From the San Jose Mercury News
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By Christopher Wren, New York Times

See
The Drug Czar’s Testimony On "The Drug Legalization Movement In America" Has Three Parts:
Lie About The Anti-Prohibitionist Movement; Lie About Marijuana; Lie About The Netherlands.
With A Little Lying About Me. 

LAWMAKERS RESIST REVERSAL OF DRUG POLICY

House: Any Legalization Would Be A ‘Surrender’ In Drug War, Some Charge.

WASHINGTON—Congress seldom meets a hearing that it doesn’t like, but the one that Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., convened Wednesday raised quite a few hackles. Its topic: "The Pros and Cons of Drug Legalization, Decriminalization and Harm Reduction."

The hearing, the first on the subject since 1988, was motivated by suspicions on Capitol Hill that legalization of drugs is the ultimate goal of people who actively promote marijuana as a medicinal palliative or advocate giving sterile syringes to heroin addicts to prevent them from contracting AIDS.

(Marijuananews note: Was that really their motivation?)

The hearing illustrated Congress’ reluctance to rethink the "war on drugs," on which the federal government spends nearly $18 billion a year. And it presaged the sort of discourse about drugs bound to surface in next year’s election campaign.

A ‘risk-free’ position

"It’s a politically risk-free area," said Eric E. Sterling, a former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee who helped draft the Anti-Drug-Abuse Acts passed in 1986 and 1988. Sterling, who is president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, attended the hearing.

"No member of Congress is going to lose a vote because they’re tough on drugs," he said. "And it attracts media attention. I suspect pollsters would tell members of Congress that this is a very good area to be outspoken in."

The hearing drew protests from opposing camps.

"We do not have hearings called ‘The Pros and Cons of Rape,’" said Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., who is on the subcommittee.

Ethan A. Nadelmann, the director of the Lindesmith Center, a New York-based group working to change drug policy, dismissed the hearing as "an effort to smear the many moderate proposals for drug-policy reform with the broad and false brush of radical legalization."

The hearing was prompted by voter initiatives to approve medicinal marijuana in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington and the District of Columbia.

"There was a feeling that one side was doing all the talking and there really needed to be a congressional response to this," said Bobby Charles, the chief counsel for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, which held the hearing.

Barry McCaffrey, the retired general who is the White House’s national director of drug control policy, put it more bluntly. "We’re getting rolled in the public arena by very clever people," he told the subcommittee.

(Marijuananews note: Thanks.)

In his testimony, McCaffrey described a campaign of deception and half-truths to erode society’s disapproval of marijuana and harder drugs, to which 4.1 million Americans are now addicted. While 82 percent of the public oppose making illicit drugs legal, he said, there is "a carefully camouflaged, well-funded, tightly knit core of people whose goal is to legalize drugs in the United States."

(Marijuananews note: When will the Times stop parroting the party line about this and compare the funding of the two camps?)

Nadelmann did not attend the hearing, contending that the subcommittee had disinvited him.
See
Committee Investigating Anti-Prohibitionist Movement
Rescinds Invitation For NORML To "Testify." But NORML Still Tells Congress:
"Legalize Marijuana! There Is Nothing Wrong With Responsible Marijuana Use By Adults."
"They might have held hearings on whether current federal drug policies are doing more harm than good," he said. "Instead, they decided to hold a hearing on the ‘drug-legalization movement,’ which is essentially a figment of their imagination."

Charles said none of the subcommittee members wanted to legalize drugs. But Mica, he said, believed "that an open and honest debate only serves the cause of truth." Other subcommittee members expressed unhappiness that the hearing was even taking place.

"Legalization is a surrender to despair," said Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y. "It cannot and ought not be any topic of serious discussion in our nation’s debate of the challenges of illicit drugs."

‘A chilling effect’

Suggesting the depth of hostility toward the notion of legal drugs, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., asked whether anti-racketeering laws could be used to prosecute people conspiring to legalize drugs. McCaffrey shot back that doing so "would have a chilling effect on the right of free speech."
(Marijuananews note: This should have been the headline of the story, but at least it got reported.)

McCaffrey assured the subcommittee that "I am not open-minded about drug abuse in America." But afterward, he said he wished that there had been a fuller exposition of the legalization argument. "I want people to come out and say what they believe, and be subject to cross-examination," he said.

Ira Glasser, who testified before the subcommittee as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "I think they are engaged in an effort to discredit and attack and intimidate people who disagree with them."
See
ACLU Urges Congress to Reconsider Destructive Drug War Strategy

Glasser, who is also president of the Drug Policy Foundation, said in his testimony, "The government has demonized all drug use without differentiation, has systematically and hysterically resisted science and has turned millions of stable and productive citizens into criminals."