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August 20, 2005
American drug policy in the News:
In the News:
The highly political nature of American drug policy- together with the control of funding for both Academia and Medicine which the feds have been exerting for years- has produced a particular type of drug policy punditry. Two "experts" routinely receiving a lot of Op-Ed space in our nation's most influential newspapers are Mark Kleiman and Sally Satel.
I have a particular reason to remember them because the first letter to an editor I ever had published in a comparable newspaper was written to criticize a 1995 (or '96) Op-Ed on the dangers of meth they'd written for the LA Times. Kleiman was so upset at my derision of their "intellectual constipation" that he briefly joined a drug policy e-mail discussion forum- with mutually unsatisfactory results.
He is a professor of Public Policy at UCLA and Satel is a psychiatrist who runs a Methadone clinic in Washington, DC. Of some interest to me is that they have both have been moved to side publicly (and apparently independently) with many of the police agencies now protesting the Bush Administration's recent emphasis on cannabis at the (apparent) expense the war on meth. What I would find amusing- if their ignorance weren't so supportive of our stupid national drug policy- is that they are still so obviously confused about illegal markets and unwilling to accept that those markets were created and are sustained by the same futile policy they continue to endorse.
Beyond that; both are apparently still "true believers" who actually think police suppression of criminal markets reduces their size- despite mountains of historical evidence to the contrary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16comm.html
Op-Ed written by Satel
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/politics/19drugs.html
News item quoting Kleiman
Dr. Tom
Posted by tjeffo at August 20, 2005 06:36 AM