Around the world, countries, states, municipalities, institutions, and individuals are coming to the realization that the Drug War has failed. But after more than 60 years of Prohibition, the problems are so ingrained and complex that they have become extremely difficult to address. With over 2 million people in prison nationwide, rampant drug use and abuse, violence brought on by illicit markets, and a constant attack on our civil liberties, it is painfully apparent that we need to redirect our efforts toward finding solutions that work.
We invited you here today because we feel that Madison is an ideal place to tackle this issue in a comprehensive way, pulling in people with many different talents and perspectives.
Madison is home to a highly educated, highly engaged citizenry. We have a great University and all of the resources it offers, accessible elected officials, a more humane and less militarized police force than many cities, a tradition of receptivity to cutting edge ideas, a wide variety of social service providers, and perhaps most importantly, we already have a dialogue going in regard to Drug Policy.
The purpose of this address is to begin a process of pulling these resources together in order to develop a drug policy that is guided by a forward-thinking, unified approach in dealing with problems of drug use, abuse, and the social ills and public health crises that accompany Prohibitionist laws.
Over the last year and a half, the Progressive Dane Drug Policy Task Force has been researching drug policy and its implementation in Madison and Dane County. During this time we have met with: Asst. Police Chief Noble Wray; Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard; Mayor Sue Bauman; Lt. Bill Housley and Lt. Brian Ackeret, former and current head of the Dane County Narcotics Task Force, respectively; State Sen. John Erpenbach, and many City Council members and County Supervisors.
We were very pleased with the responsiveness of these officials, the respect they afforded us, and the amount of compassion and common sense that they expressed in their statements. However, there were a number of areas in which actual practice did not reflect the commonly professed belief that a health-oriented approach to drug policy is what is needed.
We have broken down our evaluation of city drug policy into several areas, and will now present our findngs in each.
MARIJUANA -- Across the board, everyone we met with expressed the sentiment that people do not deserve to be imprisoned for simple marijuana possession and use, and that the imprisonment of marijuana users is not productive to society. The Dane Co. Narcotics Task Force and the Madison Police Dept. both claim that marijuana is their lowest priority. However, marijuana arrests account for the highest number of arrests by the Narcotics Task Force, and the MPD arrested hundreds of marijuana users last year. We feel that the selectivity with which marijuana laws are enforced in Madison invites bias in the application of the law.
In researching Madison law, one of our earliest findings was that Madison has a very progressive marijuana ordinance on the books. Passed in 1977, Madison General Ord. 23.20 states that "casual possession of marijuana on private property is not a crime and is not subject to forfeiture." It affords further protection for medical marijuana patients, who, with a recommendation from a (very loosely defined) practitioner, may possess marijuana on public property.
We call upon the Mayor and/or Police Chief Richard Williams to direct the Madison Police Department to recognize and comply with Ord. 23.20 across the board for Madison residents.
We also call on the City Council to pass an amendment to permit medical marijuana patients to grow up to ten marijuana plants in order to eliminate the necessity of patients' violating any city law in order to obtain their medicine (as the right to obtain marijuana is not currently protected under Ord. 23.20.) We have drafted such an amendment, which will be introduced by Ald. Judy Olson.
INFORMATION GATHERING -- Perhaps the most surprising and disturbing thing to come to light in our meetings with law enforcement officials and legislators was a frequent lack of knowledge about specific drug laws and their implications for people charged with their violation. As police consistently use their own discretion in choosing what charges to bring to prosecutors, we recommend using some of the grant money that we get to fund the drug war to instead fund a training program for law enforcement officials, in order to inform them of relevant drug laws and how they tend to be prosecuted. We recommend including information about how charges are often stacked in order to increase possible sentences, and how offenders are affected by mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. We also recommend including information about other areas, such as the Higher Education Act of 1998 which denies federal financial aid to students who have drug convictions on their records.
As we attempted to research local drug law implementation, we found that information about drug policy enforcement tends to be scattered through many different departments, sometimes between the city and county, and generally extremely difficult to obtain.
A positive development in regard to information gathering is the passage last May of Ald. Judy Olson's resolution calling for a thorough study of city drug policy enforcement. It will be extremely beneficial for the city to gain a thorough understanding of what is currently being done. Our main concern, however, is that this ongoing study not be used as an excuse for not taking timely action on drug policy matters such as harm reduction efforts.
NARCOTICS/ OTHER HARD DRUGS -- We commend both the city and county for continuing to fund needle exchange programs, helping to reduce the spread of infectious disease through needle sharing. But we can do more. We recommend the swift passage of a similar county-level study which was recently introduced by Supv. Andy Olsen. We then recommend using the studies as a starting point from which to evaluate potential longer-term harm reduction efforts, and from which to develop a comprehensive policy in regard to hard drugs. We recommend researching the possibility of conducting ibogaine trials and experimenting with safer injection rooms for narcotics users (currently being used successfully in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands). More information on both of these things will be presented in the expert testimony, and is also included in the press packets.
One issue we have been working to address is the concern that fear of prosecution may keep people from calling 911 in case of a drug overdose. The law enforcement officials with whom we met on this topic claimed that overdose victims generally are not prosecuted. The hard data on this matter was difficult to obtain and officials were gracious in helping to compile it. But once the data were obtained, we found that, of 25 overdose calls over the last three years, nine victims were charged. Two were in treatment and the remaining seven were in unspecified stages of criminal prosecution.
One major reason that was cited for a need to have the option to prosecute overdose victims was that sometimes the individual is in desperate need of treatment, and family members want prosecution as a form of intervention.
A major problem with this approach is that family members may get the undesired consequence of seeing their loved one go to prison rather than to treatment, possibly even in a different state. No family should be faced with the possibility that their attempt to acquire treatment for a loved one may result in imprisonment instead. We recommend that the city look into ways to shift overdose cases into the public health sector.
We also recommend adopting a written policy assuring 911 overdose callers that they will not be interviewed by police after the call unless there is evidence of foul play, and that overdose victims will not face prosecution based on the 911 call. In a medical emergency, panicked people should not have to weigh the potential of going to prison against the potential death of a friend. The lack of a written policy leaves this matter to trust, and trust of police officials tends to be in short supply among illicit drug users. The lack of written policies also leaves citizens in the vulnerable position of relying on the discretion of people working in positions over which we have no oversight or power in hiring decisions.
Another reason that was cited for the need for police to respond to overdose calls is that police are often the first to arrive on the scene and thus can provide medical attention quickly. We recommend then that police be trained to administer Naloxone, a remarkably effective antidote for opiate overdoses, and carry it with them in their squad cars at all times.
DRUG-RELATED SOCIAL DISTURBANCES/ CIVIL LIBERTIES -- The anti-loitering ordinance was a positive thing for Madison in one important regard; it focused attention on the social ills that neighborhoods are facing due to illicit drug markets. The negative was that it promoted a divisive, ineffective, and unconstitutional ordinance as a solution to the problem. We commend Mayor Bauman for vetoing the loitering ordinance and hope never to see it again.
We recommend introducing an alternative/s to the loitering ordinance, focusing law enforcement efforts on social disturbances such as threatening or violent behavior, illegal weapons possession, noise violations, and disturbing the peace, and ensuring a timely response to police calls in affected neighborhoods. We recommend that the Madison Police Department renew its commitment to community based policing.
For longer term improvements, we recommend steps that benefit affected nieghborhoods by promoting economic development (it is a positive step that TIF grants are now being targeted more often for "troubled" neighborhoods), providing activities for youth, and promoting community building efforts. We also recommend adopting inclusionary zoning ordinances and ending Section 8 discrimination as means of reducing the pockets of poverty that lend themselves to the illicit drug trade.
We also recommend providing more entertainment options for young people around the city and promoting fact-based drug education efforts as means of preventing youth drug use.
PROPERTY FORFEITURES -- The Dane County Narcotics Task Force derives tens of thousands of dollars of its budget, including half its $44,000/year rent, from drug-related seizures of private property every year. We believe that financial dependence on forfeitures is an automatically corrupting influence, greatly reducing the likelihood that the seeking of justice is the driving force behind enforcement of the law.
We recommend that the Narcotics Task Force remove forfeiture money from its budget (thereby reducing the budget by that amount), that seizures ONLY take place after an individual is convicted of a significant charge, and that forfeiture money be redirected toward treatment and prevention programs. In the long term, drug-related property forfeitures should be phased out altogether.
TREATMENT/JAIL ISSUES -- First, though we don't necessarily advocate methadone as the best form of treatment for narcotics addiction, we are concerned that it is completely unavailable in the Dane County jail.
We recommend that the Dane County Sheriff take immediate steps to ensure that addicts undergoing methadone treatment have access to this treatment while in jail.
On the larger scale, it is very positive that Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk has vetoed jail expansion in favor of proposing a treatment facility. Dane County is also ahead of many counties in that we have drug courts, which are better-equipped to handle the unique circumstances present in drug-related cases.
While we strongly support shifting resources from incarceration to treatment, we are concerned that casual users and experimenters will be funnelled into treatment when it is not needed, thereby reducing treatment availability to people who are seeking it. Currently, the average waiting list for the Dane County Mental Health treatment facility is 60 days, and 65% of the people in the treatment facility are there by court order.
We recommend that any treatment option have a strong assessment component in which there are many options besides incarceration or coerced treatment, including community service, job counseling, health care, etc.
EVALUATION -- We recommend that in all drug policy matters we separate drug use from drug abuse. We further recommend that drugs be evaluated and addressed based on their physical attributes, likelihood of addiction, and potential health hazards, just as is done with currently legal drugs. We also recommend implementing harm reduction policies in regard to hard drugs, including supporting the efforts of organizations like DanceSafe in providing fact-based drug education and increasing cooperation between law-enforcement agencies and harm reduction organizations.
In the longer term, we recommend researching the possibility of having controlled and appropriate markets for these drugs. Any illicit market is an unregulated and uncontrollable one.
And in complete contrast with the Drug War itself, we recommend regular evaluations of the success of these various measures in order to continually refine and improve our city's approach to drug policy.
Madison has to decide -- Either we can continue to pursue a drug policy that tends to run primarily on inertia, funding and enforcing policies that are widely recognized to be failures and destroying lives in the process; or we can choose to adopt an honest, cohesive, forward-thinking, and health-based drug policy that protects public health and safety and the rights of individuals.
Actively pursuing an effective drug policy will be a big job and will require commitment, hard work, and a spirit of cooperation. And it will make Madison a model city for the rest of the country. We need to insist that our police and elected officials continue to show compassion and common sense. More than that, we need them to show vision, determination, and leadership.