No Ordinary Car
Advocates of policy reform face the task of persuading the public that a seemingly ordinary thing is actually not ordinary at all.
This task can be a bit like a problem faced in the automotive world of the 20th century, when people had to be taught that sometimes a car is not just a car: sometimes it's a Ford Pinto.
(Above: The 1979 Ford Pinto. Photo from HowStuffWorks.com. Below: A Pinto explodes into flame after being rear-ended. Still from a video available on YouTube.)
The Pinto looked pretty much like other subcompact cars of the 1970s. But it was different in an important way. As the public eventually learned, it was extremely unsafe.
The Pinto's gas tank was easily punctured in a rear-end collision, creating a risk of fire. Not only that: Ford knew the Pinto was poorly designed. It simply made a cost-benefit decision to pay damages in lawsuits rather than shell out the $11 per car it would have cost to make the Pinto safer.
An 1977 article by Mother Jones magazine, which exposed this callous reasoning, helped lead to a recall.
Today, we have a policy called the War on Drugs that looks and sounds a lot like other government programs. But as readers of this blog know, this policy is also different than other policies in critical ways.
The War on Drugs is not just any car on the road. It's the Ford Pinto of public policies.
(By the way, if you don't agree with that claim or don't understand why anybody would make it, a short, simple argument is here.)
The challenge for advocates, then, is in persuading the American public that something they see every day, something that's extremely "ordinary" in many ways, is actually extraordinary.
The challenge is in helping people to see a dramatic issue as a dramatic issue, one crying out for the solution of policy reform, and not simply as the humdrum backdrop of life.
How do we that?
Better Mousetraps
Look at the question from a different angle. What does a paradigm-shifting idea look like before the paradigm has shifted?
In 1968, a man named Douglas Engelbart invented the "mouse"-type controller for computers. Eventually, the invention of this device had a massive impact on computing, facilitating the rise of graphical user interfaces as a quicker, more intuitive alternative to "command line" interfaces. The graphical user interface, however, did not really come into being, even in the laboratory context, until the early 1970s, end Engelbart never received any royalties for his invention.
(Above: The first "mouse." Photo from Wikipedia. Below: the Macintosh 128K, the first widely adopted computer to use a mouse and graphical user interface.)
The mouse, then, was initially a solution in search of a problem. It was a device that allowed for a more sophisticated, gestural mode of interacting with a computer. But it was radically ahead of its time, created long before computers became a mainstream consumer item that could really benefit from this sort of interface.
It wasn't until the release of the Macintosh and Amiga in the mid 1980s that mainstream consumers could appreciate graphical user interfaces and develop a real need for the mouse. Apple worked hard at making its GUI something that made sense from a user's point of view. Once that happened, the "mouse" suddenly became a better mousetrap for ordinary consumers, and the "ordinary" way of computing using command lines became something that was left mostly to the tech-savvy.
Beyond Right and Left
A final example, from the policy world, suggests one way this kind of dramatic and surprising redefinition of "ordinary" behavior can happen legislatively. In 2003, seemingly out of nowhere, the federal government passed a law called the Prison Rape Elimination Act. This was a law passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president, but it was the first ever federal attempt to deal with an issue that was typically ignored, trivialized, or even mocked by the mainstream public. This week, six years later, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission finally released a report documenting the extensive problem with sexual abuse in prison.
Prison rape had been another "Ford Pinto"-type problem: a disaster that was taking place every day, but one that hadn't been dramatized in the public mind as something that actually impacted regular people and needed to be stopped.
(Above: Pat Nolan (at left), with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), one of the sponsors of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. Below: The writer and advocate T.J. Parsell, who was himself a victim of sexual assault in prison, testifies before Congress in 2005.)
Prisoners' rights advocates had been fighting for decades to get some traction around prison rape, without much success. Why, then, did 2003 see such a significant leap forward?
The answer had to do with an extraordinary alliance of progressives, rape survivors, and the Christian right.
Progressives did a lot of the organizing and generated much of the scholarly work documenting the nature of the problem. Two years before PREA was passed, for example, Human Rights Watch released a book-length study of the problem. The organization that I worked with, now known as Just Detention International, also did a lot of work creating fact sheets and talking points, and reaching out to encourage individual victims to share their stories. Those "survivor stories," as we called them, were truly wrenching and affecting. It was impossible to hear one and not realize what an awful thing it was to allow sexual abuse in custody to be ignored.
But the surprising part of the coalition were the people from the conservative side of the aisle.
These were people like former Watergate figure and Prison Fellowship Ministries leader Chuck Colson, who had done time in federal prison. They were people like Pat Nolan and Michael Horowitz. These individuals had pull with the President and with conservative legislators, turning what might otherwise have been a purely "left" issue into one that legislators on both sides of the aisle could embrace.
Instead of a debate about a the needs of prisoners, the fight for PREA became about our own morality as a society. Some people saw that moral question in terms of "human rights," while others viewed it through the prism of religious thought, but it was a concern that proved compelling in a way that escaped partisan categorization.
Lessons for Re-Thinking the Drug War
These examples suggest a couple basic notions that may be helpful in reconceptualizing the drug war.
First of all, people will embrace an idea if it serves their needs, not because it's "smart."
An idea has to respond to perceived needs in order to mean something. Smart and useful suggestions will go unadopted for decades if it has not been made clear to the public why they are smart and useful.
This is a challenging point for drug policy reform. People typically feel the need to be safe much more acutely than they feel the "need" to be fair or just or even rational. People are also somewhat unsympathetic to drug criminals because the criminals have chosen to break the law and bear some of the responsibility for their own fate. On the other hand, the example of the Prison Rape Elimination Act illustrates that moral arguments about the behavior of the majority can be quite compelling, and can overcome some of these sentiments. We've also seen examples of this phenomenon in the debate over torture, where advocates have successfully framed the issue as a question about our own values as a society.
Critically, however, people are rarely going to be persuaded of anything by an advocate's claim that an existing practice is "stupid," or a claim that the people behind that practice are malign or idiotic. People can be persuaded by the prospect of improvement, but it has to be an actual improvement for them, based on their values -- not based on the values of a the person making the argument.
Second, people adopt a new idea more readily when the idea is presented in a way that is sensitive to human psychology.
Something about that $11-per-car cost in the Pinto story particularly galled people, because it seemed like such an exceedingly low price to put on human life. Even if the Pinto was an "ordinary" car, this story about the car was astounding because it revealed that a simple change could have made an enormous difference in people's lives.
In an similar way, the mouse, in conjunction with the thoughtful design of the Macintosh user interface, resonated with users by showing that a small change could completely transform the computing experience. Once the mouse and the GUI became viable, regular people suddenly felt empowered to embrace a world of computing that had previously seemed forbidding.
Prison rape is more like drug policy in that it is not a "simple" problem, and there is not a simple solution. But the problem of sexual violence in prison was made more accessible by telling individual stories and by pointing to specific reforms that jails and prisons could implement to make things safer.
In the drug policy arena, we tend to throw around tons of statistics and acronyms, and we tend to assume that the wisdom of our arguments is obvious. For most ordinary people, this is unpersuasive at best, and may even be rather off-putting. If we're selling an idea, we do in fact need to be selling it, using every persuasive tool at our disposal, not simply shouting at people or hurling insults at the forces we consider to be our opposition.
Finally, the choir is not the relevant audience.
The last lesson is simply that the people with whom we already agree don't need any encouragement to continue to be our allies. We shouldn't necessarily spend a lot of time crafting arguments that will only appeal to these people, or be interested only in changes that will satisfy the most hard-core partisans.
The people we need to reach are the reasonable folks who currently disagree with us, or who agree in the abstract but feel that an end to prohibition is somehow practically impossible. These people are like the conservatives who were not previously engaged in the discussion over prison rape. They are like the potential customers for personal computers who figured that computing was just too technical before the GUI and the mouse became the norm.
For these folks, prohibition is still an "ordinary" issue that isn't worth a second thought. It's not an extraordinary problem crying out for change.
One of the groups that I think has a lot of potential to be won over is law enforcement. These are the men and women who put their lives on the line trying to uphold the rules of our society, and they are acutely aware of the pernicious effect of the black market in drugs in our communities.
If more members of law enforcement can be encouraged to take the next logical step, and acknowledge that black market economies are a function of prohibition, these men and women could become extremely powerful allies in the fight for change. I recognize that there are potentially economic and professional pressures that would cut against such participation, but I also believe that most of the people who uphold the law for a living do so because they think those laws are basically reasonable and fair. They do what they do, in other words, because they think it is right. The growing prominence of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a group that advocates for reform in spite of the potential for controversy, speaks to this essential ethical foundation.
We can help grow the constituency of folks who were previously our opponents. We can do this by explaining the extraordinary harms of prohibition for all members of society and encouraging a move toward the alternatives of regulated markets. But the argument has to be clear, simple and persuasive enough to cut through the fog of "ordinary" policy chatter, and that's a challenging task even for advocates dealing with the most compelling issues.
We can do it, but we have to remember who we are speaking to, and what it is we're trying to accomplish when we open our mouths.
