About
The Intitute for Policy Studies Drug Policy Project advocates for reform by reaching out to non-traditional allies and employing innovative tactics to promote a sustainable, constitutional, and humane drug control policy. The project's mission is to help foster a paradigm shift by replacing the punitive and coercive "social control" model of drug policy with a public health and community economic development model. By encouraging an interdisciplinary discussion of the myriad factors contributing to our social ills, we try to advance policies that address the root causes of the drug problem (such as decaying school systems, lack of inner city and rural jobs, shortage of affordable housing, lack of health care, and social alienation) rather than scapegoating the symptoms (addicts, street corner dealers, overseas peasant drug growers, etc.).
The Drug Policy Project seeks to promote holistic alternatives that address race and poverty as an integral element of drug policy. Internationally, the project examines the social impact of exporting the US drug war overseas. From military "counternarcotics" aid for repressive regimes, to the environmental devastation caused by eradication and fumigation policies, the project highlights the consequences of such programs on the poor and disenfranchised. Domestically, the project works to reform national drug policies in Washington, but it also has local projects in Los Angeles and Baltimore.
In Los Angeles, the project sponsored a "Citizens' Fact-Finding Commission on US Drug Policy" that held public hearings in May 1999. The Commissioners examined the social costs of current drug policy, explored government corruption and complicity around the drug war, and promoted sustainable alternatives. In Baltimore, the project works with grassroots activists and community-based organizations to explore the intersection of race and poverty in the so-called "Drug War" - an unwinnable, unjust, and irrational quagmire taking its greatest toll on the most disenfranchised segments of our citizenry.
Under the current policies of prohibition, whenever extreme poverty is placed next to the (perceived) riches of the drug trade, the predictable outcome is an unconscionable flow of less-privileged citizens into the criminal "justice" system. These lives are not squandered by necessity, but by political choice and accompanying neglect. We aim to disrupt both.
Sanho Tree, Director, Drug Policy Project
Sanho Tree is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and Director of its Drug Policy Project. A former military and diplomatic historian, his current work focuses on policies concerning international drug control, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism. In recent years the project has focused on the attendant "collateral damage" caused by the US exporting its failed drug war to Colombia, Bolivia and Afghanistan. Establishing humane and sustainable alternatives to the drug war continues to be a focus of the Project as one of the major contemporary social justice issues at home and abroad.
He has been featured in numerous documentaries (Coca Mama, Plan Colombia: Cashing in on a Drug War Failure, Held Hostage in Colombia, the ABC/John Stossel documentary on the drug war called War on Drugs, War on Ourselves) and has also appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. He previously collaborated with Dr. Gar Alperovitz on The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (Knopf, 1995). He was also former associate editor of CovertAction Quarterly, an award-winning magazine of investigative journalism, and worked at the International Human Rights Law Group in the late 1980s. Currently, he serves on the boards of Witness for Peace and the Andean Information Network.
Drug Policy Project is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. For more than four decades, the Institute for Policy Studies has transformed ideas into action for peace, justice, and the environment. IPS is the nation’s oldest progressive multi-issue think tank. For more information please visit www.ips-dc.org.