Last year, Andrew Epstein, a senior at Amherst College, conceived an original project for an art class. In order to make a statement about the futility of the war on drugs, he managed to ban the sale of coffee on the Amherst campus for 24 hours, and watched the pandemonium that ensued. His project made national news, including the front page of the New York Times.

Last night Epstein and Amherst College Students for a Sensible Drug Policy attempted to host a debate between two drug policy advocates – Deborah Small, public policy director for the pro-legalization Lindesmith Center, and Robert Housman, the former assistant director of the anti-legalization organization Strategic Planning – in order to foster discussion of drug policy issues on the Amherst campus.

Housman, however, was unable to attend, due to Congressional hearings on the September 11 attacks. In his absence, Small delivered a lecture last night in Converse Hall on the arguments for legalization, and led the audience in an open discussion.

Rather than argue that legalization could lead to greater public safety, a common argument of decriminalization advocates, Small focused on the argument that drug laws, in theory, violate human rights.

“All of the drugs you buy or take are things your body makes naturally,” Small told the assembled audience. “Our body makes opiates, and stimulants, and things that make you sleep. Nothing you put into your body is foreign. Using drugs is a way of increasing the body’s own ability to alter its consciousness.”

“As long as human beings have been on this planet,” she continued, “we have looked for ways to alter consciousness. There is no society that didn’t have some ritual around the altering of consciousness. Some of it was attached to religious practice, some was erotic, and some was recreational. It’s nothing new.”

Small pointed out that medical author Dr. Andrew Weil has noted that young children often attempt to alter their consciousness.

“Children engage in behavior with similar effects to drugs,” she said. “Holding their breath, running around in circles, holding their head below the water in the bathtub. For the most part it’s a pleasant thing.”

A great deal of Small’s lecture dealt with what she perceives as hypocrisy on the part of the government in accepting some drugs but denouncing others.

“Some people would say that it’s perfectly reasonable for a society to prefer coffee over cocaine,” she said. “I would say, how? And why? And does that make any sense?”

She pointed out that Ritalin, a drug regularly given legally to schoolchildren, has many similar properties to cocaine.

At one point, she asked if anyone in the audience felt that marijuana, as a drug, was more harmful than caffeine or cigarettes.

“I don’t know about all y’all,” said Small, “but I tried marijuana, and I liked it. It didn’t make me feel a whole lot different than drinking a couple of glasses of wine. But you can go to jail for that!

“I don’t know how many people in this room smoke cigarettes,” she continued. “When you talk about drugs with such a high level of addictiveness, I can not think of many others…but we as a society have built in regular fixing times for people – cigarette breaks, coffee breaks.”

A crucial point of Small’s argument was that drugs, even if dangerous, should be legal for those who wish to do them simply because it is not the business of the state to intrude in such matters.

“The goal of the war on drugs is to control people’s personal behavior,” she said repeatedly.

While Housman was not in attendance to present the anti-legalization argument, many audience members took Smalls to task on her views. Particularly controversial was her assertion that pregnant women should not be punished for using drugs such as cocaine.

One audience member, who described her experiences babysitting for a child with fetal alcohol syndrome, accused Small of being more concerned with the rights of an expecting mother to use drugs than the right of a child to be “born healthy”.

“If you’re a pregnant woman who has a problem with obesity or an eating disorder, you can harm your child just as much [as if you used drugs],” she responded. “You can harm your child by taking in too much salt. Are we going to pass laws that mandate that people not do that?”

Erica Pollack, a senior double major in Art and Neuroscience, also questioned Small’s rationale.

“If a child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, and its mother turns to the government for aid and health care, shouldn’t the government be able to make some restrictions on bringing that sort of child into the world?” she asked.

Other attendees expressed a sense that Small was ignoring the negative aspects of drug usage.

“My concern is that, even though I can understand how we might be better off without drug laws, it’s still not a [good situation],” said Rachel Speer, a freshman. “I don’t see how your policy addresses that clearly. There are drug problems whether we have drug laws or not.”

In response to a question about the connections of race and the war on drugs, Small decried current drug policies as racist. She pointed out that a far higher percentage of people of color are incarcerated for using and selling drugs than whites.

“Go to any state in this country,” she said. “Got to prisons, and see who’s there. There’s no state that doesn’t have more black, brown and poor people in prison [for drugs] than anybody else.”

She attacked the mentality that white women need to be protected from drug-using men of color. She said that she was especially disturbed by a scene from the film Traffic [a movie she said she otherwise admired], which showed a black drug dealer taking advantage of young white woman.

“The one thing they [should not have done] was show a black man administering drugs to a white woman so that he could have his way with her sexually,” she said. “Other than Don Cheadle, the only black guy you saw was the naked drug dealer standing over the naked white girl.” In concluding her lecture, Small urged that Americans not turn away from what she sees as a violation of civil liberties.

“You might say, ‘I’m not the police officer who arrested these people. I’m not the judge who sentenced these people. Why am I accountable?’ But you are accountable – for what a society does in your name.”