Janine Jackson: The September 20th Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed from Jim Carroll, identified as “deputy director of national drug control policy and President Trump’s nominee for drug czar.” Carroll evinced concern for the “lives lost” to drug overdoses and empathy for the “loved ones devastated by their loss,” as well as “those in recovery”—all by way of explaining why he was
in Columbus to meet with law enforcement officers from Ohio and across the Midwest about working together to stop heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamines and other drugs from entering our communities and ruining people’s lives.
That immediate recourse to a policing response is writ large in Trump’s “call to action” on what his administration calls the “World Drug Problem,” but it doesn’t reflect the direction of much of the actual world. So how much impact can that disconnect have?
Hannah Hetzer is senior international policy manager at Drug Policy Alliance; she joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Hannah Hetzer.
Hannah Hetzer: Thank you for having me.
As you have reported, the nature of the UN event at which this document, the Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem [was presented], the nature of the event is, itself, telling. The UN has its maybe Byzantine ways, but this was still special. What was the story behind this less-than-18-minute meeting?
I think, ultimately, what this was was just an…