CSDP Blog

Seattle Police Chief R. Gil Kerlikowske has been charged to control the nation's use and trade of illegal substances. According to The Washington Post March 12, 2009 article, ("Choice Of Drug Czar Indicates Focus On Treatment, Not Jail") "The choice of drug czar and the emphasis on alternative drug courts, announced by Vice President Biden, signal a sharp departure from Bush administration policies, gravitating away from cutting the supply of illicit drugs from foreign countries and toward curbing drug use in communities across the United States."

The article states, "Since President Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs nearly four decades ago, the government has spent billions of dollars with mixed results, according to independent studies and drug policy scholars. In recent years, the number of high-school-age children abusing illegal substances has dipped, but marijuana use has inched upward, and drug offenders continue to flood the nation's courts. Kerlikowske's top deputy is expected to be A. Thomas McLellan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania medical college and the chief executive of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia, according to two sources in the drug control community who said the selection underscored the administration's philosophy of rehabilitation and outreach."

The article adds, "On the campaign trail, Obama and Biden promised to offer first-time, nonviolent offenders a chance to serve their sentences in a drug rehabilitation center rather than a stint in federal prison. In promoting wider use of drug courts, the administration is embracing an idea that has broad support in theory but has never been a main path for people with drug addictions who are charged with crimes. The nation's first drug court originated in Miami in the late 1980s at the urging of Janet Reno, who went on to become President Bill Clinton's attorney general. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was providing money for communities to plan and set up such courts--although not to help operate them long-term. According to John Roman, an Urban Institute researcher who has studied drug courts, they now exist in most of the nation's medium and large counties, but they are used for only approximately 55,000 of the 1.5 million Americans with drug addictions who are arrested each year on crimes."