How could we improve communities without a war on drugs?

-Kurt L. Schmoke
UB President

Thirty years after he proposed a new approach to the nation’s drug problems—during a national speech he gave as Baltimore’s mayor—University of Baltimore President Kurt L. Schmoke is talking about those remarkably different times in light of the ongoing movement to reform drug laws and bring to a close the “Just Say No” era.

In a profile in Baltimore magazine, President Schmoke, who served as the city’s mayor from 1987 to 1999, recalls the speech he gave before the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. in April 1988.

Prior to the speech, “Schmoke had also begun reading critiques of the drug war by then-Princeton professor Ethan Nadelmann, who advocated a European-style, harm-reduction approach to drug use,” the article says. “‘How could we improve communities without a war on drugs?’ Schmoke says. ‘We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Law enforcement would make a show of the drugs and money they seized, but the problem persisted.'”

He recalls thinking that his fellow mayors would be interested in his perspective on the problem of addiction and street violence—that much of the problem could be seen as a public-health matter. Instead, his speech was met with, as he put it, “deafening silence.”

It would take many more years for law enforcement and the political establishment, and voters as well, to begin to see the diminishing returns of fighting drugs in a manner similar to the way police and lawmakers fought bootlegging gangs during Prohibition. Now, decades after his historic speech, Schmoke says he has no problem with his legacy being tied to drug decriminalization.

Read the article.

Learn more about UB President Kurt L. Schmoke.