Obama’s ‘Third Way’ Looks a Lot Like the War on Drugs

We know President Obama is committed
to “drug policy reform” because he keeps telling us he is. Since
April 2012, when the phrase
first appeared on the White House website, it has been
mentioned there 65 times. But what does it mean? According to
the latest
National Drug Control Strategy, which was released
today by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP),
“we must seek to avoid over-simplified debates between the
idea of a ‘war on drugs’ and the notion of
legalization as a panacea.” Fans of
Obamaspeak will appreciate the way that sentence poses a false
choice while renouncing false choices. After all, legalization need
not be a “panacea,” or anything resembling one, to be better than
the disastrous war on drugs, which Obama himself once called
“an utter failure.”

What is the president offering in its place?
“Drug use and its consequences are complex phenomena
requiring an array of evidence-based policy responses,” the
ONDCP says. Understanding this reality, “the Administration remains
committed to charting this ‘third way’ toward a healthier, safer,
and more prosperous America.” But in practice,
Obama’s “third way” looks an awful lot like the first way, because
he refuses to renounce the use of violence to stop people from
consuming politically incorrect drugs.

The administration does endorse some sensible
harm-reducing policies, including syringe exchange programs that
curtail the spread of blood-borne diseases, wider availability of
the opioid antagonist naloxone to prevent overdose fatalities, and
the adoption of laws that shield people who report overdoses from
criminal liability. But Obama’s notion of a more enlightened and
compassionate drug policy seems to consist mainly of forcing
illegal drug users to choose between jail and “treatment.” That
makes sense, according to the ONDCP, because “substance use
disorders are medical conditions.” Therefore illegal drug users
should be treated just like people afflicted with cancer or heart
disease, who are routinely forced to undergo treatment by the
threat of imprisonment.

On second thought, maybe that’s not such a good
comparison. What about alcoholics, who surely are just as afflicted
with a substance use disorder as people who favor marijuana,
cocaine, meth, or heroin? Nope, heavy drinkers are not compelled to
undergo treatment either (unless they harm or endanger others while
under the influence). So how is it logical or fair to treat
marijuana, cocaine, meth, or heroin addicts like criminals,
especially since the ONDCP insists that it’s wrong to think
“someone with a substance use disorder is
exhibiting a willful choice rather than suffering from a recognized
medical condition”? As Bill Piper, director of national affairs at
the Drug Policy Alliance,
observes, “The Administration says drug use is a health issue
but then advocates for policies that put people in the criminal
justice system.”

To its credit, the administration thinks some drug
offenders should spend less time in that system. It supported less
severe penalties for crack offenses, and it favors additional
sentencing reforms. The ONDCP regrets that “the United
States has the largest per capita
prison population in the world,” and it cites
Attorney General Eric Holder’s effort
to curtail the use of mandatory minimum sentences “for
certain nonviolent, low-level drug offenses.”
At the same time, the administration believes
“serious, high-level, or violent drug traffickers” deserve “the
most severe mandatory minimum penalties.” That description covers
plenty of people whose only crime is engaging in peaceful,
consensual transactions. For helping people do what the
administration says is not really a crime, they go to prison for
years or decades.

Aside from sentencing reform (and clemency, assuming Obama
follows through on his
rumored plans to commute hundreds or thousands of drug
sentences), the president’s most significant drug policy legacy may
prove to be his grudging tolerance of marijuana legalization in
Colorado and Washington. The ONDCP presents the decision not to
challenge those laws or go after state-licensed marijuana growers
and sellers as an exercise in drug law enforcement.
“In August,” it says, “DOJ released guidance
reiterating that marijuana remains illegal under Federal law
and that Federal law enforcement activities in these two states
would continue to be guided by eight priorities focused on
protecting public health and safety.”

While Obama deserves credit for letting these experiments
proceed (and for
admitting that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol, a
point that ONDCP Acting Director Michael Botticelli also has

conceded), the administration in other ways continues to
display an irrational anti-pot prejudice that is hardly consistent
with the “evidence-based policy responses” it claims to support. To
this day it
defends the proposition that marijuana belongs on Schedule I of
the Controlled Substances Act, which is supposedly reserved for
drugs with a “high potential for abuse” that have “no currently
accepted medical use” and are so dangerous that they cannot be used
safely, even under a doctor’s supervision. The ONDCP bemoans
reductions
in the percentage of teenagers who think trying marijuana or using
it occasionally poses “a great risk,” even though the truth is that
trying marijuana or using it occasionally
doesn’t pose a great risk.

Perhaps most gratuitiously, the administration continues
to back “zero tolerance” drugged driving laws that treat people
with any trace of marijuana in their blood as public menaces even
when they are not impaired at all. The ONDCP likes that standard,
which makes even less sense than the excessively strict five-nanogram
rule recently adopted by Washington state, because it
“increases the ability to prosecute
drivers using drugs other than alcohol without specifying a bodily
fluid concentration.” But if the point
is protecting the public from impaired drivers,
shouldn’t there be some evidence that the drivers who are
prosecuted actually were impaired? Not if the
ostensible concern for road safety is just an excuse to punish
people for smoking pot. If you believe the ONDCP, that is
the sort of mindlessly tough policy that comes from “relying on
science, research, and evidence to improve public health and safety
in America.”