Gary E. Johnson, governor of New Mexico, and Asa Hutchinson, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, will participate in a Federalist Society Debate titled "The War on Drugs: Its Past, Present, and Future," on Thursday, November 15, 2001, at 8 p.m. The debate will be held in Levinson Auditorium at Yale Law School and is free and open to the public.
Two men in the same political party take completely opposite sides on one issue: One supports legalizing marijuana and moving from a criminal model of drug enforcement to a medical model. The other heads the federal agency responsible for interdicting all illegal drug use in the United States.
Gary E. Johnson, the Republican governor of New Mexico, wrote in the New York Times, "I have called repeatedly for a serious reevaluation of our current drug strategies. I'm neither soft on crime nor pro-drugs in any sense. Yet when I ask whether our costly, protracted war on drugs has made the world safer for our children, I must answer no." He is the highest-ranking elected official to advocate decriminalizing marijuana use.
Asa Hutchinson, the newly confirmed head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, was recently quoted as saying, "It is moving in the wrong direction to decriminalize or take drug offenses out of the criminal context. Within the criminal context, let's debate them, but those should be the parameters." The DEA. indeed, recently shut down the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, which provided marijuana to patients who had a doctor's prescription for it, in accordance with California law.
Johnson and Hutchinson will meet for a debate on the war on drugs at Yale Law School on Thursday, November 15.
Mike Shumsky '03, who organized the debate for the Federalist Society at YLS, points out that the drug war is an issue that impacts enormous numbers of people. As many as 80 million Americans have tried marijuana, and 1.5 million people are arrested each year for drug-related crimes. In addition, the federal government spent nearly $20 billion on anti-drug programs in 2000, with states spending at least as much.
"It's a topic that people are uncomfortable about and haven't necessarily thought through," Shumsky says. But, he adds, "it's something that people are talking about more today than five or ten years ago."
And Shumsky deliberately left the topic of the debate wide open. "The War on Drugs: Its Past, Present, and Future," it's called. He's hoping for discussion "not only of the efficacy of the drug war, but its desirability and its alternatives . . . to provide a foundation for future policy makers at the Law School to really think about these issues."
"There are so many arguments on both sides," says Shumsky. Some see drugs as necessarily harmful to society, and so requiring prohibition. Others believe the battle is one that we never should have begun. It is even difficult to measure the success or failure of the drug war. Where Governor Johnson sees a "mind-boggling failure," DEA Administrator Hutchinson maintains that "we are holding our own."
"Debates always, to my mind, present more information than straightforward talks," says Shumsky. The format of this debate will give each man a twelve-minute opening speech, followed by an eight-minute rebuttal. The program will conclude with twenty minutes of questions from the audience. Shumsky hopes this structure will allow each speaker to discuss his viewpoint in some depth, while giving the audience a chance to bring up topics that might be overlooked. And, he mentions that the two speakers have expressed willingness to prolong the session if the audience has more questions than can be addressed in the hour.
The importance of the discussion is apparently something Johnson and Hutchinson can both agree on.