Editorial: What's With All the Good News Lately?

Editorial: What's With All the Good News Lately?
David Borden, Executive Director

One of the recurring complaints we receive at Drug War Chronicle is that we publish a lot of bad news. Some readers find it can be hard to take. Some even stop reading; they just find the whole thing too depressing.

That's easy to understand -- there is a lot of bad news in the drug war, and it can be hard to take. Even when the Chronicle's headlines seem hopeful, it only takes a few Google News searches to see that the government's mass arrest campaign, mostly of very low-level, nonviolent offenders, continues unabated. That means bad news for about 4,000 people a day who are arrested across the United States on drug charges, plus all the other countries, and all the other ways the drug war brings trouble and harm and grief.

Still, sometimes the headlines are too good to ignore, even in drug policy. When a friend of mine posted to Facebook this week about THREE medical marijuana bills making significant progress in state legislatures -- not one, but THREE, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Rhode Island -- that caught my attention. When the news crossed my e-mail that the Obama administration would call for federal crack cocaine penalties to be lowered to equal the ones that exist for powder cocaine, at a hearing taking place in the Senate, that caught my attention. And when I read that Mexico's Senate has passed a bill, supported by President Calderon, to decriminalize possession of small quantities of drugs, despite their having gotten raked over the coals by drug warriors in Mexico and the US the last time they tried this, that definitely caught my attention. All of it happening this week.

There's still plenty of bad news, of course, and the road ahead is still not going to be easy. Mexico's decrim bill is not as good as the one they almost passed the last time. Minnesota's medical marijuana bill faces a strong veto possibility by the congenial but not always reasonable governor of the state, Tim Pawlenty. Reportedly Missouri's Speaker of the House if preventing the bill from even coming up there. Medical marijuana isn't everything, and neither is decrim. And of course, the government's mass arrest campaign continues unabated. But the headlines are still too good to ignore.

Twelve and a half years ago, after our movement's first state ballot initiatives passed (Prop. 215 for medical marijuana in California, Prop. 200 for sentencing reform in Arizona), colleagues of mine at the old Drug Policy Letter placed an appropriate Winston Churchill quote on the cover: "[t]his is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

In light of all that has changed since then, it's fair to say that 1996 was in fact the end of the beginning. In 2009, are we now experiencing the beginning of the end?