The Mouse that Roared- Calling for An End to the War on Drugs

By Daniel Forbes - for Drugwar.com

August 9, 2002

The small, influential Unitarian Universalist church has issued the rather remarkable call to: “Make all drugs legally available with a prescription by a licensed physician, subject to professional oversight.” That’s one element - certainly the most controversial - of the denomination’s recent Statement of Conscience, all of it meant to be taken at face value. Entitled, "Alternatives to the War on Drugs", the statement was approved through a process of amendments, debate, lobbying by drug reformers in and outside the church and, finally, a formal vote at the Unitarian Universalist Association annual General Assembly, held in June in Quebec City. It was passed by the required two-thirds majority of the 1,500 voting delegates among the 4,200 UUs (as they often call themselves) in attendance.

Given that approval, it is now the church’s policy to “denounce” the war on drugs as it seeks “a more just, compassionate world.” This pursuit unfolds in the context that, “Our faith compels us to hold our leaders accountable for their policies.”

Other planks of the ‘platform’ (for this is largely a political document), include “a legal, regulated, and taxed market for marijuana”; the elimination of criminal penalties for drug possession and use; and punishment only for users who commit “actual crimes” such as burglary, assault and “impaired driving.”

A website associated with the UU effort calls for treatment available on request, ending the practice of addicts deliberately getting arrested since, “drug abusers seeking treatment are put on long waiting lists while arrestees who might not even need treatment are being forced into it.”

Given the current funding climate, the statement has some pie-in-the-sky recommendations on treatment, including nutritional counseling; there’s also a call for insurance parity regarding treatment - a bit less of a stretch.

The product of two years of study and soul-searching, the statement charges the Boston-based church’s some 200,000 members, most of whom deserve their reputation as socially active, ratiocinative liberals, to ponder whether they can personally endorse the statement and - yeah or nay - their subsequent response as people of faith.

(At that size, the church is somewhat like the tiny mythical country in the 1959 Peter Sellers satire, The Mouse that Roared, based on the novel by Leonard Wibberley. The Grand Duchy of Fenwick declared war on the U.S., planning to grow rich on U.S. aid after its certain defeat. Of course, the small band of invading archers happened to win, so…. )

Preaching on it in 2001, when it was being studied and discussed in the UUs’ 1,000 congregations, Rev. Elwood Sturtevant, of the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church in Louisville, KY, declared that the statement, resting as it does on the church’s “purposes and principles and covenants,” will “help shape who we are as religious people and [will] ask us to do something of consequence in our lives.” Well and good. But, he added, “The real question is, what will you make of such a statement? Will you recognize that it has any call on you, or will it be something simply to ignore?” In other words, now that the statement is ‘official’ church policy, will the drug reform movement be bolstered by a flock of smart, committed new troops accustomed to the increasingly stilted nexus of conscience and politics?

Will The Statement Be Heard?

Long-time drug reform activist Charles Thomas is eager to answer that in the affirmative. Previously a staffer with the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project (current sponsor of a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot in Nevada as well as a medical pot measure in D.C.), and now executive director of Unitarian Universalists for Drug Policy Reform, Thomas has been working on promulgating and passing the statement since the 2000 General Assembly approved it for a vote this year. Estimating that the total membership of the various national drug policy reform organizations is less than 30,000, Thomas figures it a significant increase if even a small percentage of UUs become active reformers.

Under the traditional Protestant practice of ‘congregational polity,’ every UU congregation is independent - responsible, for instance, for hiring, and firing if need be, its own minister. But with the statement now formally approved, the church’s Boston headquarters must pursue its implementation in the national political arena. Operating independently but with Boston’s approval, Thomas’s two-person, UUDPR office (and whatever interns he can scrounge) has received funding from the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters in Boston, as well as from some individual congregations and two deep-pocketed funders, including well-known ballot initiative backer, Peter Lewis.

Individuals are free to craft their own response to the statement. And given UU’s emphasis on personal autonomy, any church member, minister or congregation is free to dissent as they wish. But the church as a whole will throw its weight - however slight but politically sophisticated - behind the nation’s burgeoning reform movement. It does so fully aware of the status quo’s inequities and misapplication of resources. As the not lightly designated Statement of Conscience declares: “Our current drug policy has consumed tens of billions of dollars and wrecked countless lives. The costs … include the increasing breakdown of families and neighborhoods, endangerment of children, widespread violation of civil liberties, escalating rates of incarceration, political corruption, and the imposition of United States policy abroad.”

Saying that “United States government drug policy makers mislead the world about the purported success of the war on drugs,” the statement calls for harm reduction as the yardstick of effective policy. And it advocates “special attention to the harm unleashed” by current criminal justice policies. Asserting that the crime associated with drug use is a function of prohibition’s “inflated street value,” the UU General Assembly decried the use of contaminated needles, “overdoses resulting from the unwitting use of impure drugs,” environmental degradation and “property confiscation without conviction.” UUs also castigated inflexible mandatory minimum prison sentences, evictions from public housing of generations of a family for one person’s even minimal drug offense, and similar loss of other government benefits.

To quote again from Elwood Sturtevant’s sermon presaging the vote, he said it’s becoming increasingly apparent “there are things we think we know that aren’t so - often things we learned from the media without having a real sense of perspective.” He added that the “image of war connected with drugs gave us sensationalism in the media and a need to find enemies.” An example of Grade-A hype, said Sturtevant, is the now discredited myth of harmed-for-life crack babies; to penetrate the official obfuscation, he cited Mike Gray’s Drug Crazy and Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors extensively.

Or, as one reform ally echoed the UU statement: “Every part of the drug war stinks - it destroys lives, and communities and democracy. What’s more, it’s blatantly racist.” So said the Rev. Janet Wolf, a Methodist minister and director of public policy and community outreach for the ecumenical group, Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy.

Recreational Archeology of the Mind

Most of these positions have been long-held by most reformers. But the UUs also reach for the moon when they voted to “Make all drugs legally available with a prescription by a licensed physician, subject to professional oversight.” Does that mean what it seems? Does it sanction medically approved use - even recreational use - of just about any drug?

Thomas said this part of the statement was “the most hotly debated” issue at the General Assembly, but that it actually represents a compromise between those who wanted to water it down and the delegates pushing full legalization. Thomas himself treads a fine line, maintaining that non-medical use by someone not a patient or an addict is neither explicitly condoned or excluded. “I don’t say recreational, hedonistic, whoop-it-up use. Some do - it could be.”

Other potential non-medical scenarios include the religious use of psychoactive substances to achieve, said Thomas, “mystical levels of consciousness” or perhaps to just learn how to be “a better neighbor.” And if curiosity about different levels of consciousness can be belittled as mere recreational use, then, he said, “it’s like recreational archeology, digging into one’s mind.” As to using drugs simply to relax, Thomas wondered whether to classify that as recreational, medical or social. (Referring to marijuana, some wags joke: It’s all medicinal.) He did say that turning to drugs to fit in with a peer group or to feel more grown up is the “least healthy reason to use drugs.”

That UUs react variously to anything, including the statement, is perhaps the only axiom in the loosely teneted religion. Thomas believes it “leaves an open door on what UUs can advocate. Even recreational use can be heavily regulated, with liscensed, non-profit providers.” He noted that drugs have been a constant in human society. That fact unassailable, should the decriminalization of possession and use ever be achieved, Thomas says that leaves three main options for supply: the current criminal, unregulated market; a loosely regulated, “more libertarian, profit-oriented model”; or the UU statement’s “medical model, with the most heavily regulated market possible.”

The medical model is akin, said Thomas, to providing contraception for sex outside of marriage. Some sectors of society view that as immoral, but he sees it as harm reduction. An ancillary benefit to the medical distribution model is that users will end up discussing their potential drug use - and therefore their lives - with a “nonjudgmental clinician.” That’s good in and of itself, he thinks, but it also means increased access to mental health services.

The medical route, while more regulated than the current illegal and therefore out-of-control (beyond control) status quo, is obviously quite controversial. Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said that, “Asking doctors to be a distribution control point is a mistake. Doctors prescribe drugs to treat disease, which is inconsistent with the reasons most people use currently illegal drugs.” As to the statement’s reference to all drugs, Sterling added that, given drugs’ diverse nature, just as with beer versus liquor, “different schemes of regulation are called for - different regulatory devices achieving different types of control.”

One observer, Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, believes that such regulation, though featuring consistent strength and purity, can hobble, but never eliminate the black market. A staunch reformer, Gray is the author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It.

In his sermon, however, Rev. Sturtevant argued that, “Study after study has begun to show that the most useful controls are just that - controls, not an absolute prohibition. That is, crime, abuse, addiction, etc. are all lowest when addictive substances are not freely available without restriction, nor when they are utterly prohibited, but when the are regulated, in particular to keep them out of the hands of children.”

A Difficult, Awkward Position

Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has the unenviable task of trying to actually implement the statement. He described the shift from a criminal to a health model as “a real sea change,” though in his view, the church is not advocating use of such drugs as heroin or cocaine. Acknowledging the “possible criticism” that the policy might amount to a species of de facto legalization, Sinkford said the bottom line is, “The war on drugs has been a failure - criminalizing it has not decreased the huge illegal business. And the underlying principle, [the statement's] the underlying logic, is that it’s a medical issue. Use is not a crime.”

The plank regarding writing prescriptions puts doctors in a “difficult, awkward position,” said one UU minister, the Rev. Michael McGee of Arlington, VA., who, along with his congregation’s fellow General Assembly delegates, fought its adoption. Some doctors may fall prey to greed, McGee fears. He views the medical provision as “filled with loopholes, and [UUs] marginalize ourselves if we go too far and to too irrational a position.”

Referring to the statement as a whole, Rev. Meg Riley, the church’s chief Washington lobbyist, admitted, “The debate on drug policy is very skewed at this time - we’re not in step. Our view is closer to what folks believe at the grassroots level, but there’s no legislative legs in Washington for it right now.”

Her colleague, Rob Cavenaugh, the UU legislative liasion in Washington, said delgates feared the prescription provision would garner all the attention. “But the theme is harm reduction and maintenance of a normal life, as in the U.K. You have to rely on the medical profession to be wise about who needs drugs for what reason,” Cavenaugh said. Though doctors writing scrip for all sorts of drugs won’t be tested in the real world anytime soon, Cavenaugh feels confident of their probity.
Speaking of this “radical” proposal, Prof. Walter Wink, a Quaker and professor at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, said availability by prescription “may scare the socks off many people.” But, he added, “It may push the issue to the left so the middle can slide over and return policy to prior to 1910 - before drugs were criminalized.”

Janet Wolf, the Methodist running Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy, said with a laugh that UUs are “often further out on the edge, pushing the conversation in different directions.”

Prior to the statement’s passage, UUDPR noted that it “gives us a tremendous opportunity to ‘push the envelope’ in the nation’s drug policy discourse.” Pointing to his church’s early adoption of such causes as progressive sex education and gay clergy and gay marriage that other mainstream churches now support, Thomas said that advocating legal pot, for instance, “gives other denominations room.” As in any struggle, choosing to be on point makes you a target. Public criticism or a decline in membership for an already small church may prove the price.

To effectively bear witness, it’s probably best to avoid any mantle of moral superiority. One of the statement’s rare flirtations with grandiosity is the acknowledgment that as a community of faith, UUs have a “moral imperative and a personal responsibility to ask the difficult questions that so many within our society are unable, unwilling, or too afraid to ask.”

But perhaps UUs deserve a bit of such talk, accustomed as they are to the vindication of history - a good thing for a group that, while pragmatic, is often in the forefront of social movements. They’ve helped move the country forward on such issues as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and gay rights. That said, the go to a doc and get your drugs provision (aside from the rigors of finding such a doctor) may be pretty much a pipe dream over the near-term. Or so a mid-July message from the UUDPR’s Thomas to his list-serve might indicate. Though he told me the UUDPR’s main short-term- that is, over "the next several years"- goals are marijuana legalization and decriminalization of other drugs, his e-mail stressing immediate goals to his fellow UUs stated:

-“The general public is not yet ready for the long-term recommendations in the … new Statement of Conscience (i.e., legalization, decriminalization and medicalization). While we will spend some time educating the public about these drug policy alternatives, our advocacy work will focus primarily on the drug policy reform options that are currently being given serious consideration by the public and various legislatures.

Examples include: Medical marijuana; clean needle exchange; treatment instead of incarceration; more effective drug education; and eliminating mandatory minimum prison sentences, racial profiling and sentencing inequities, property forfeiture, and other excessively punitive policies.

Therefore, even if you have some concerns about legalization, decriminalization and medicalization, I encourage you to remain involved with UUDPR. I'm sure that you'll be happy to find that most of our action alerts will be on issues that you fully agree with.”-

Soothing Ruffled Feathers

Such conciliatory muting of radical long-term goals might soothe the feathers ruffled by the effort winning the statement’s approval. (Rev. Sinkford, who naturally doesn’t want to see his term as the UU Association president marred by contention, said the level of debate was par for the course; Rev. Riley said the Quebec discussions were a little more vigorous than usual.) For his part, Rev. McGee praised the “healthy debate” and said his Arlington delegation agreed with most of the statement. “But making all drugs available through a doctor goes too far, we felt,” said McGee.

He added that his members didn’t have “much of a problem” with the marijuana legalization goal. In a sermon this past January, he’d stated, “The problem with the War on Drugs is that it does more harm than do the drugs themselves.” He then quoted prominent reform advocates Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and added, “The War on Drugs is in actuality a war on minority groups.”

But McGee expressed dissatisfaction with the process in Quebec, saying, “It was not as transparent as it should be, and not as democratic as it should be.” Complaining that he didn’t know who generated the original statement first issued for individual congregations’ consideration back in 2001, he added, “We felt it was stacked against us.” It was a less than open debate, with no indication, said McGee, of who was commenting on and revising the statement leading up to Quebec’s deliberations.

Told of McGee’s complaints, Sinkford replied, “It’s very much a democracy involving the free, responsible search for truth and meaning by every individual.”

Thomas noted that five UUs, under the auspices of the church’s Commission on Social Witness, produced three separate drafts of the statement, the first circulating in mid-2001. The Comission on Social Witness then sought input from every congregation in an attempt to achieve some sort of consensus prior to June’s conclave. As to McGee’s critique, Thomas said the Arlington delegates “offered a whole litany of changes” in Quebec and “went there organized to try to gut it.” Declaring the spirited debate an appropriate part of the process, Thomas said opponents’ views were considered and rejected by the General Assembly. He spoke at around a dozen UU congregations prior to the GA, but failed in his attempts to gain an invitation to Arlington.

(Incidentally, the Arlington delegation included a high-level federal official - someone involved in drug policy research and policy formation, not law enforcement - who by dint of his position and reputation, I believe is an overall supporter of current drug policy. Of course, his efforts as a UU operating in this private realm to influence the statement according to the dictates of his own conscience are entirely appropriate.)

Flat-Out Marijuana Legalization

The statement flat out calls for marijuana’s legalization, advocating, “Establish a legal, regulated, and taxed market for marijuana. Treat marijuana as we treat alcohol.” (That this is the consensus different factions can fall back on indicates the statement’s uncompromising nature.)

John Chase is a board member of UUDPR as well as a pillar of reform advocates, The November Coalition. Chase said, “If marijuana wasn’t in there, an awful lot of people would wonder why not.” He felt conscience did indeed mandate a call for pot’s legalization as simply “the right thing to do.” Taking the long view, Chase noted that women’s suffrage took some sixty years of struggle to achieve, and pot’s been illegal for at least that long. In fact, UUs have been urging legalization for some time, dating back to at least 1970, when (according to UUDPR) the church issued a “ ‘Marijuana Legalization’ resolution support[ing] the removal of criminal penalities for ‘growing, sale, trade and possession of marijuana.’ ”

And the effort just might bear fruit before more decades of struggle elapse. According to a poll commissioned by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundation and released in December, “61 percent of respondents said that in light of the increased attention to the threat of terrorism since September 11, they oppose arresting and jailing nonviolent marijuana smokers.”

Surprisingly enough, a measure on the ballot this November in Nevada to decriminalize possession of up to three ounces of marijuana seems, at this writing, to be in a dead heat; its chances were recently boosted by he since rescinded support from the board of the Nevada Conference of Police and Sherriffs, the state’s largest police organization.

Eric Sterling doubted that the marijuana plank of the UU platform would create “broad opposition.” And Cliff Thornton, president of the Hartford, CT.-based reform advocacy group, Efficacy, Inc., (and not a UU - as of yet) said most people looking at the issue “in earnest” are looking to regulate marijuana in some fashion. Even Rev. McGee said that his Arlington church members didn’t have “much of a problem” with the marijuana legalization goal, though he preferred some form of “full decriminalization.” After all, he observed, his use in college did him no lasting harm.

This most widely used illegal drug raises another of the statement’s most controversial elements: the fact that there is no articulated age limit below which any drug use is simply unacceptable. The church does embrace the goal of “preventing consumption of drugs, including alcohol and nicotine, that are harmful to the health of children and adolescents.” (Elsewhere, the statement refers to marijuana as a “safer” - not safe - drug.) Drug warriors, of course, will reply that all drugs are harmful, except of course the Ritalin and its ilk that school districts - under the threat of banishment to special ed classes - and parents alike foist on troublesome kids. For its part, UUDPR advocates, “adequate supervision at gatherings of youth to ensure that there is no non-medical drug use taking place.”

Taking Real-World Drug Using Patterns Into Consideration

The church will soon incorporate a harm-reduction based drug education curriculum as part of its religious education program, an effort (at least compared to what’s taught in public schools) perhaps as socially advanced as the UU’s sex education program was some thirty years ago. Backed by national survey data, Thomas declared that a majority of high school students do try drugs. Therefore they need a research-based curriculum and “an open, honest discussion.” Likening it to a safe sex strategy, Thomas said, “To just say no and have no strategy for users is what’s extremely risky and detrimental.” That is, users should be approached with more than just attempts to hound them into sobriety - whether through mandated treatment, kicking them off the chess or football team, or denying federal loans for college.

For his part, Rev. McGee said, “That bothers me, that there’s no line in the sand. There needs to be a more precise age limit.” His sermon to his Arlington congregation declared: “The use of drugs, especially those that are addictive, by our youth should be illegal. But the punishment should not be so drastic that their lives are ruined if they are arrested.” I imagine McGee seeks reform of the Rockefeller drug laws that ruin so many lives; I don’t know whether he classifies marijuana as ‘addictive.’ But he does support harm-reduction education, his sermon adding, “We need to provide our children with honest information about all drugs, legal and illegal, and teach them how to make rational and healthy decisions.”

Thomas stresses harm reduction based on real-world drug use patterns rather than specific age limits. With that lack of an aged-based line in the sand, UUs part company with the stated positions of many of their fellow reformers who’ve articulated policy for such organizations as NORML, which unabashedly states that, “marijuana smoking is for adults only, and is inappropriate for children.” Allen St. Pierre, NORML Foundation executive director, said that NORML basically leaves it to society to define the consensual age limit as reflected by the legal consumption of alcohol.

In the absence of any UU age-limit declaration, some rely on the implicit. Cliff Thornton worked with Thomas and others on the statement. He said, “Talking of responsible drug use involves regulation and control, which means age limits. So a cut-off at age 18 is intended.” John Chase figured that with the statement’s provision to treat marijuana like alcohol, “Age is not defined, but the inference is strong that it’s only for adults.”

Asked about the ambiguous age limit, Rev. Sinkford, in effect, undercut the statement’s potential impact, saying it in and of itself does not “attempt to write legislation.” He added, “The hope is to shift our way of responding to drug abuse to something more like alcohol and tobacco.”

Use, Abuse and Cognitive Liberty

If the position regarding youth use is open to interpretation, the statement is clear in its rejection of the stark zero tolerance policies that have sprung up in so many settings. It contends that use “does not necessarily mean” abuse or addiction. Opining that any notion of a drug-free society is “unrealistic,” the statement calls for understanding of those who “use drugs for relief or escape.”

It adds, “The war on drugs has blurred the distinction between drug use and drug abuse. Drug use is erroneously perceived as behavior that is always out of control and harmful to others.” Conflating all use with abuse - certainly the attitude, divorced as it may be from reality, which dominates official circles - allows, says the statement, for scant “study, discussion, and consideration of alternatives by legislative bodies.”

Distinguishing between use and abuse raises the thorny issue of cognitive liberty, the right to control one’s consciousness.

As a people of faith, the statement says, “Through acceptance of one another and the encouragement of spiritual growth, we should be able to acknowledge and address our own drug use without fear of censure or reprisal.”

While implicit in the statement, the autonomy of one’s own mind is not articulated as such. Pragmatism being one of the burdens of his office, that’s OK with Rev. Sinkford. Asked about cognitive liberty, he said, “I deplore the situations abusers find themselves in - we have to wrestle with a response.” Holding his feet to the fire on the topic produced only: “I’m more inclined to focus on the outcomes of the war on drugs, which have been quite simply a failure.” Given the government’s current, overt attacks on civil liberties, (the issue to be studied over the next two years for a GA statement in 2004), Sinkford believes that the more abstract issue of cognitive liberty will probably take a back seat.

Thomas maintains that zero tolerance policies are “antithetical” to UUs’ acceptance of one another. He added, “Trust in the transforming power of love. Coercion and punishment mean you’ve given up hope in human nature, in faith in God, in love that can cure.”

Rather than punishment, the UUDPR site states that when drug use “is having a quantifiable negative impact” on an individual, his family or the congregation, he “should be confronted firmly but lovingly.” Rhetorical gloves off, Thomas said treating a health issue as a crime posits an almost idolatrous relationship to a government improperly granted the power to punish sin.

As to identifying ‘sinners,’ the statement says that urine testing should be “imposed only upon employees in safety-sensitive occupations.” Sterling, for his part, felt that went too far, given his belief that testing “is appropriate in drug treatment and criminal justice settings.”

(The Supreme Court’s recent endorsement of wide-spread drug testing of any student involved in after-school activities will of course back-fire, driving kids from pursuing interests shown to be the best route to avoiding problems with drugs. Rev. Sturtevant referred to Prohibition’s unintended consequence of moving many drinkers from (softer) beer to (harder) liquor, just as urine testing may now cause kids to switch from the pot which lasts so incriminatingly long in one’s system to far more dangerous drugs.)

Smooth Stone or Wave Maker?

So is there any chance that all this isn’t just a nice smooth stone dropped in a deep dark well - that falling tree that no one hears? Sterling felt the UU effort might have some impact on the drug-war debate, “but it’s unlikely to affect professional politicians.”

In a political environment where the federal government uses taxpayer funds to broadcast the notion that smoking pot funds terrorists, Thomas acknowledged it’s “a David and Goliath struggle. But one demonination needs to take the lead.” After two years focusing on getting the statement passed, Thomas declares himself ready for “direct public witness to the media and to public officials.” Despite what he termed a genuine consensus on the need for drug reform, McGee felt that, “9/11 changed the whole social justice agenda around.”

Thornton said there are plans afoot for Charles Thomas, himself and other activists to visit UU churches around the country. “But I don’t think [the statement] will have a monumental effect; I don’t think people will get up in arms.” And John Chase, who’ll also be speaking at various congregations, admitted it’s a “very small” church. Hoping for some impact, but fearing there may be none, he’s gonna “keep pressing.”

Even McGee, despite his reservations, said, “We take the statement seriously. It’ll be part of the Religious Education curriculum, and we’ll devote time and energy and resources to it.” Some of those resources will be devoted to political dissemination, though the effort in Washington will be primarily reactive rather than proactive. Without the sheer political heft for daring offensive maneuvers, defense by necessity becomes a virtue. Or, as Sinkford put it, “Alternative religious voices are even more important as religious discourse has been dominated the last several years by the religious right.”

Rev. Meg Riley, director of the UU Washington office admits her's is a largely reactive effort. She said, “When concrete legislation comes up, like the Rave act [attacking music promoters], we’ll write letters, use list serves and engage people in our congregations.” UUDPR’s site agrees that, “Even more often than the reform organizations are able to pass good bills, they are able to defeat new bills which would make the existing laws even harsher.”

“We take the Statement of Conscience quite seriously and will use it as opportunity for advocacy … to raise the issue and apply pressure,” Sinkford maintained- necessary since, as he put it, open and honest discussion of drug policy rarely happens today.

Specific issues Riley is hoping to move on include reforming the Higher Education Act that denies federal loans to any college student with a drug conviction, curbing racial profiling and addressing disparate sentencing policy. All of these are more modest and politically acceptable than the goal of marijuana legalization.

Thomas, however, has been rolling his boulder uphill a long time, and he appreciates the need for incremental action. One chink in the armor is a bill introduced in Congress by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) to federally reclassify marijuana so as to be available with a doctor’s written prescription, thus ending federal prosecution of patients and dispensaries that operate legally under state law in Maine and throughout the West. In a late July e-mail to activists, Thomas indicated his office will “be contacting UUs who live in the districts of the 120 congressional ‘swing votes’ on this issue.” As to any potential congressional vote this Fall on whether to permit voting on or implementation of the D.C. medical marijuana initiative, Thomas asked committed UUs to, “Encourage your minister and social action coordinator to get involved. Perhaps print out a batch of pre-written letters and set up a table at coffee hour to encourage others in your congregation to sign them.”

Then there’s promulgation at the personal level. UUDPR says UUs can push acceptance of “the worth and dignity of drug users,” at such events as parent-teacher meetings, scout meetings and with companies doing drug testing. Asked about this potentially risky strategy, Thomas said, “Spiritual leaders have the courage to go into the lion’s den and speak truth to power.” Courage and truth alone, however, don’t ensure declawing that employer or (teacher-alerted) child welfare lion.

But, according to Methodist minister Janet Wolf: “Every voice matters. Silence involves complicity with the way things are. UUs have a strong history of challenging the system.” She feels that just raising the discussion that current policy is doing more harm than good is a huge advance.

So does Judge Jim Gray, though even more emphatically. He said the UU effort, “is pivotal. That this group with no axes to grind except what they think is right is challenging the bureaucracy is rather radical.” Gray feels that once discussion challenging the basic premise of the drug war is legitimized, “then the whole shooting match is over.”

Looking for Allies

Small as it is, the church can hope to rely on its reputation, as Quaker Eric Sterling put it, as “an influential denomination that’s highly regarded and highly active.” Quoting Jesus’s maxim that a bad tree yields bad fruit, Thomas acknowledged that many other churches “don’t see the rotten tree of prohibition.” Indeed, one of the giant Baptist denominations won’t be joining the reformers’ ranks any time soon. Thornton, who is black, said the statement won’t have any impact on black churches, “who don’t know UUs.” He added that some black ministers are willing to provide him with a platform, “but they’re not ready to get out in front on this issue.”

But there is real hope of alliance with some of the more liberal Protestant churches, and even the U.S. Catholic bishops have landed squarely on the safe ground of calling for “reduced penalities and more treatment,” according to the UUDPR site.

One possible ally is the 1.4 million member United Church of Christ, which joined with the UUs on progressive sex education way back when. Sinkford declared it, “our closest cousins, with the same roots in New England.” And Walter Wink, the Auburn Theological Seminary professor, also thought the United Church of Christ a good candidate, sharing forebears as it does with Unitarian Universalism, along with a “liberal Protestant tradition” and a strong tradition of self-governing congregations.

United Church of Christ spokesperson Ron Buford said his church looks forward to studying the UU statement since the current policy’s criminal justice implications trouble the UCC and may well be addressed at its next synod. Echoing some of the UU statement’s concerns, Buford pointed out that many in the UCC feel that criminal penalties fall inequitably on people of color. He added, “It also affects children, so many of whom end up in foster care. Our feeling is we need to find other solutions, including treatment rather than incarceration. There’s a disproportionate punishment for drug offenses when so much white collar crime, for instance, is minimally punished given its consequences for society.”

Wink, a Quaker himself, noted that the Quakers passed a consensus statement calling for drug reform back in the early 1990s. This June, ABC News.com reported that a Philadelphia-based, regional Quaker group, along with the Presbyterian Church (USA), the UUs and the Progressive Jewish Alliance all “lent their support to a call by the National Coalition for Effective Drug Policies to redirect efforts to curtail drug use.”

Wink was also quite taken with Rev. Janet Wolf’s group of liberal clergy - “quality people with not many troops” in his view - who were once prominent opponents of the war in Vietnam. Wolf says her group began investing in community organizing staff around a year ago, working to “be prophetic and bear witness” at the local level at synagogues, mosques and churches. Saying that many congregations of all stripes have little knowledge of drug issues beyond the NA meetings they host, Wolf wants to define the local connection, such as how mandatory minimum sentencing hurts individual communities. “Our task is the theological issue of the squandering of lives of so many of God’s creatures who come out of jail with the same brokenness or worse.”

James Russell Lowell, 19th-Century American poet, ardent abolitionist, Unitarian and son of a Unitarian minister, phrased it a bit differently in words the church has set to music. Hymn 119, Once to Every Soul and Nation, reads in part: "Once to every soul and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side…." It ends, the organ swelling, "Then it is the brave one chooses, while the coward stands aside, till the multitude make virtue of the faith they have denied."

Daniel Forbes (ddanforbes@aol.com) writes on social policy. His recent report on state and federal political malfeasance geared to defeat treatment rather than incarceration ballot initiatives was published by the Institute for Policy Studies. Much of his work, including his series in Salon that led to his testimony before both the Senate and the House, is archived at www.mapinc.org.