Today is my first day back at DPA world headquarters in New York since returning from the 2005 International Drug Policy Reform Conference.
What better time could there be for my first blog post?
And what better topic than the future of the drug policy reform movement as I, a young person still very new to this movement and with a surely naive perspective, see it?
I think that the drug policy reform movement is undergoing a transition right now and I think that the conference highlighted how things are changing.
At the conference’s opening plenary, our executive director Ethan gave an amazing speech in which he began by pointing out that there are three kinds of people in the reform movement: people who love drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don’t care about drugs at all.
I am a proud member of the third group.
I work in this movement because I believe in compassion and justice.
For too long, and really this is still the case, the loudest voice in our movement came from the first group: people who love drugs. Eventually, the people who hate drugs became a bigger part of the movement. Now I think we are finally seeing the emergence of more and more leaders from the third group: people who don’t really care about drugs at all.
This excites me tremendously because I think that it is this group who will be the most effective when it comes to enacting on-the-ground-reform.
I think that the era of the middle-aged-white-man-who-likes-to-smoke-pot being the face of the movement is ending. The new faces of the drug policy reform movement are the formerly incarcerated, their families, parents and their teenaged children, religious leaders, doctors, and police. In other words, all the people who care about ending the drug war, but not so much about drugs themselves.
These were the voices that stood out to me at the conference. These were the voices that stirred my emotions and made me proud to devote myself to this work. As DPA President Ira Glasser put it, the drug policy reform movement is the new movement for civil rights and racial justice in the United States.
Don’t get me wrong. I am honored to stand arm in arm with everyone who wants to end the war on drugs and I am so grateful for the support of every person who cares about this movement. I care about the sovereignty over one’s own mind and about freedom from government invasions of individual privacy.
I’m just excited to hear so many people whose voices resonate with my heart becoming leaders.
Posted by Robin Beck.
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