No! I Mean Center!
A happy new year to Points readers! Trysh Travis was kind enough to alert me to this op-ed piece, “Overdosing on Extremism” by Kevin A. Sabet, which appeared in the New Year’s Day edition of the New York Times. Sabet was a staff member at the Office of National Drug Control policy until 2011; recently, he’s begun policy consulting in the drug field, and been doing a lot of writing, for The Fix and The Huffington Post—you can see more at his home page. Dr. Sabet earned a Ph.D. in Social Policy, publishing a few academic articles before joining the ONDCP.
So, what do we make of “Overdosing on Extremism”? It is a brief, op-ed sized summary of Sabet’s mend it-don’t end it approach to drug prohibition, views he has more fully elaborated in “Making it Happen: The Case for Compromise in the Federal Cocaine Law Debate,” Social Policy & Administration 39 (2005): 181-191. At the heart of this approach is a reasonable point: that what we call “prohibition” is actually a complex set of policy choices, each with a broad range of options. Following from that premise, Sabet and others have made the case that the problems of prohibition are not fundamental but, instead, problems of implementation. Drug prohibition can be accomplished in a more effective, rational way. Prohibition can avoid excessive punishment, corrosive racism, and pointless social programming, by focusing on “what works” in drug policy. How do we get there? According to Sabet, we give way to the “drug-policy centrists” out there, the “moderates” who can steer policy through the hazards of dueling extremist agendas.
At the outset, I will say that there is certainly something to be said for the ability of productive centrist politics to move specific areas of social policy forward in incremental fashion. Most of the time, incremental progress beats stalemate or total defeat. That said, I’m not sure that Sabet offers a persuasive way forward in “Overdosing on Extremism” either from a policy perspective, or from a historical one. I’ll focus on the latter (but implicate the former), with a few quick reactions:To begin, who exactly are the “moderates” of drug policy history that Sabet is conjuring up here? Here’s what he writes:
Indeed, moderates have historically been key contributors to both the debate and the practice of effective drug policy. In 1914, Representative Francis B. Harrison, a New York Democrat, worked with Republicans and President Woodrow Wilson to pass the first major piece of federal anti-drug legislation, in response to a surge in heroin and cocaine use.
Other moderates, from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, made drug policy an important part of their domestic agendas. President Bill Clinton worked closely with Bob Dole, the Republican Senate majority leader, on sensible measures like drug courts and community policing. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the reason there is a drug czar in the first place, having pushed the idea for years before President Ronald Reagan approved it.
So, “moderates” appear to be one of two varieties in what I’ll concede is just a shorthand summary. They might be, first of all, politicians generally recalled by Sabet today for their policy “moderation”–here, we could include Roosevelt and Kennedy, and perhaps Joe Biden. Of course, generic policy “moderation”–even if we were fully comfortable in accepting this label for TR, JKF, and our current VP–has little or nothing to say about their drug policy stances, which may or may not have been as moderate as their policy views more generally. Biden, for example, as a Democratic member of the U.S. Senate was for many years among the most hawkish of Congressional drug warriors. Which brings us to the second element of Sabet’s moderation–bipartisan policy making. Here, Sabet gives us Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Joe Biden and Ronald Reagan, and even Democratic Representative Francis B. Harrison and his Republican colleagues in 1914 (coming together to pass the Harrison Act, the foundational piece of federal drug legislation). Here again, though, the connection to actual moderate drug policy making is a tenuous one.
Bipartisanship is hardly the guarantor of moderation. Alcohol prohibition rode in to bipartisan applause. So, too, did the exceedingly punitive Boggs and Daniels acts in the 1950s, and the 100-t0-1 crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity enshrined in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Frankly, lots of immoderate social policy in U.S. history enjoyed very high levels of bipartisan support. Without a clear sense of who the “drug-policy centrists” are and what sorts of policy choices define them, it is hard to know what to make of Sabet’s call to action. It would even nicer (icing on the cake) to get rid of the fuzzy historical examples, and perhaps locate some actual historical examples of drug policy centrists in action.
But, if we’re going to write the history of drug policy centrism (or at least invoke that history to cheerlead the current push for such a thing), there are two big problems to overcome. First, we need to stop using careless historical analysis, and start employing some evidence-based historical research. Sabet rings in 2012 with the year’s first (surely not the year’s last) flawed bit of historical argument: that Congress passed the Harrison Act in 1914 in response to a “surge in heroin and cocaine use.” Sabet knows some drug history (he used Musto’s The American Disease in his 2005 article), but not enough to know that there was no surge of use that preceded the Harrison Act. On the contrary, David Courtwright has effectively demonstrated that opiate consumption was decliningby 1914, and I have argued that the same was true for cocaine. It seems a minor point, but it isn’t–the bipartisan Harrison Act is hardly the model of rational, evidence-based policy making, and certainly was something far more complicated than a utilitarian response to objective trends in drug taking.
Which leads me to the second problem with writing the history of drug policy centrism: the center of what? Drug policy is far too complicated to reduce to a single spectrum anchored by a single pair of policy poles, between which exists some sort of unified “center” of policy making. Sabet obviously understands this, to the extent that he is frustrated by the manner in which public conversations about drug policy dwell on legalization and law enforcement to the exclusion of much else. But how real and definable is the centrism he seeks? To what extent can harm reduction activists coexist with consumer protection liberals, libertarians, various drug treatment communities, and so forth. Can we summon useful historical examples of this actually happening, and to what extent can these serve as a roadmap for the future?
I’m starting a conversation here, so this initial response isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject.
Joe Spillane is Professor of History at the University of Florida. He has authored Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States (Johns Hopkins Press, 2000) and co-edited Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice (Haworth Press, 2004). More recently, he authored Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform (Johns Hopkins Press, 2014). His current drug-related research agenda includes: the history and development of drug abuse liability assessment; reflections on the nature of drug epidemics; and examinations of drug war “harms” in historical context.
Kevin’s was a very enlightening piece, Joe. I liked your critique, but I think you were a little harsh. Kevin’s historical examples are ones Americans can relate to (Biden was more moderate than the Right in his time; and JFK held the first addiction conference from the White House). Also, the examples Sabet gives later in the op-ed are credible and workable. This is the first piece in the Times on drugs from a perspective other than Ethan Nadelmann. We should be thankful for such a thoughtful piece.
Thanks for reading and responding! Underneath the harsh tone of my immediate response–which I’ll grant you is there–is a pretty sound principle: if we’re going to invoke a history of centrist policy-making with respect to the drug problem, we should work to clarify our object of study. Some recent works (Michael Massing’s The Fix comes to mind) find the Nixon administration to be a model of centrist drug policy, but it still leaves open the question of just what that means. I’ve argued that Nixon’s policies were a kind of a “big tent” with room for anti-drug liberals and conservatives alike, so perhaps that’s the sort of approach that’s being recommended here. But the “big tent” approach to centrism leaves open the question of whether there’s a distinct constellation of centrist policy approaches, or whether being centrist simply means being accommodating to multiple agendas. The recommendations in “Overdosing on Extremism” point in the direction of another definition–a kind of pragmatic, evidence-based policy making. I’m all for careful, empirical policy research (and history!), though this seems more like a rejection of ideologically-motivated policy activism than an appeal to moderation or centrism per se. In any event, I’m very happy the piece was published–drug policy receives far too little airtime these days–and expect it will serve as a useful platform for continued discussion.
Joe Spillane’s critique is excellent and well stated, although far from harsh. I read it as very gentle toward Sabet’s hypocrisy (e.g., now seeming to back away from punitive forms of prohibition he either advocated or was completely comfortable with) and his shoddy intellectual work (e.g., even if the Harrison was a moderate, the Harrison Act of 1914 did not criminalize use; the alcohol prohibition agents who were given control of drug policy c. 1919 had to create several additional court cases in order to establish the case law that would allow the Harrison Act to be interpreted as criminalizing even opiate maintenance). And Clinton a drug policy centrist??!! The man who appointed as drug czar a general who knew little about drug policy just so he’d appear to be tough on drugs and insulate himself politically from Republican attacks? The man who twice suppressed his own administration’s evidence that needle exchanges saves lives, thereby effectively sentencing to death thousands of injection drug users? The man who increased funding for the drug war and under whom marijuana possession arrests skyrocketed well beyond their rate under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush-I? Clinton was a centrist alright, a cowardly one who chose political expediency over policy efficacy time and again on drug issues. Harm Reduction was designed to exist inside prohibition; that is the “center” between prohibition and legalization, and Sabet has done everything he could to undermine it since he was in college. What he wrote was self-serving fiction; Spillane provided the history and journalism. Well done.
Craig Reinarman
The problem with the idea of moderates in drug policy is that it looks at too small of a sample.
We must begin by looking at the full arc of drug Prohibition beginning with the Maine prohibition statute of 1840, continue through the California anti-Chinese opium statutes of the 1870s, the state (and then federal) alcohol Prohibitions of 1880 – 1933, and even the early anticannabis acts like the California ban of Indian hemp in about 1913 and the El Paso marijuana ban of 1915.
All of these acts have three things (at least) in common:
— they treat the issue as one of morality (usually religious), not as one of social or medical problems
— they treat the drugs themselves as evil actors, not as neutral chemicals that ca be used for good or ill
— they are all highly xenophobic.
How does one find a moderate position between positions based on these beliefs and positions that attempt to be evidence-based? It can’t be done. It’s timeto find a moderate approach based on facts, but that does not include compromising with thoroughly misguided beliefs.
I’m confused. How is it centrist to put the distribution, control, and safety of drugs in the hands of criminals? We have yet to witness any comprehensive scheme of drug prohibition in the history of the human race that doesn’t involve enormous destructive costs in money, lives, corruption, etc.
It’s all well and good to say that we should implement HOPE programs — that’s wonderful and we should. But they can’t by themselves eliminate the destructive nature of prohibition unless you can figure out a way to either make drugs undesirable or defy the laws of economics.
Where is the acknowledgement that legalization isn’t some extremist libertarian fringe position as Kevin Sabet dishonestly claims, but rather a wide range of options of control and regulation. See Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, for example, or Transform’s excellent Blueprint for Regulation. Why isn’t the centrist position within that range of options, and the extreme position that which fuels a black market?
The real problem with Sabet’s piece is that he tries to sidestep the elephant in the room by making it seem that the way we deal with most substances in the world is simply not worth discussing.
Very thought-provoking post. Thanks for it.
What are some better historical examples? What would be a more accurate and productive way to frame policy discussions?
The NY Times and almost everyone else neglect to call the drug war out for the criminal scheme it really is:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2011/03/drug-war-tobacco-pharma-agricultural.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2010/07/it-is-criminal-mercantilism-to-protect.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2011/01/drug-statutes-infinitely-worse-than.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/criminal-mercantilism-public-health.html
That sales chart of cigarette sales speaks volumes.
Here’s what’s needed:
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2009/02/coca-come-back.html