Six Questions: Peter Cohen, Ph.D. Talks to the Alliance

Peter Cohen has been researching drug use, drug policy and drug use epidemiology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, as director of the first Amsterdam Drug Research Program, and since 1996 as director of CEDRO, the Centre for Drug Research. He is co-author of a recently published study that found drug use in Amsterdam has not increased because of that city's decriminalization of marijuana.

1. How did you get involved in drug-policy reform?

I realized from the beginning of my scientific activites in the drug field that much of the current "theory" around drugs, and drug users, is dramatically flawed. So, when an Amsterdam group of civilians working in the red light district to improve living and business conditions asked me in 1981 to participate in thinking about a heroin maintenance system for the city, I said yes. My involvement in drug policy reform continued ever since.

2. What is your current role in the field?

My role is the cynic and eternal nonbeliever. I comment, I support, I present at conferences, and then I could be silent for months. Once in awhile I work in an organization, like last year in encod. Since I am retired (this year), I no longer design and execute research that is aimed at damaging some of the most destructive myths about drug use and drug policy.

3. What is your most memorable drug war moment?

Attacking Mark Kleinman at a DPF conference in the ninieties, together with Ira Glasser, even to the point of shouting, at his unsavory opinions about drug users and his elitist views about how to control them.

4. What challenge would you most like to see the drug-policy reform movement overcome this year?

Overcoming this love affair with "treatment instead of prison." Drug treatment and the "science" it uses is a fraud from A to Z, a mythological way of describing drug use and its consequences. It destroys much more life and lives than drugs ever did. It is like Catholicism in the time of inquisition, a cruel power.

When people have problems in life they should have some form of assistence available, no matter what problems. But "drug problems" I do not know, life problems, yes. Under present drug policies, people do have drug policy problems (bad drugs and infernal prisons the most important ones).

5. One sentence, please, that sums up your views on drug-policy reform.

Drug policy reformers will slavishly repeat goverment lies about alcohol or propagandistic harm amplifications about tobacco, and then attack the same goverment as lying about marijuana and other drugs!

6. What is your advice to fellow reformers who want to be more active in the field?

Expose local possibilities for improvement in  any area of drug policy. Locally the drug policy reform movement is already strong and could eventually become so strong it will influence national and international discourse. Our movement should specialize even more in detailed local drug policy reform empowerment programs, and coordinate them. Please help remove the neocons from power... also when disguised as Democrats.