A Drug War Truce?

Read Tim Dickinson's full story in our new issue, on stands now.

Looking at the headlines, you might get the impression that America is approaching a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. After four decades of mindless prohibition and draconian prison sentences for addicts and casual users, the first four months of the Obama era have seen a rapid turn toward rationality. The administration has announced that it will no longer bust clinics that legally dispense medical marijuana, and incoming drug czar Gil Kerlikowske declared flatly in May that he had "ended the War on Drugs." Prominent politicians from Virginia to California — including Sen. Jim Webb and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — have begun to discuss the merits of legalizing and taxing marijuana. And most striking of all, New York — the state that pioneered the use of prison cells for drug addicts — has repealed its repressive Rockefeller drug laws, replacing the nation's harshest sentences with a progressive approach to treatment. "We put a stop to 35 years of bad policy," Gov. David Paterson tells Rolling Stone.

The pace of change has shocked even the most optimistic drug-reform advocates. "I could never have predicted the way things have opened up in the last four months," says Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "We haven't had an open and honest conversation about drugs like this on a national level since the 1970s."

But while states like California and New York are challenging the fundamentals of prohibition and punishment that have governed America's drug policy since the Nixon era, the Obama administration is largely staying the course. The president, who has blasted the drug war as an "utter failure," has nonetheless delegated oversight of drug policy to one of the chief architects of that failure: Vice President Joe Biden, who coined the term "drug czar" and steered the passage of the nation's harsh drug sentences as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Far from scaling back funding for drug interdiction and law enforcement, the administration's 2010 budget increases the levels established under George W. Bush. And despite the growing bipartisan discussion among state leaders about decriminalizing marijuana, Kerlikowske tells Rolling Stone that legalization is not up for debate "under any circumstances."