Redefining the drug war...

From criminal justice to public health

Kurt Schmoke talks to Pat O'Hare

The Hon. Kurt L. Schmoke is the Mayor of Baltimore. He is a lawyer, graduating from Harvard University and also studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He was formerly State's Attorney for Baltimore City, during which time he established special units for narcotics, domestic violence and child abuse. In April 1988, at the US Mayors' conference in Atlanta, he shocked his fellow Mayors by calling for the legalisation of all drugs as the best way of dealing with inner city problems and associated crime. He was recently awarded The Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Drug Policy Reform by the Washington based Drug Policy Foundation. Mayor Schmoke agreed to explain some of his controversial views to The International Journal on Drug Policy.

PAT O'HARE. Can I firstly ask how you arrived at your present position on drug policy?

KURT SCHMOKE. Well I spent about eight years as a prosecutor, first with the federal government and then for the state government. During the time that I was the Chief Prosecutor here in the city, I started to read about alcohol prohibition and began thinking about the comparisons between alcohol prohibition of the twenties and thirties and the current drug prohibition laws. That was just intellectual involvement.Then a friend of mine who was an undercover police officer was killed here while wearing a body recording device and we actually listened to the man die right on the tape. It was just very clear that the money in drugs is so great that people are willing to put profit over human life. I started to think about alternatives. What else could we do? Then I started reading about things going on around the world. I just felt when I came to the US conference of Mayors last April (1988), the conference of Mayors and Police Chiefs from major cities, I should suggest that we think about another approach, that we think about what I term decriminalisation, which was simply taking the emphasis away from the criminal war and making the war on drugs a public health war, rather than a criminal justice war. The idea at the time in my mind was very much unformed. If somebody had followed up that day and said "What do you mean?", I don't think I would have been able to answer that question. I just felt that it was time to shift the emphasis and was really calling for debate, rather than proposing an answer. Over the last year or so I have obviously done a lot more work and listened to experts, talked to people who are involved in this field and I just think that the approaches taken that emphasise public health over criminal justice make a lot of sense and they ultimately are going to be the solution to the international problem.

POH. Your views received a lot of publicity in Britain which focussed on your use of the word 'legalisation'. You are now talking about 'decriminalisation'. Is this deliberate?

CS. Oh boy, I got some great letters from England. Well the reason I used the term decriminalisation rather than legalisation is that both in the United States and England we are such a law orientated society that when people hear legalisation they assume you mean promoting something as a positive good. Decriminalisation is a more cumbersome term but I think it gets to the issue of de-emphasising criminal law. Now, in most of my speeches, I try to use the term public health, rather than either legalisation or decriminalisation because what I find is that when you talk to people about concepts, and not labels, they agree with the concepts. They agree that we ought to have a system in which addicts are able to be treated rather than turned away from treatment. They agree that we ought to have a system that takes the profit out of distributing drugs and they agree that we ought to have a system that reduces the spread of AIDS by making sure that people are not shooting drugs intravenously and then sharing needles. So all those things they will agree to and then when you say that that is what you mean by decriminalisation they will say "Oh I can't agree to that". We have to, I think, make sure that the labels do not get in the way of the argument. We have seen that here in the abortion issue and many other issues, at least in our political system, and I guess also it happens in England.

POH. At the start you said that when you made your first speech on the topic you had not developed your ideas. You have mentioned treatment and you have talked about AIDS prevention. How have your ideas on those things developed along with those on decriminalization ?

KS. Well, I can give a specific idea of what I think society would look like in a transition period from the criminal justice approach to the public health approach. Now, what society looks like at the end of that transition is something that I cannot guarantee and is something that I think we have to discuss. That is the reason why I have proposed a national commission, here in the USA, made up of neutral, impartial experts in health, law and ethics to discuss the issues of what a decriminalised society, decriminalised in relation to drugs, would look like. But in the transition period I believe first of all that we should take criminal penalties away from the simple possession of marijuana and allow marijuana to be sold in government regulated stores and taxed. I would not, however, allow advertising of drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol. I would also allow addicts to become registered in the public health system. If they need these substances to maintain themselves day in and day out, rather than breaking into houses and stealing from people, I would allow addicts to be registered in the public health system and have physicians, or other health professionals, actually distribute, in government approved clinics, these currently illegal drugs to them. I would allow these physicians to provide needles or syringes so that a person could actually shoot the drugs and hand the syringe back and it would be destroyed right there at the clinic, so that we would cut down on sharing dirty needles and the spreading of AIDS. That would be during a transition period. I would still, during that period, allow for criminal penalties for distributing drugs outside of the regulated system so that if the person tried to go outside to a black market, that would still be a crime. I just think that if we make a system available for addicts to actually get drugs in a free, safe environment that that is probably going to cut down on a lot of the crime and help destroy the market for these criminals out here. Now that is a subject for debate, but I think it is a legitimate issue to be debated.

OH. On the way down here we were talking to the cab driver about the drug problem in D. C. and in Baltimore. When we mentioned "legalisation", he said "well, this is what I've thought all along", but he said you can 't do that with crack. What is your view on that? Can you do what you've just suggested with crack and cocaine ?

KS. Well you see, the problem with crack is right now that has the attention of the public, but if you just go back a few years it was another drug and next year it is going to be ice (methylamphetamine). That is the big fear coming in now. I think there obviously has to be a lot more research, neutral research, done because there is a lot of debate now about whether crack is immediately and permanently addicting and I think there is a lot of mis-information out there about this. I believe that you can do what I'm talking about with the full range of drugs. What I have said about this National Commission is that I believe that at some point we should get to a system in which we regulate drugs based upon their potential for doing harm so that at one end you may have a drug like marijuana, where the case that could be made is that nobody has ever died from an overdose of marijuana and so you might have marijuana on one end, crack or PCP on another end. Your regulation would get tougher and tougher and maybe your penalties would get more harsh, depending on the nature of the substance. Now, where cigarettes fall in that continuum is probably closer to the PCP side than it is to the marijuana side and I think that people have to begin to come up with a rationale for how we regulate these drugs and if it is solely based upon potential for doing harm, I think some currently legal drugs, like nicotine and alcohol, may find themselves regulated in a very different way.

POH. One of the words you used was "neutral " and you said "impartial experts". One of the problems that we have found is that not only in the States, but everywhere really, people find it very difficult to be neutral. People are either on one side or on the other and their research comes up with the answers they want to find. It is very emotional and it is hard to get through to people who have these great prejudices about drugs and also it is sometimes difficult to talk about it without people thinking that you are promoting drug use. I think it is helpful when establishment figures like the former Secretary of State in the United States writes in the Wall Street Journal that we should begin considering decriminalising drugs and when Secretary Shultz did that last week I'm sure a lot of mouths dropped in this country. But there is a major establishment figure who has now come out and proposed that we seriously consider decriminalising drugs for very positive reasons, not as a retreat and that is what a lot of people will say, "Oh you're giving up." In fact we are saying we are not giving up we are coming up with a better method of controlling the problem, so when the establishment begins to move then I think it makes it easier for a lot of other people to come in and say well maybe we ought to at least look into it. That is why I felt that this was at least a ten year process in the United States. Now, I'm only in office for four and I hope to get my contract renewed, but we'll have to see if public opinion shifts on this issue a little bit further than it has, then I think I'll be in good shape to stay around and continue this debate. If not, then you can describe me as a man who had a very bright future.P'OH. There must be a serious possibility that you have committed political suicide. Mayors of major US cities don't often say the kinds of things you did.

KS. Well, yes they did say that and that is why I didn't tell anybody I was going to give the speech until afterwards. In fact, my advisers didn't know what was in the speech until I handed it to them, as I walked on stage. I felt though, that I was in a unique position politically to have an impact and to raise this question. The reasons are, firstly, I was a former prosecutor, so no one could question whether I was tough on crime. No one could say that this is some soft headed, bleeding heart liberal who never made a tough decision and who doesn't care anything about crime. Clearly I couldn't get attacked on that front. The second one had to do with the race issue and drugs. People who have raised decriminalisation in this country before have often been attacked as promoting genocide among non-whites and there is no way that anybody is going to get away with making that charge about me. One or two people at forums that I have been to have tried to raise that issue, but not only am I a black American but a family man and a mayor and I am concerned about my children and everybody else's children and so that issue, that form of attack just doesn't stick with me. I really have kind of forced my opponents to address the issues and not just the emotional non-issues that they used to raise when questions like this were raised in the past.

POH.So who are your supporters ? Who are my supporters on this? Well, I can count all of them! Obviously, the Drug Policy Foundation is the most important and it is important to note that most of the ideas that I espouse spend a great deal of time reading Professor Ethan Nadelman's material now and I feel that if I have made any contribution at all to this, it is simply that I have helped pull some of the ideas from the academic community into the political arena. Now, these are not new ideas, but they have got to be resolved in the political arena because it means changes of law. Politically, I am sure there are some proponents out there. I know that in congress there is a growing number of people who at least are willing to say that this is a legitimate issue to discuss. Very few actually come out and say that we ought to decriminalise.

POH. You have mentioned the reaction of the black community. How have the Catholic church and other sections of the community reacted?

KS. The Catholic church is very important. In fact, we are about to celebrate two hundred years of the Archdiocese. I know by English standards that is still modern history, but for us that is big news! What has happened is that the Baltimore community has generally been very supportive of me politically and they almost ignore or forgive to a certain extent this one position. That is if people feel, well he is doing a good job on X, Y, and Z, so we will agree to disagree on A. Or in this case D! I guess the major point though, is that there has been a shift and my mail is an indicator. A strong shift from last year when my mail said "We disagree", "We are outraged", "Take it back". Now it says "We disagree with the conclusion but we agree that you should have raised the issue" and that is a very important change. The other thing is that we have the churches. Not only the Catholic church but our very fundamentalist churches that are getting involved in action against AIDS and they recognise that the drug issue is intertwined with the AIDS issue. So we have a lot of people now who are starting to talk about the public health side but they don't want to go as far as saying decriminalise. Our State Governor just came out with a Commission with proposals on drug abuse and drug abuse prevention, and he has been very critical of me in my position. However, this Commission report which he has endorsed is very strongly weighted towards public health and not criminal justice. Really, the opposite of President Bush's national drug policy. Now, the governor of this state would never say that he is a proponent of decriminalisation or legalisation, but the document is just an admission that the approach to solving this is through the health system and not the jail system.

POH. On a more concrete note What is the situation in Baltimore now with, for example, needle exchange programmes?

KS. Well, our city has 750,000 people. We have about 35,000 opiate addicts and only 3,300 available treatment slots for them. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health approached me about doing a needle exchange programme but they discovered that federal law prohibits any medical institution that receives money from the National Institutes of Health from running a needle exchange programme. So they have asked us if we will do it and then they would monitor it and at this point we are working with our local prosecutor and the police chief to develop a pilot needle exchange programme that would involve a hundred identified addicts. We would have two groups of actually two hundred people. With one hundred we would use traditional treatment methods and with the other one hundred we would use local prosecutor, which we need to give people an immunity from prosecution while they participate. As soon as we get that then we will be able to move ahead .

POH. How do you feel about only being able to implement such a limited programme?

KS. Well, I feel frustrated about the difficulties in establishing a programme like this and I am ever more frustrated at the national policy that prevents localities from being able to treat this problem in the most effective way possible.

POH. Even though such practical initiatives are gathering support from many quarters, do you feel that radical changes in drug policy are happening quickly enough ?

KS. No, I just hope that people around the world continue to participate in this debate because policies won't change unless the average citizen sees it in his or her interest to force governments to make a significant change in policies to deal effectively with this problem.

The Hon. Kurt L. Smoke, Mayor of Baltimore

"The past 20 years have demonstrated that a drug policy shaped by rhetoric and fear-mongering can only lead to our current disaster.Unless we are willing to honestly evaluate all our options, including various legalization strategies, there is a good chance that we will never identify the best solutions for our drug problems"

George P. Shultz, former US Secretary of State Oct 7^th 1989 address to alumni at Stanford Business School