Grand Old Man of American Drug Reform

Arnold Trebach is indeed a godfather of the American drug reform movement. From his post at American University in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, Trebach began exploring the impact of drug enforcement on crime policy, leading him to found the Drug Policy Foundation, progenitor to the Drug Policy Alliance. The author of groundbreaking critiques of US drug policy, such as "The Heroin Solution" (1982) and "The Great Drug War" (1987), Trebach played a central role in making drug reform an issue that could be addressed in polite circles.

But as his exploration of drug policy deepened, Trebach moved toward the embrace of legalization of drug use and the drug trade as the best solution to "the drug problem." Now a spry 76-year old in retirement, Trebach continues to monitor the drug reform milieu, whether as a board member and advisor to the International Antiprohibitionist League, a compiler of drug treatment program abuses, or, as just last month, a speaker at a cutting edge conference, the Third National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His major passion at the moment is finishing a book on drug control in the age of terror, in which he argues that today prohibition makes even less sense than before and that a rational system of legalization or re-legalization is demanded by the age in which we live and try to survive.

We thought it was time to check in with Arnold again, on the occasion of his recent birthday, and we spoke with him by phone at his suburban Washington, DC, home last week.

You've been in this game for a long time. How did you get started in drug reform and how do you think the movement is doing?

Arnold Trebach: I came out of the civil rights movement. For example, I was on the streets of Birmingham with Martin Luther King. I was there as a federal civil rights official to observe events and, truth to tell, to give aid and comfort to the revolutionaries. I made sure to call up Bull Connor and tell him I was there and that I would like to speak to him. He was unimpressed and un-cowed and called up Burke Marshall and told him that the next time he sent down a civil rights official, teach him to speak dog talk and I will let him talk to my dogs. I did not work for Burke, a wonderful man, but he told me about it later. The important point is that I marveled at the courage of the protestors, King, and Shuttleswoth and Oliver and the others. They were my heroes.

That's the tradition I came out of, civil rights not drugs and rock and roll. I often say I grew up at a time when I missed the sex and drugs revolution, damn it. I wandered into the field of drug policy by accident. I was an analyst of crime control policy and a civil rights scholar at American University, and I found my students knew more about drugs than I did. It was only when I started looking at the federal crime control budget that I got intrigued. I read that and thought, "Wait a minute, this is very strange." The alleged facts, the basis for the policy, seemed wrong, distorted or half true.

These were the grains of sand in my oyster, so to speak. I just started looking around and following my nose, and I started going to England with seminars or institutes from American University. I saw that what we said about heroin and its use as a medicine there was totally distorted. On the basis of those visits and much research, I wrote "The Heroin Solution," which title was really a play on words. What I said then was there was no solution, at least not in American terms. You can't have unconditional victory over heroin; you just have to learn to live with it. Also, if properly used, it's a wonderful drug and should be used as a medicine.

Then in the mid-1980s, I wrote "The Great Drug War." I was so appalled at what I saw in the process of gathering information for that book that when I was done I told my dean that I was not going to write another book for awhile but that I was going to start a reform organization. I sat down at the same old word processor I had used for the book and wrote out the plans for a centrist drug policy reform organization based on my experiences overseas and here. I had 50 names for it in my files and eventually came up with the Drug Policy Foundation, a real white bread name.