The conservative wings of both political parties have been urging Americans to take charge of their lives and become less dependent on government, and drug policy reform is one area where the American people will indeed have to do it themselves because they can expect no help from Washington.  As in the 1930s, the political establishment is paralyzed on this issue, like a jackrabbit frozen in the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. Anybody who questions the idea of jailing our way to abstinence is labeled soft on crime, and that is still a career-ender of the first order. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was hounded out of office, not for suggesting legalization but for suggesting a study of legalization.

Clearly it’s time for such a study whether Congress likes it or not, but the legislators will likely have to be jolted into motion. Incapable of leadership on anything this loaded, they will respond like bellboys to whatever the people ultimately decide.  Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress of 1932 got credit for repealing Prohibition, but it was private citizens like Pauline Sabin, Henry Joy, and the du Pont brothers who led them to it by the nose.

Professor Arnold Trebach of the American University was one of those academics who travelled to England in the late seventies and came home to write a book about it. The Heroin Solution, published in 1982, highlighted the superiority of the old British system and put Trebach at the center of the reform movement.^[29]  He began attracting like-minded thinkers and the result was the Washington-based Drug Policy Foundation, with a board of directors that quickly grew to include financiers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, police chiefs, a federal judge, and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. The Foundation’s national conferences brought the leading drug policy reformers from all over the world under one roof for the first time, creating a critical mass that ignited the current push for reform.