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What Price "Success?"
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A panel discussion at last Saturday morning's plenary session involved the most spirited and meaningful debate I've yet encountered at a DPF meeting. The question at issue was how reform should deal with coerced treatment as an alternative to incarceration; the same concept embodied in California's recently passed (but yet to be implemented) Proposition
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Those advising caution were troubled because the initiative implicitly agrees with the central prohibitionist notion that the danger of "drug use" is so extraordinary that society is obligated to forcibly intervene in the lives of individual citizens. Beyond that, they were concerned that the principle implicit in coerced treatment can actually extend the power of law enforcement and also provide a cosmetic "fix" for the image of an increasingly discredited war on drugs.
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Those wanting to forge ahead with similar initiatives in other states agreed with both concerns, but insisted that the need to "rescue" those now being sentenced to Draconian -- literally life destroying -- sentences in our crowded and brutal state prisons overrides such considerations.
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This may be the most troubling and difficult issue yet to emerge from the schism between anti-prohibitionists and harm reductionists which has plagued our movement. There is no doubt that thousands of lives are being destroyed every year by imprisonment; but there can also be no doubt that the forces now running our police state -- although they bitterly opposed the restraints of Proposition 36 -- are the same people best positioned to coopt it for their own purposes.
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It's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which coerced treatment extends the reach of prohibition to the middle class, generates substantial revenues from fines, recruits a coterie of treatment providers, and grants the drug war another decade or more of longevity. It all depends on public perceptions which are now imponderable.
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One suggestion was that the results of Prop. 36 (which will not even be implemented until July 1, 2001), be observed before forging ahead with similar initiatives; however an article written for the May 30 Wall Street Journal disclosed that to be a forlorn hope.* The same funders who have been key to qualifying both medical marijuana initiatives and Proposition 36 have already decided to finance coerced treatment initiatives in three more populous states in the next election cycle.
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Not only is this is an issue with the potential to splinter our movement, it's also an excellent example of the critical importance of money in American politics -- not just for the major parties, but also for the "radical" opposition.
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Super-Wealthy Threesome Fund Growing War on the War on Drugs *
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Pubdate: Wed, 30 May 2001
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: David Bank
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n969/a06.html
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by Tom O'Connell
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| DrugSense Weekly #202 June 8, 2001 |
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About the author
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