Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics
612 Clayton Street
San Francisco, CA 94117

Alan Leshner, Director
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Parklawn Building
5600 Fishers Lane
Rockville, MD 20857

Dear Dr. Leshner,

At our breakfast meeting on Tuesday you quoted a sign in your office: "The definition of insanity is the repetition of unsuccessful behavior." Immediately I (and several others present) thought of the supreme example of unsuccessful behavior: the Nation's prohibition policies. We would love to know whether those policies are sometimes in your mind, too, when you look at your sign.

It would be a worthy project for NIDA to work through a consensus definition of "unsuccessful", so that we can objectively measure the success of our magnificent, costly drugs prohibition experiment. To find a clear negative outcome would enable the Nation, at last, seriously to consider the most obvious alternative behavior, recently summarized by The Economist in four words: "Legalize, regulate, tax, discourage." Of course, we might even then choose to persist in the unrewarded behavior, in which case we would be well served by historians to chronicle our collective "insanity".

Sincerely,

John Newmeyer, Ph.D.
Epidemiologist