The D'Alliance: Personal Views on Drug Policy

Reflections on Reform Conference 2009

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

This month in Albuquerque, NM I attended my first International Drug Policy Reform Conference (I'm in my sixth month as a member of the Drug Policy Alliance staff). I expected going in that the conference would give me a more comprehensive sense of where the drug policy reform movement is headed, but I wasn't quite prepared for the degree to which the conference would reshape the way I conceptualize my own activism and how my position in the drug policy reform movement connects me to other social and political movements.

Attending the conference helped me gain a new perspective on something I've been thinking about for years now- how do all the causes within the so-called "progressive movement" overlap? How can we better facilitate coalition building within a movement comprised of individuals with a myriad of different passions, motivations, and ideologies. And how can we change attitudes within the movement to alter the power hierarchies that so often marginalize people based on gender, race, socioeconomic status, and various other factors?

My time at the Reform Conference didn't provide me with neatly packaged answers to these questions. While I was impressed with the diversity of the conference participants, there were times when the inequities within the reform movement became very clear. As in every progressive movement, there is discrimination and marginalization within the drug policy movement. Even at the conference, for example, an honest, wide-ranging discussion of gender was relegated to a couple panels and remained largely absent from the major plenary sessions. So much of the decision-making power in the reform community still lies with a largely white male elite.

Yet, even dismayed by the obvious inequities with in the reform community, I was exceedingly hopeful during my three days at the conference because I realized that, with this gathering, our movement already has in place a forum in which nearly every stakeholder group in the drug policy reform movement is represented. With former and current drug users, cops, family members of overdose victims, research scientists, formerly incarcerated individuals, harm reductionists, students, and so many others gathered in the same building, we have the perfect venue to acknowledge and address serious problems within the movement and to build the unlikely bridges we absolutely need to build to take our efforts to the next level.

The personal stories of the speakers I heard and the people I met gave me a more tangible sense of how the movement to end the drug war intersects with various other progressive causes. Some of these intersections I already understood pretty clearly. It's easy to see how ending the drug war would be a primary goal of the prison reform movement and an essential step toward achieving racial justice. But until the conference, I hadn't full conceptualized how the drug policy reform movement intersects with the reproductive rights movement when women who use drugs face criminal charges or other penalties for choosing to carry their pregnancies to term. I hadn't been able to adequately explain how it intersects with the gay rights movement through a common conviction to end the government's policing of our bodies.

I believe that to change enough minds to succeed in ending the drug war, we need to build coalitions, and not just the obvious ones. We need to build bridges with unlikely allies. If we show the failures of the drug war through enough lenses, we're bound to win over at least some of the people we've been unable to reach until now.

With the Reform Conference, we have a great platform to discuss how our varied personal experiences led us seek the common goal of dismantling the drug war. From there, we can learn from each other how to make our movement stronger by adding more voices to the conversation and moving to the center of the discussion voices that have until now been marginalized.

More from the conference: Watch videos, view presentations and our twitter feed, read the conference program and more.