Ethan Nadelmann - Described by Rolling Stone as "the point man" for drug policy reform efforts, Ethan Nadelmann is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform both in the United States and abroad. He is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States advocating for drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights.
He has written articles for a wide range of journals, including Science, Foreign Affairs, American Heritage, and National Review, and is the author of Cops Across Borders, the first scholarly study of the internationalization of U.S. criminal law enforcement.
He received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. from Harvard, and a Master's degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and then taught politics and public affairs at Princeton University.
The U.S. has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's incarcerations; imprisoned 50,000 for drug crimes in 1980, a number which has ballooned to nearly 500,000 today; and locks up more people for violating drug laws than the entirety of Europe incarcerates for all crimes. Reformer Nadelmann postulates the true obstacles to re-envisioning the drug war lies within us--as fear, prejudice, and ignorance.
This plenary connects the dots between rhetoric and reality and reminds us that healthy public discourse is impossible without an informed citizenry.
Rational activists involved in this critical issue, so deserving an epiphanous groundswell demanding immediate evisceration of the status quo, must track down, dart, tranqualize, and rendition this stunningly wretched representative of their cause. Immediately. Obtain a transcript (assuming any transcriptionist or technological proxy is actually capable of tolerating this cosmically shrill hour of desparate, 120 decible attempted auto-erotic self-asphyxiation) of his comments, find a balanced mammal to present said comments to the public, and call it a good day's work. I believe in this issue, and I believe it deserves a passionate, brilliant, fearless, unreserved and relentless spokesperson. This speaker conveys little of any of these virtues, instead displaying a 9-month old's grasp of effective pursuasion via tantrum, breathlessness, an unshakable conviction that around him revolves the universe, and above all, preposterous reliance on unchecked, ear-splitting, issue-killing volume.