Hello and thank you for reading Drug Law Blog. My name is Alex Coolman, and I'm a San Francisco-based attorney working primarily on criminal appeals. While I was in law school, I worked with the Drug Policy Alliance Office of Legal Affairs and as a law clerk with the hard-charging criminal defense attorneys of San Francisco's Pier 5 Law Offices. I also volunteered with the First District Appellate Project, which handles appeals for indigent clients who have been convicted at trial in the First District of California. I also served as an editorial consultant on the 2006 report Understanding California Corrections, published by the California Policy Research Center. The opinions expressed on this blog are not intended to represent the views of any of those organizations.
Before going to law school, I worked as a reporter and as a communications/policy associate for the nonprofit human rights organization Stop Prisoner Rape. My interest in drug law stems from doing work related to criminal justice and learning about the overwhelmingly negative consequences that the war on drugs has had on American society.
Professional inquiries can be made both via email and by cell: (415) 632-6612 (Pacific time zone). Snail mail: 2440 16th St., #266, San Francisco, CA 94103-4211. I do not provide legal advice to non-clients.
Drug Law Blog is an exploration of the way America's criminal law around drugs contributes to its serious problem with overincarceration. It's also a discussion of the alternatives to the use of criminal law to control drugs and an argument that civil regulatory mechanisms may offer solutions to some of the most troubling consequences of America's war on drugs.
This is not a "pro-drug" blog. I have lost friends and family to addiction, and my heart sincerely goes out to people who are struggling with that type of situation. My concern, though, is with a side of the war on drugs that many middle class people never see: the devastation that this war has brought to communities of color and to the poor, both by turning poor neighborhoods into areas where constitutional rights basically don't apply any more and by creating powerful economic incentives for people to participate in the illicit drug trade. Like many other people from all political stripes who have been writing about this subject for years, I worry about the way the war on drugs is eroding the civil liberties of all Americans and is causing this country to rely more heavily on prisons as a tool of social control than any other nation in the world. I also worry that the war on drugs ultimately is not very effective at accomplishing the goals of protecting individuals from unsafe drug use, and may in fact facilitate precisely such unsafe experiences by putting them in the unregulated realm of "criminality." This blog is a way of discussing and encouraging policy change to address these problems.
The blogroll on the left side of the main page of this blog has links to several other blogs that write great material on this subject. There is also a vast array of literature in this area. A few of the books that are most relevant to the writing on this blog are:
Nils Christie, Crime Control As Industry
Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
Judge James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.
Doris Marie Provine, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs
Nothing in this blog is intended to be legal advice.
