The Drug Policy Alliance Network and the Drug Policy Alliance promote alternatives to drug prohibition based on science, compassion, health and human rights. Read our entire mission statement here.

The current drug "control" system -- the war on drugs -- consists of two basic elements: the predominant role of criminal justice in all things having to do with marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other prohibited drugs; and the presumption that any use of those drugs, whether harmful or not, is inherently immoral and must be eliminated by government coercion.

Drug war advocates evaluate policy almost solely according to whether the number of people who admit to using certain drugs rises or falls after the policy's implementation. This standard has two key flaws. Since it does not distinguish problematic from non-problematic drug use, it gauges very little about actual changes in harmful behavior or social wellbeing. More importantly, it fails to account for many of the most important social costs related to drugs: high levels of incarceration; violence generated by the criminal market; the preventable spread of HIV and other infectious disease; the denial of medical marijuana to the sick; and so on. These costs are often driven by drug war policies more than by drug use itself.

Drug policy reformers evaluate a policy by asking a range of questions about its actual effects, both intended and unintended. Would an increase in recreational marijuana use by adults indicate, in and of itself, a policy failure? Drug warriors would likely say yes. But what if that "failure" were accompanied by a decrease in incarceration, taxation, black-market crime, and a host of other social problems? Drug policy reformers, taking into account both the larger social picture and the strong scientific evidence that adult marijuana use is relatively benign, would probably answer no.

This "new bottom line" is known as harm reduction. Harm reduction began in the 1980s as a public health strategy to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS among people who inject drugs. From its clinical successes, most notably with needle exchange, and from its pragmatic and compassionate values, emerged an alternative vision for drug policy as a whole. Harm reduction is grounded in the conviction that people should not be punished for what they put into their bodies, but only for crimes committed against others. It acknowledges that no society will ever be free of drugs. It holds that drug policies should seek to reduce the negative consequences (principally death, disease, crime and suffering) of both drug use and the policies themselves.

If the drug policy reform movement is successful, harm reduction principles will form the basis of a more effective, scientific and humane drug control regime. The number of drug law violators behind bars will be a tiny fraction of today's population; drug policies will no longer provide the means and excuse to arrest, incarcerate, disenfranchise and otherwise harm millions of people, especially African American and Latino men and women; marijuana will be legal, no doubt with regulatory models varying from state to state, as is true with alcohol today; drug control efforts with respect to heroin, cocaine and other drugs will seek to reduce the negative consequences of both drug use and prohibition through strictly controlled availability as well as quality treatment and other viable alternatives to drug abuse and criminality; drug education for young people will be honest and well informed by science and scholarship; government resources currently devoted to punitive approaches will focus instead on education and affirmative alternatives to drug abuse and incarceration. Under a harm reduction regime, these and other actual results -- rather than wishful thinking or political platitudes -- will be the goal of policymakers and the sole judge of their success or failure.