Every nation, every society struggles with what to do with psychoactive drugs, with the problem of addiction. In the United States and certainly in the city of Seattle, we have found that many of our policies were causing more harm than the actual drugs that we were trying to police.

— Seattle Police Department’s Jim Pugel to the Polish parliament

Poland has recently played host to several Seattle-connected drug-law reformers (including one former interim police chief) as at least some officials there seek to reform that country’s “War on Drugs”-style laws.

Among the most recent was I-502 architect and ACLU attorney Alison Holcomb, who was in Warsaw in November “for a meeting convened by former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (1995-2005) to discuss problems associated with Poland’s punitive approach to substance use and abuse, and possible approaches to advancing reform.”

Another was Seattle’s former-interim-but-still-candidate-for-police-chief Jim Pugel. He was there to talk broadly about Seattle PD’s LEAD, or Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program:

This is part of the news release by the Polish Drug Policy Network announcing Pugel’s trip to Poland last week:

“Poland can learn a lot from Seattle,” said Agnieszka Sieniawska, chairwoman of the Polish Drug Policy Network. “Many of us recognize that harsh punishments for minor, non-violent offenses only make a bad situation worse. Seattle, under Chief Pugel, charted a sensible new path that is worth emulating.” The lessons of Seattle are particularly relevant to Poland. In 2000, the country introduced one of the most punitive drug laws in Europe criminalizing possession of any amount of drugs and making it punishable by up to three years imprisonment. The law resulted in 100,000 Poles suffering criminal penalties for possession of illicit drugs in the following decade. Most of these people were young men, between the ages of 17 and 30. The law has since been amended to include some prosecutorial discretion, however, in many parts of the country drug offenders are still subject to arrest and severe punishments. There are around 30,000 people arrested every year for minor drug offenses, roughly one every three hours.

Or as Holcomb wrote to us this evening:

What I heard from Polish officials and policy advocates was clear recognition that the increased threat of punishment wasn’t producing the intended improvements in public health, and was causing significant collateral damage and cost. But I also heard skepticism from some quarters about whether decriminalizing drug use would make matters better, or worse instead. I think Assistant Chief Pugel’s visit was timely and important because he has first-hand experience with how police can collaborate with service providers to improve public safety and order without cycling drug users through the criminal justice system. It’s unusual for police and providers to work together on the streets – drug users don’t trust the police, and providers can’t reach people if they’re not trusted. Pugel and his LEAD team have accomplished something pretty amazing in Belltown.

What Pugel told Poland

Here’s the gist of Pugel’s comments (nothing surprising, but still a strong reminder of what went wrong with America’s War on Drugs) made to members of the Polish parliament … as transcribed from a video provided by a PR person with the Open Society’s Global Drug Policy Program:

Thank you deputy. I am honored to be here. I am humbled to be able to share our experiences … Every nation, every society struggles with what to do with psychoactive drugs, with the problem of addiction. In the United States and certainly in the city of Seattle, we have found that many of our policies were causing more harm than the actual drugs that we were trying to police. … We in the United States declared a war on drugs 40 years ago. And for the last 30 years as a police officer, I have arrested — and many of my fellow men and women police officers — have also arrested people over and over again. Putting them in jail. Once they get out of jail, they return to the drug scene without ever being cured and continuing to be stigmatized with a criminal record. We worked closely with former adversarial groups, with the American Civil Liberties Union and with the Defender Association. We all agreed that our policies were not working. We all agreed that the people we were most often putting in jail were nonviolent, low-level subsistence level of drug dealers. This is a consensus based group … our goal is to divert the person at the point of arrest into treatment, physical and mental health and into housing and job counseling. In order to qualify for diversion into this harm-reduction initiative, a person cannot have more than three grams of any drug. It does not matter what type of drug it is. They cannot be predatory, they cannot be a for-profit drug dealer and they have to be amenable to diversion into the program. If the drug dealer, the drug user, or the sex worker meets the qualifications, they are offered to go to jail or they are offered to go to treatment. The police officer then brings the person to the police station, begins filling out her paperwork and calls for a case manager from a treatment service provider that we contracted with.

For a truly mind-bending exercise (provided you are not fluent in Polish), check out this video of Pugel talking with some 50 Polish cops about taking the harm-reduction path in law enforcement:



Seattlepi.com news intern KJ Hiramoto contributed to this story.