- Social disapproval, while a powerful, economical means of reducing
    drug use, should not breed indiscriminate hostility toward drug users.
    But people who violate the rights of others while under the influence
    of drugs or while trying to obtain them should be held responsible.
    -- Policies should be tailored for different drugs, because every drug
    carries its own risks and has its own patterns of use.
    -- Treatment that reduces drug use but fails to produce lasting
    abstinence should be considered an incomplete success, not a failure.
    -- Drug-prevention messages should reflect accurately what is known
    about specific drugs.
    Several signers expressed hope that their statement would provide a
    cover for politicians who have been reluctant to discuss the nation's
    drug problem more openly for fear of sounding soft on drugs.
    "A lot of politicians have avoided talking about drug policy because
    there is no articulated middle ground, so they just stay silent on the
    issue," MacCoun said. "We want to make clear to them that there's a
    whole palette of choices, and any criticism of the status quo doesn't
    have to imply endorsement of drug use."
--- PPoint 2.00
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