MEChA and the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy hosted guest speaker Sanho Tree yesterday at the Knight Law Center to speak about what he sees as the failures of the U.S. War on Drugs. Tree is a fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies think tank in Washington D.C., and took time after his presentation to speak with the Emerald.
Oregon Daily Emerald: Could you talk a little about what you do, and what the Institute for Policy Studies does?
Sanho Tree: Sure, my name is Sanho Tree, and I am a Fellow at IPS. IPS is a 45-year-old, multi-issue progressive think tank. We’re in many ways the main progressive think tank in Washington. I’ve worked on drug policy there for the last 12 years. I’ve worked on both the demand side domestically and more recently the supply side internationally. I try to make recommendations for alternatives and to educate the public and the media, also public policy makers.
ODE: Could you go into what you see as the failure of the American War on Drugs?
ST: The number one problem is prohibition. Drug prohibition makes these drugs incredibly valuable. And it causes what people are willing to do in Mexico and places like Colombia. They’re killing each other to control trafficking over what are essentially minimally processed agricultural commodities. Cocaine, heroin, marijuana — these things are easy to produce. It’s our policy of prohibition that makes these things so valuable; it’s indirect price support, if you will. The more money and militarization and policing we throw at this problem, the more valuable the drugs become. The more we escalate the War on Drugs, the more valuable they become, and the more valuable they become, the more people get drawn into this economy.
ODE: Why aren’t U.S. leaders listening to these ideas?
ST: Probably because it’s easier to be a demagogue. The person with the simple message has the strategic political high ground. It’s much easier to say, ‘I’m going to be tougher than the next guy,’ but that’s changing. It’s harder and harder to find a member of Congress, or a president who’s been drug free their entire lives, so when people say marijuana is a gateway drug, I say yeah, it’s a good gateway to becoming president. Every president since 1993 has violated our drug laws in serious ways.
ODE: Do you think that there are going to be some solid reversals in the way America treats its drug policy, or do you think it’s a lost cause?
ST: I used to be a historian in a previous career, and I think the only thing that’s certain is change and sometimes it’s even for the better. Who would have thought the Arab Spring would have occurred this year? The CIA never predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you had talked about civil rights in the 1940s and ’50s in the United States, people would have said, ‘You’re crazy, it’s never going to happen,’ yet within a dozen years you had the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, so change happens. It’s difficult to predict tipping points except in hindsight, but when it happens, it’ll happen quickly.
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