Morning-after Question: Who will be the Obama Administration's drug policy appointees?

In this morning's inbox:

I assume that you know the process by which the short lists for the new heads of ONDCP, DEA, NIDA, etc. will be formulated.
Do you know who will be compiling those lists, i.e. who has the task of planning for the formulation of drug policy in this administration?

This morning, few outside the campaign know yet the answers to these questions.

Drug policy and the drug policy chiefs are low priority. There is no urgency to fill these positions from the public or political realm.

A transition team will be appointed. There are likely to be two aspects of this.

First, there is likely to be a public transition process that may have some number of experts appointed to "study" the issue, and make recommendations. This is to give the concerned groups a focus for their concerns, and to demonstrate that no issue is being ignored. Clinton did this. Concerned groups of all kinds are completing their transition documents right now. A coalition of advocates of criminal justice reform is finishing their agenda catalogue and will post it here soon. www.2009transition.org

The second process is the real process which is likely to ignore the public process. The new White House personnel team will consult with political constituencies that are important to Obama, which will include appropriate key Members of Congress, and perhaps funders, and consider these appointments in a very large matrix that involves balancing paying back political debts, appeasing political pressure groups, finding a leadership team for the various agencies, and giving the best appearance of choosing "qualified" persons.

Selecting appointees is a higher priority than making any policy decisions. First, it is easier for the media to count up "unfilled" positions and blame the new Administration for being "slow" to fill vacancies. Second, because few policy changes are without political costs, most changes will require extensive preparation of the public. The possible exceptions might be medical marijuana and sterile syringe exchange which have large public support.

The three agencies and the agency chiefs are likely to be considered by three different teams: White House team, Justice department team, and a HHS team. For each of these teams, drug policy and drug agency heads are going to be lower profile, lower priority appointments.

For the Administration and the nation, the economic appointments and the national security appointments are going to be the top priority. Then there are a host of other issues and the agencies that deal with them that are much higher priority than drug policy.

Various groups in Washington and around the country will start trying to influence these decisions by assembling their own lists of suggested appointees and forwarding them to the press and to persons who know people close to or inside the new Administration.

I would not be looking for an announcement of a nominee to be the ONDCP director until the Spring. DEA can operate with an acting director, likely to be a career DEA manager, for a long time, as can NIDA. The decision of DEA Administrator won't come before a new Attorney General has time to orient himself or herself.

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Funding necessary government programs

Here's an excellent account of how Britain taxed gin in the 18th century (replacing an experiment in prohibition) to fund the central government.

The 2008 recession is driving down government revenues in the U.S. Can we afford not to tax marijuana?

Gin, drugs and the bank crisis

Gordon Brown could look back to the 18th century for a way to pay for the banks' rescue and eradicate a modern plague

Comments ()

• 
• • Robert Fowke
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Saturday October 25 2008 16.00 BST

I have a cure for the financial hangover we're about to suffer. My cure will make us better, it will cost us nothing and it is based on solid, historical precedent.

In 1742, Britain was involved in the Austrian war of succession, our principle enemy being France. Our navy was very powerful but if we failed to participate in the land war on the continent, our allies threatened to make peace without us. We urgently needed money to finance a force of Hanoverian troops, to be based in Flanders. Lord Carteret, secretary of state under George II, proposed a "sinking" fund of £1.8m to pay for the troops and for various other expenses, to be borrowed at 3% per year – and he also had a suggestion as to how to pay for it.

In the 1740s, gin consumption in Britain had reached the proportions of a plague. Originally encouraged as a replacement for French brandy, it resulted in large sections of the poorest in the land becoming addicted. There were an estimated 10,000 gin sellers in London alone. Destitution, crime and premature death walked in that addiction's wake. Various attempts had been made to crack down. In 1736, exorbitant licensing charges had amounted to prohibition. The result was riots, and an increase in consumption to an estimated 8m gallons a year by 1743. Too many people had become dependent, either as drinkers or sellers, or both. Gin went underground.

Now Carteret proposed a revolutionary reform. He suggested a cut in retail licensing charges from £50 a year to £1, a level affordable for small-time dealers. This, together with moderate duties from distillers and allowing for costs and for a small measure of supervision, would result in sufficient revenue to pay for the Hanoverian troops, and it might also bring about a reduction in the evils associated with the gin trade. The naysayers were horrified. In the parliamentary debate that followed, they insisted that gin was evil and must be outlawed permanently. It was abhorrent to make money from it. The debate was long and heated.

Carteret won the day, and the naysayers were comprehensively proved wrong. His 1743 Gin Act was a triumphant success. It raised £90,000 within a year – more than enough to pay the interest on his "sinking" fund. Indeed, gin substantially financed British efforts in the Austrian war of succession. But equally important, gin consumption was brought within the control of the law and mortality rates began to fall, as did alcoholism and crime. Further licensing during the following years tightened the screw (but not too much), and gin gradually ceased to be a matter of public concern.

Today, as we are learning to our cost, the government is once more obliged to raise vast sums of money, this time to counter weaknesses in the banking system. And the sums are much more vast than they were in 1743. Gordon Brown's "sinking" fund to part-nationalise the banks amounts to many billions of pounds.

It is perhaps tasteless to say so, but we are fortunate that we face a social plague very similar to that of gin – the illegal drug trade. And as in the mid-18th century, we see the failure of abolitionist policies to control the menace. The total value of this trade amounts to between £2bn and £6.5bn a year – all untaxed.

Our financial hangover will be caused by the payment of interest on Brown's bank rescue package. He should take a leaf from Lord Carteret's book. He should license and tax the sale of all currently illegal recreational drugs at a level that would allow a substantial number of those involved in the trade to come in from the cold, thus incidentally reducing crime – combining this, of course, with oversight and control.

He should ignore the naysayers, just as Lord Carteret did, and for the many medical and social arguments in favour of abolition he might care to look at the website of the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit. The total benefit of such legalisation to the Exchequer is likely to be between £3.5bn and £6.3bn a year, including excise duty, VAT and income tax from the dealers and allowing for additional costs. This is more than enough to pay the interest on the bank rescue package at the sort of rates a government can command. You're a world leader, Gordon, and it's a world problem. With luck, others will follow you – again.

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Take the Handcuffs Off the Economic Recovery

See my post on the economic consequences of our criminal justice policies on the Huffington Post.

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Gov. Sarah Palin tried marijuana

Is anyone surprised that a dynamic, competitive young

woman (a high school basketball star and beauty pageant entrant), who

has become a crusader against the corruption of the GOP establishment,

tried marijuana at some time? Half of all high school graduates try marijuana.

Most reasonable people are not surprised that curious young people

try marijuana -- even if they are athletes, raised in strong families

with good values.

Wouldn't it have been a tragic shame if Sarah Palin -- the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States -- had been unlucky

enough to have been arrested, like 800,000 other young people every year?

Isn't it time to acknowledge that marijuana use in not only not

deviant, but not wrong? Doesn't the experimentation with and use of

marijuana by so many national leaders demonstrate that marijuana use

is normal and we should not be threatening an arrest, a criminal record and potential jail sentence to everybody who tries it or uses it?

If Sarah Palin had been arrested for her marijuana use, it is inconceivable that Senator John McCain would have selected her as his running mate, isn't it?

Isn't it time to acknowledge that since past marijuana use is clearly irrelevant in discounting a person's qualifications for national leadership, it is wrong to block the careers to tens of thousands of potential community leaders who have unluckily been caught with marijuana and given a criminal record? Nobody should have a criminal record for possessing marijuana.

Whether marijuana was legal or not in Alaska when Sarah Palin tried it doesn't really matter, does it?

The question is not whether she broke a law that most of us, in our hearts know is wrong. The question is, how long will we keep a law on the books that did not trip her up, but does devastate hundreds of thousands of lives for no good purpose?

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21-year old drinking age? College Presidents call for a debate

Those good folks at Choose Responsibility have enlisted 100 college presidents to call for a debate on the continuation of the 21-year old drinking age, according to Associated Press account in The Chicago Tribune. The project is called the Amethyst Initiative. There is also a good report in The Baltimore Sun.

Clinton Administration HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, now a university president, dissents. We've made some progress she says. Folks will remember her "wisdom," "political courage," and "respect for science" when she kowtowed to drug czar Barry McCaffrey on sterile syringe exchange. As head of health, she was willing to let injecting drug users acquire HIV and hepatitis rather than get into a fight with the "hero" of the Gulf War.

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