After the Shooting Stops
Establishment support for the drug war is eroding on the left and the right. On the left, the Netroots has pushed liberals to reconsider hardline policies forged in the ’80s. On the right, a shrinking Republican party is returning to small government roots. On the ground, cities such as High Point, N.C. are experimenting with pragmatic approaches. What will a new drug policy look like, and how can the Netroots help bring it about? This panel addresses it from four perspectives: academic, liberal, libertarian and law enforcement, highlighting the unusual new political convergence.
Ryan Grim covers Congress for the Huffington Post. A former reporter for Politico and Washington City Paper, he has written for The Nation, Mother Jones, Harper's and Rolling Stone and is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. While interviewing Elizabeth Warren last year, he got a text message saying that his apartment had been foreclosed on. But that's another story.
Radley Balko is a senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine.
His work on criminal justice and civil liberties has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Time, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Slate. Balko has also appeared on the BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and NPR.
Balko's work on paramilitary raids and the overuse of SWAT teams has been widely featured and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent in the case Hudson v. Michigan.
Balko publishes the personal blog, TheAgitator.com. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in journalism and political science.
Mark A.R. Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at UCLA. His books include Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control and Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results. His latest book is When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton University Press, 2009). He edits the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis and blogs at The Reality-Based Community: http://www.samefacts.com. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and taught there before coming to UCLA. He has worked on Capitol Hill, in Boston City Hall, and at the Justice Department.
David Bratzer is a police officer from British Columbia, Canada. While off-duty, he volunteers as a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The mission of LEAP is to reduce the harms resulting from fighting the War on Drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition. LEAP's goal is to educate the public and policy makers about the failure of current drug policy by presenting a true picture of the history, causes and effects of drug use and the elevated crime rates more properly related to drug prohibition than to drug pharmacology.
