Judge James Gray Criticizes Drug Laws (2001)

- Well we appreciate very much you giving us some of your time. In the introduction to the book, you write that the War on Drugs is about lots of things but only rarely is it really about drugs. If it is only rarely about drugs, what is it mostly about? - Well regretfully David, it's about money. I think most of our politicians understand and a lot of people that this war is not winnable but it's eminently fundable and people are addicted to the drug war funding which is a regretful thing to have to say but I think it's true. - Well and we're talking about the money that goes into mostly into law enforcement, into corrections, things like that. - Well that's right, it's basically a runaway freight train of federal funding. All of our federal agencies are getting extra money to fund the war on drugs and they're addicted to the money. It's not just the obvious ones like the Department of State and Bureau of Customs and DEA and all of the military, but it's even the smaller ones like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, all of these organizations are simply addicted to that extra funding and it's a terrible thing to see.

- I think that what this says is and my feeling is that you would agree with this, that our approach to the problem of drug abuse has been mostly approaching it as a law enforcement problem and that's not to say that that's not a dimension of this but there are some people who would argue that it would be more profitable if we approach this as a public health problem and yet we seem to put very little in the way of resources and emphasis on that aspect and treat it more as a moral issue really than as a public health issue and my suspicion is that you would say as long as we continue to do it like that then we're not going to make much progress. - Well there are numbers of distinctions to make. First of all, I think we all are familiar with this actor Robert Downey, Jr. who truly has a drug problem and I would tell people and I think that they would agree that it makes as much sense to put Robert Downey, Jr. in jail for his drug abuse as it would

have to put Betty Ford in jail for her alcohol abuse. There really isn't any difference. The secret though is to hold people accountable for their actions, to hold them accountable for what they do and if Robert Downey, Jr. or Betty Ford drive a motor vehicle under the influence of any of these mind-altering substances they should be held accountable and put into jail and coerced into treatment in the rest, but otherwise it really is a medical problem. It is not a criminal justice problem or at least shouldn't be. And we also, David, need to keep in mind the distinction between drug problems on the one hand and we certainly have them and drug prohibition problems on the other and we are manufacturing those by the ton. For example, this shooting down of that missionary plane in Peru is not a drug problem