A front-page story in The New York Times last month sounded the alarm that the Net has become "an alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer can find out how to get high on LSD." Just days later, Barry McCaffrey, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, complained that online discourse about drugs is "dominated by pro-drug drug-legalization opportunities to learn; you know, High Times, interactive video." McCaffrey announced that his agency has earmarked US$400,000 - out of a $175 million advertising package still awaiting congressional appropriation - to zap teen Net surfers with anti-drug messages, starting this October.
As the media and the White House turn up the heat on the Cheech and Chongification of the Net, the Drug Reform Coordination Network has launched a new Web site devoted to chronicling the social devastation wrought by drug prohibition. By detailing the health impact of laws against needle exchange, the injustices brought about by mandatory-minimum sentencing, and the ravaging of inner-city communities by black-market entrepreneurs, DRCNet hopes to prove, says associate director Adam Smith, that "drug policy itself ... is a major social problem. DRCNet is not fighting the people who are fighting the drugs - we're fighting for a rational policy."
"We don't see ourselves as pro-drug," director David Borden explains. "We see drug use as a personal matter that has risks associated with it. We see ourselves as a policy-reform organization, aiming to change the laws that are making the harms of drugs worse."
Smith compares the current "culture of prohibition" to the 1920s, when the 18th Amendment stoked a firestorm of gangland violence coast to coast. "Crack is a product of cocaine prohibition, like wood alcohol was a product of alcohol prohibition. Crack is a way to sell cocaine to people who can't afford to pay $80 a gram for what it costs 28 cents a gram to produce.... So many people are making money off of this - the construction industry, the correction industry, the black market, law enforcement. It's a war that's being sold to the public with hysteria."
StopTheDrugWar.org is the newest in a phalanx of sites hosted by DRCNet, which also features a calendar of events related to drug-law reform, a state-by-state analysis of the spread of drug-related HIV in the United States, and the Drug Library, the most in-depth online resource of information about drug-related legislation.
Plans for the new site include a "guided tour" of the war on drugs, beginning with the first installment, Prisoners of the Drug War, a collection of stories of those incarcerated under mandatory-minimum sentences. (Upon sending 22-year-old Todd Davidson to prison for 20 years for intent to distribute LSD, one judge wrote, "My hands are tied.... I hope you have good luck with your appeal, because 20 years is too long for your offense.")
Smith, who is an attorney, sees the Net as indispensable for accomplishing the goals of DRCNet, calling drug policy reform "the first major social movement coordinated by electronic communication." DRCNet was born online, as an email list for academics and grassroots activists launched by Borden in 1993. The list kept growing - it now has more than 2,500 members - and in 1995, DRCNet received one of the first grants from the Drug Policy Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to drug-law reform.
The organization's presence on the Web has helped DRCNet bring information to public attention that "for years, we couldn't get the mainstream media to run," Smith claims. "Don't You DARE," the damning exposé of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that appeared in the New Republic last March, drew examples of the program's failure from DRCNet's "A Different Look at DARE," Smith says.
Smith and Borden plan to utilize the Web's original app - hypertext annotation - by porting public drug-war documents to their own site, and footnoting errors of fact and disinformation.
Borden agrees with Barry McCaffrey that there's a lot of misleading information about drugs online, though he sees the situation differently.
"The most effective promotion of LSD I ever saw on the Net was on the DEA's Web site, where they had quotes from kids who had tried it," Borden recalls. "If you want to get kids fascinated with LSD, give them this book."
