Alameda County Superior Court Judge Don C. Clay today postponed the Preliminary Examination in the case of former Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle for the New Years Day murder of Oscar Grant at the Fruitdale BART station following the weekend killing of three Oakland police officers. A fourth officer is brain dead following the incident this weekend in which a parolee is alleged to have shot the four officers following an automobile stop. Defense attorney Michael Rains said that he was close to two of the officers and emotionally he could not give it his best at the Preliminary Examination scheduled for the 23rd.

The American Constitution Society has published another essay detailing the failure of the War on Drugs which is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of President Nixon’s declaration.

Just about everyone agrees that, unless you measure its success by the number of people put in prison or the billions of dollars spent annually, the war has failed. The purpose of the war was to cut back on drug use. Yet a WHO study of 17 nations shows the United States has the highest rate of use of illegal drugs. This is despite the fact that over the past twenty years the number of Americans incarcerated has doubled and one quarter of those in prison are there for drug offenses.

In the ACS report Alex Kreit proposes a number of short term changes in the law and the way we spend money that would have an immediate affect upon our society for the new administration. He points out that during the last forty years we have spent a lot of money on supply reduction and insufficient funds on demand reduction. Yet the dollars spent on demand reduction are much more effective than those spent on supply reduction. He suggests spending less money on ineffective supply reduction programs such as source-country crop eradication programs and more money on treatment programs such as the Adult, Juvenile and Family Drug Court Program. Even when the eradication in one county is successful the growth of poppies or coca just moves to another country. Kreit points out that the drug courts are not perfect but they have positive results and are less expensive.

Among the immediate modifications of the law that he recommends are amendments to the mandatory minimum drug sentence laws, Federal encouragement of state medical marijuana laws, lifting the 1988 ban on the use of Federal money on needle exchange programs, and repealing the ban on financial aid to students with drug convictions. Under the mandatory minimums, sentences are base on the quantity of narcotics. Thus a mule who drives a truckload of drugs across the border has the same mandatory minimum sentence as the drug kingpin who owns the drugs. Kreit recommends that the mandatory minimums be amended in such a way that they exclude lower level and mid level participants. Needle exchanges have proved to be financially effective and they are an important tool in the fight against AIDS. The ban on financial aid affects mostly the poor and middle class and is counter productive in decreasing drug use.

One glaring omission in his list of immediate changes is the need to amend the public housing one strike law. Under the HUD rule families get evicted from public housing when any member of the family is arrested for violation of the law. Its not limited to the immediate family. It includes arrests of guests and those under the control of a member of the household. Thus if a grandchild who spends summers with his grandparents gets arrested for bringing marijuana to school the grandparents can be evicted from public housing. Certainly in the case of drug offenses the rule needs to be modified to limit it to members of the household and to the possession of drugs in the residence.

But the bigger question needs to be answered and it needs to be answered now. It is not too much to ask that a president who ran on the need for change, appoint a blue ribbon commission including doctors, scientists, law enforcement, and specialists in addiction to propose a complete reworking of our drugs laws. While Kreit’s immediate changes make some sense it is more important that the commission be appointed and be given one year to propose significant changes in our drug laws.