Ending the War on Drugs means ending our over-reliance on the criminal justice system to address what is primarily a public health problem. It means replacing arrest, prosecution, and incarceration with prevention, education, and treatment as your primary strategies for reducing substance abuse and improving the health and safety of our communities. And it means ending the civil liberties, civil rights, and racial justice abuses that have flowed with terrible inevitability from our declaration of war not truly on inanimate substances, but rather on people - disproportionately people of color, young people, and poor people.

But there is reason for hope that the War on Drugs is coming to an end. And Washington is a leader in making it happen.

To support this claim, I offer Exhibit A.

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Last week the Seattle P-I publicized the fact that Seattle's University District needle exchange, privately funded and operated by the People's Harm Reduction Alliance, had added clean crack pipes to its arsenal of disease-prevention weapons.  KING 5 News picked up the story, as did KIRO Radio.

Many of the reader comments posted to the stories reflect the expected divide in public opinion about needle exchange programs.  On the one hand are those who understand that certain strategies focused on reducing the societal and personal harms of drug abuse not only "meet addicts where they are" and provide a compassionate link to treatment and recovery, they also save tax dollars that would otherwise be spent on emergency rooms, hospitalization, and uninsured treatment of Hepatitis C, HIV, and AIDS.  On the other are those who think harm reduction strategies simply enable addiction, and addicts would be better served by a dose of "tough love" - or simply left to die from overdose or the diseases they contract.

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Last week the California affiliates of the ACLU (Northern, Southern, and San Diego) endorsed Proposition 19, a cannabis reform initiative that will be on the ballot in November. Kudos to our ACLU peers in California. Prop 19 represents an important step forward in the development of rational marijuana policy.

The use and abuse of prescription opiates (powerful pain killers, such as Vicodin® and OxyContin®) has been steadily increasing in recent years. 1 in 5 adolescents and 1 in 10 adults are prescribed an opiate medication each year. Many of these drugs will be used illicitly by those who do not have a prescription. In 2008, prescription opiate abuse accounted for 20% of all publicly funded treatment admissions, ahead of marijuana and cocaine. A variety of solutions have been offered for how to deal with the prescription opiate problem. Better education for patients and healthcare professionals, tighter regulations for how and when they can be used, and disposal programs for unused medications. Notably absent from these solutions is one we commonly rely on in the United States; total prohibition via criminal enforcement. Thank goodness.