The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation closed in June 2020.

Eric E. Sterling, Executive Director (1989-2020), is the author of most of the content on the website.

The URL, www.cjpf.org has been transferred by CJPF to Eric E. Sterling.

Many of the papers and books of Mr. Sterling and CJPF are now housed at the American University Library Archives and are available for researchers and scholars. (Author Jordan S. Rubin found a document there for his 2023 University of California Press book, “Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America’s Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins it Captured”.)

Mr. Sterling continues to speak, write and give interviews about drug policy and criminal justice policy to a variety of audiences and to the news media. Here is a link to his March 2023 talk to high school students visiting Washington, D.C. from the Philadelphia suburbs, The Heart of Drug Policy.

Mr. Sterling continues to engage in criminal justice policy reform activities. Eric currently is serving on the Policing Advisory Commission (PAC) of Montgomery County, Maryland, and was elected Chair of the PAC in November 2022.

On Nov. 15, 2022, he submitted a memorandum to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on “Fundamental challenges of cannabis law reforms and opportunities for the Oversight and Reform Committee.”

In May 2022, he filed a complaint against the FBI with the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice for its policy misrepresenting the number of arrests carried out by state and local police in the United States, in particular requiring that police report as an arrest the issuance of a non-criminal citation for marijuana possession. See this account in Marijuana Moment.

He has extensive commentary in the Netflix documentary, Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy, now streaming.

He has a 2-second cameo appearance in the movie on Netflix, Fantastic Fungi. (He is shown presenting at one of the two sessions of the Pacific Symposium on Psychedelics in which he participated in 1994 and 1996).

THE Evolution OF DRUG POLICY

By Eric E. Sterling (Revised, Nov. 16, 2022)

The United States is no longer simply at a fork in the road in its journey to confront drug use, it has turned in a new direction.

Since the days of President Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. has relied primarily upon an enforcement approach to control drug use. The effort to stop alcohol consumption through prohibition enforcement beginning in 1919 and its abandonment in 1932 is history well-known to all Americans. Then, for four decades, from the 1970s, through the first decade of the 21st Century, with the strong encouragement of Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the nation’s anti-drug laws were toughened, and enormous sums of money – approximately one trillion dollars – have been spent fighting a "war on drugs." (Parenthetically, the famous speech of President Nixon on June 27, 1971 that is mistakenly cited as the “declaration” of the “war on drugs,” was actually the White House endorsement of a public health-focused anti-drug effort. Accompanying President Nixon were no Chiefs of Police, Sheriffs, prosecutors, Attorneys General or military. There was no one in a uniform flanking President Nixon. At the podium in the White House, the President was flanked by two psychiatrists who were experts in treating heroin addiction with methadone who were being charged to dramatically expand addiction treatment! Later, Nixon’s rhetoric and order shifted to more enforcement.)

Our formal national drug policy goals have been to protect young people from using drugs, to save lives from the risks of drug overdose, to reduce the suffering from addiction, and to reduce crime and violence. These goals are the right goals, but the means to achieve them have been flawed and often counterproductive, and thus the goals are not being achieved. But there has always been another goal of drug policy — sometimes conscious and explicit, sometimes unconscious and implicit — which is the protection of white supremacy. The first American anti-narcotic laws of the Nineteenth Century were explicitly anti-Chinese in the control of opium importation and use. The fears generated by to support enactment of those laws and the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 were of the dangers faced by White women at the hands of drug using and drug-enticing Chinese and Black men. The narrative of the Black, Chinese and Latino criminal — violent and devoid of morality — was repeatedly asserted to support new anti-narcotics laws, decade after decade for 150 years.

Since President Reagan commenced the current “offensive” of the “war on drugs” after he was elected in 1980, the number of persons who are incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to more than 450,000 in 2017.

And consider that the annual number of deaths from drug overdoses since 1980 has risen more than twelve-fold and by 2022 exceeded 100,000 – more deaths than from firearms or motor vehicle crashes. That one-year number is approaching twice the number of all American deaths in the Vietnam War.

The greatest effort in the “war on drugs” has been against marijuana use. For decades drug abuse officials insisted that marijuana was the gateway to addiction and overdose deaths – despite evidence that the claim was false. And every year for decades, arrests for marijuana, primarily for possession, have exceeded all arrests for all violent crimes combined. Tens of millions of Americans have been arrested for marijuana since the late 1960s.

That our national approach to drug control is changing is most dramatically seen in the change of marijuana laws. Since 1996, state after state has loosened its marijuana law. First, states provided protection to patients who use marijuana medically and to their physicians, and then, to those who dispensed medical marijuana. By late 2022, 37 states and the District of Columbia allowed medical patients to possess and use whole, unprocessed marijuana for medical purposes.

Second, beginning in 2012, states began to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes by adults by legalizing possession, cultivation, processing and distribution. As of November 2022, 21 states and Washington, D.C. (and Guam) had adopted constitutional amendments or statutes to do so: 2012 — Colorado and Washington State; 2014 — Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C.; 2016 — California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine; 2018 — Vermont and Michigan; 2019 — Illinois and Guam; 2020 — New Jersey, Montana and Arizona; 2021 — New York, Virginia, New Mexico and Connecticut; 2022 — Rhode Island, Maryland and Missouri. Most states that legalized adult possession and use of recreational marijuana and created agencies to license businesses to produce and sell marijuana, but the implementation of these laws lags the effective dates, and are not yet operating in several of these states. (D.C. does not license businesses or allow sales because of Congressional disapproval of such features of the D.C. law.)

Third, on October 6, 2022, President Biden announced that he (1) will pardon persons convicted of simple possession of marijuana under federal law, (2) is urging the governors of the 50 states to issue such pardons to the millions of Americans with such convictions under state law, and (3) directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to begin the administrative process of reviewing how marijuana is scheduled under federal law, setting up the possibility that marijuana may be descheduled.

Yet, Congress has not changed Federal law that still outlaws all uses of marijuana. The U.S. Justice Department, by memoranda issued during the Obama Administration, began to tolerate state marijuana regimes, and reduce the number of federal marijuana prosecutions. Congress tip-toed into reform by enacting temporary restrictions in federal funding legislation barring the DEA from interfering in state marijuana programs. By 2019, marijuana legalization legislation had been introduced by legislative leaders in the House and the Senate. In 2020, most of the leading Democratic candidates competing for the party’s presidential nomination endorsed full scale marijuana legalization. On December 4, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 3884, the MORE Act (Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2020), by a 228-164 vote. However the U.S. Senate did not take up the bill.

The MORE Act was reintroduced in the 117th Congress (H.R. 3617). It was reported by the House Judiciary Committee, Sep. 30, 2021 (House Report 117-276, and passed the House on April 1, 2022 by a vote of 220-204. As of Nov. 16, 2022, it has not been considered in the U.S. Senate.

However, in the U.S. Senate, three leading Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), on July 13, 2021, introduced to the public a draft bill to legalize cannabis and solicited public comment on all its provisions (Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, 163 pages in length). Comment was to be submitted by the early fall, 2021. On July 21, 2022, Senators Booker, Schumer, Wyden along with Patty Murray (D-WA) and Gary Peters (D-MI) introduced S. 4591.

But in recent years the entire nation has become acutely aware of the suffering that addictive drugs can cause. The nation is truly in the grip of an epidemic of drug misuse and death. In the 12 months between April 2020 and April 2021, more than 100,000 persons are estimated by the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention to have died from a controlled substance, primarily opioids like heroin, fentanyl (and its analogues), and stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, and other drugs. Shockingly, stimulant drugs like cocaine are being contaminated with powerful synthetic opioids. A person using stimulants would not typically have the opioid overdose medication naloxone (Narcan TM) on hand. In addition, an observer telling an EMT that the unconscious person used cocaine does not suggest naloxone would be appropriate, and thus a potentially fatal opioid overdose is less likely to be treated quickly. Not surprisingly, the opioid deaths have overshadowed the some 30,000 deaths from other drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and benzodiazepines (11,537 benzodiazepine deaths in 2017 (in combination with other drugs), up from 1,135 deaths in 1999). The effects of the epidemic vary by region, time period and the specific drugs that are being used vary. The damage from opioids has been widespread and indiscriminate.

Many cities and regions lived through an epidemic of smokable cocaine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later, methamphetamine addiction was found in some cities but not in others. Now, for a decade, addiction to prescription opioids such as oxycodone has been widespread in many states, and overdose deaths from these drugs increased 500% in 5 years. Deaths from oxycodone (e.g., Oxycontin®) and hydrocodone are especially intense in the Appalachian region, New Hampshire, and Florida. By 2016, addiction to, and death from, the variety of opioids (legal prescription pain medications, illegal heroin, and illegal fentanyl) had become widespread. Nationally, by 2017, the number of deaths from overdoses and drug-related poisonings was estimated to be greater than 70,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of August 2019, the 2018 national data has not been released.

In recent years, the nation’s response to the opioid addiction crisis has differed profoundly from the reaction to the crack cocaine addiction crisis which emphasized the role of law enforcement to crack down on sales with long prison sentences. In the 1980s and 1990s, other than terrorists and child molesters, “traffickers” in crack cocaine were the premiere criminal monsters stalking American families. In 1994, Congress authorized the death penalty for larger quantity drug traffickers, 18 U.S.C. 3591(b), (as part of a continuing criminal enterprise), including marijuana growers. A significant example of this change was the August 2017 interim report from the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis which called for harm reduction measures, not more law enforcement. CJPF believes that the primary reason for this change is that drug abuse treatment professionals, policy makers and the general public have concluded that the enforcement-focused effort has been a failure.

In addition, the current opioid addiction crisis has dramatically afflicted rural and suburban regions, and smaller cities. Unlike the situation in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, “drug abuse” is no longer being characterized as primarily as a heroin or crack problem primarily afflicting people of color in American cities that always threatened to escape to the suburbs. Most historians of drug abuse have noted the century-long identification of drug abuse with "outsiders" -- people who, in their turn, were primarily Chinese, African American, Hispanic, or "undesirable" whites such as “hippies” or gay men. In 2004, Eric E. Sterling wrote about the role of the “war on drugs” in maintaining white privilege.

Through the activism of the public health community, there has been growth in the philosophy and practice of “harm reduction,” and such measures are saving lives. Sterile syringe distribution programs to prevent the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and other infections survived the strong resistance of drug warriors in the 1990s and become increasingly wide-spread. In the spring of 2015, once a heroin-related HIV outbreak was identified in Scott County in southeastern Indiana, conservative Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R) embraced a sterile syringe distribution program within two months.

The distribution of naloxone (Narcan ®), a drug that can quickly reverse opioid overdoses has become widespread. States have changed regulations to permit the purchase of naloxone without a physician's prescription. Thousands of lives are being saved nationwide.  Yet in some places, such as Butler County, Ohio, Sheriff Richard K. Jones announced his deputies won't carry naloxone so they will not be able to administer it to a person who is found in an overdose condition, knowing that naloxone is likely to save their life.  Elsewhere in Ohio, in Middletown, a city council member proposed in 2017, that if a person has been revived from an overdose twice, if they suffer an overdose again, they will not be administered with naloxone by the city EMTs -- it's too expensive, he said. 

In many states and jurisdictions, a common harm reduction legal policy is to exempt persons from prosecution for drug possession who call 9-1-1 for an emergency response for persons who are in an overdose. This is known as a "Good Samaritan 9-1-1" law. 

On the other hand, in a different response to the increase in overdose deaths, some prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the distributor of opioids if someone dies from using the drugs received directly or indirectly from the distributor. (Most street distributors have no way to know what contaminants, if any, are in the drugs they distributing.) Some prosecutors use the threat of the death penalty to coerce a person to plead guilty and take a life sentence. In May 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, returned to the old language of enforcement, revising federal charging policies adopted by former Attorney General Eric Holder, directing federal prosecutors to seek the longest sentences that could be imposed for federal drug suspects.

Notwithstanding the law enforcement rhetoric, when public health measures associated with drugs have been applied, they have been successful. Addiction to tobacco is going down. Driving while intoxicated by alcohol is going down. In states with regulated marijuana markets, teenage use is not increasing.

To repeat, we are at a fork in the road. Will our national priority remain enforcement, punishment, and the language of deterrence – with the result of high rates of death and suffering? Do we maintain the ham-fisted approach of enforcement and punishment that has consumed the police, prosecutors and courts for much of the past half century? Waging our “war on drugs” we have spent one trillion dollars to intensify border security, increase arrests, lengthen sentences, and strip the rights of drug users who get caught. To deter drug use we introduced drug testing in our nation's schools and workplaces. These measures have cost hundreds of thousands of persons their jobs and education. In addition, we provided  scores of billions of dollars to other nations for a variety of anti-drug police and military operations. With that money, we have seen over the decades the authorities inflict countless human rights abuses against farmers, couriers, distributors, users, and those rumored to be so. These tragedies have played out over and over in Bolivia, the Bahamas, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Thailand, Afghanistan, and lately the Philippines. Extrajudicial killing, death squads, extortion, gang violence, and widespread corruption have resulted. And countries that do not receive U.S. aid — Russia, China, Malaysia, Iran — execute or torture drug users and drug sellers.

The American public knows that these policies are not saving lives, not reducing drug use, not protecting youth and not reducing crime. Thus, can government agencies be redirected and reorganized to act on our top priority to save as many lives as we can and secondarily, to reduce and minimize the suffering of drug users, reduce adolescent use, and reduce crime and the enrichment of criminal organizations?

Our friends in Europe have reduced overdose, reduced the spread of HIV and Hepatitis, reduced crime, reduced homelessness, and reduced the number of addicts without focusing on imprisonment and punishment. Heroin maintenance has been legalized in Switzerland and is carried out in Britain and the Netherlands. Portugal decriminalized the possession and use of drugs coupled with public health interventions achieving dramatic declines in HIV infection, death and numbers of persons addicted. 

Yet in the United States the availability and purity of street drugs have steadily increased, hundreds of thousands of Americans remain ensnared in addiction, additional hundreds of thousands are imprisoned, and too many people wanting help to become sober cannot get appropriate treatment when they are ready. Cultural conceptions of the drug problem continue to support racial discrimination in law enforcement and criminal justice, school discipline, housing policy, employment and health services.

Increasingly, the American people are recognizing that by attempting to control the drug market through force, prohibition and incarceration, our policies have created a more efficient drug trade and a hugely profitable drug market. 

Every comprehensive conversation about our domestic problems -- gun violence, poverty, racial discrimination, housing, health, educational achievement and opportunity, unemployment, community development, civil liberties and terrorism, even the environment -- recognizes the significant aggravation of the problem by the illegal drug market and the consequences of enforcement. 

Thus, increasing numbers of Americans are rethinking our drug goals and contemplating, if not demanding, a new strategy. 

To support a well-designed change of direction, on this website we provide specific policy-related information on each of the following drugs: marijuana (including medical marijuana), heroin and other opiatescrack cocaine and alcohol.

We also discuss areas of the criminal justice system tightly linked to drug policy that are in great need of reform: mandatory minimumsprosecutorial overreachcivil asset forfeiture and clemency.