Drug reform advocate denounces substance policies

Ethan Nadelmann loves drugs. And the students who attended his Fox Leadership Lunch lecture at the Fox Leadership Hall on Wednesday knew it.

Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a leading drug activism organization promoting alternatives to the current drug-use policy in the United States. He was also one of the key proponents behind California’s failed 2010 Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana.

For more than an hour, Nadelmann delivered a radical revision of America’s current policies to a packed conference room — where some of the roughly 30 students resorted to sitting on tabletops.

“Locking people up and blocking people from being treated [for their drug use] is wrong. We need to address [the drug issue] as a health issue rather than a criminal issue,” he said.

To ease students into the lecture, Nadelmann mapped out how the drug debate generally works — as with any issue, there is a spectrum of beliefs.

On the far right lie the so-called “prohibitionists,” people who would like drugs to be banned completely and who would like drug users to be punished without fail. At the other end ­— “you could call it Milton Friedman’s wet dream,” Nadelmann said — are the “libertarians,” advocates of a free-market approach to drug use and distribution.

Current drug laws in the United States sway heavily in the prohibitionist direction, Nadelmann claimed. “How many of you have been part of the DARE program?” he asked, referring to the popular elementary school drug-education program Drug Abuse Resistance Education. More than half of the students in the room raised their hands. “Yeah, your minds have all been infected by DARE,” Nadelmann said.

His mission, he told students, is to move American drug policy from the prohibitionist end of the spectrum toward the libertarian end.

Students present at the lunch were either regular attendees of the Fox Leadership Lunches, or, like two of the students, looking for a dependable source for their criminology class essays.

“I was kind of disappointed because he didn’t tell both sides, but I still got a lot of information [for my essay],” said College freshman Ike Onyeador, a Daily Pennsylvanian sports writer attending the event for his criminology class.

College sophomore Jon Monfred, however, was much more satisfied. “I came because I was interested in drug policy reform. It’s an area that hasn’t been examined because of the stigma, but Nadelmann made an incredible speech,” he said.

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