At last Thursday’s weekly meeting of the Downtown Houston Pachyderm Club, William Martin, Senior Fellow for Drug Policy at James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, delivered a sobering speech outlining why the “drug war” has been a costly failure. And he admitted something that you don’t usually hear at Republican meetings: the underlying cause of blacks being ten times more likely to end up in a state prison on drug charges is racism.

I can already hear the gatekeepers of the Grand Old Party howling about that. But the good news is that we are now talking about it and unless we are willing to talk about it, we can’t correct it.

Dr. Martin noted that for the last century, drug policy has been based upon prohibition and for the last forty years we have used a “war” model, with the typical effects that war has:

• displaced populations
• disrupted economies
• excessive violence
• terrorism
• the use of military force
• the curtailment of civil liberties
• the demonizing of enemies

That was pretty eye opening to tell the truth. I’d never thought about the “war on drugs” in those terms.

One of the things that I enjoyed about Dr. Martin’s speech was that he didn’t come across as a “crusader” but was very pragmatic in his approach. He acknowledged that we do have a drug problem but insisted that prohibition has failed. He also made the point that only about 20{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of the drug problems that we have are based on illicit drugs – the vast majority are from alcohol and prescription drug abuse.

He was also pretty funny, another rarity in Republican meetings. He looked across the room several times and said he’d bet there were some folks in the room that had smoked pot. Police are particularly worried about pot smokers, he said, because the worst that would happen is that they’d be driving four miles per hour, not speeding.

On the financial side, he talked about the cost of incarceration vs. probation – GritsforBreakfast has a detailed post on the latest LBB sentencing recommendations: LBB recommends sentencing commission to enhance consistency, contain costs of criminal sentences. One point he made was that people aren’t stealing and killing to get drugs – they are stealing and killing to get the money necessary to buy drugs at artificially high prices.

And yes, when I cornered him and asked what the underlying factor was in the fact that blacks are incarcerated in Texas prisons at a rate 10 times greater than whites, even though there is no difference in the rate of use between the groups, he acknowledged that the color of your skin matters. Now, if we can only get the majority of Republican primary voters to admit that, we might be able to fix the problem.

Dr. Martin’s speech was not partisan. Drug policy and law enforcement should not be partisan, although we have allowed both to become so. We can do better and with knowledgeable people like Dr. Martin willing to discuss the problems, we might just get there. Much of his speech was based on this report:  Conference Report — The War on Drugs Has Failed. Is Legalization the Answer? If you have a club or group of people interested in public policy, I’d highly recommend that you have Dr. Martin speak at one of your meetings.

Mikael Mustonen with the Downtown Houston Pachyderm Club captured Dr. Martin’s speech on video: