We are sad to report that the co-founder and President of Common Sense for Drug Policy, Kevin B. Zeese, passed away on September Fifth, 2020. He is sorely missed.
Kevin was one of the nation's foremost authorities on drug policy issues. He worked on a wide array of drug related issues since he graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1980.
We are sad to report that the co-founder and President of Common Sense for Drug Policy, Kevin B. Zeese, passed away on September Fifth, 2020. He is sorely missed.
Kevin was one of the nation's foremost authorities on drug policy issues. He worked on a wide array of drug related issues since he graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1980.
Kevin wrote for newspapers and journals on a range of drug issues, including an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the Colombian drug war. He also appeared on every major television network as a commentator. He served as a consultant to Walter Cronkite for the Discovery Channel special: The Drug Dilemma: War or Peace? He spoke at nationally recognized legal seminars and testified before Congress on drug related issues.
A Feb. 2005 interview with Kevin on the syndicated radio program Cultural Baggage is available. In April 2002, Kevin debated DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson at a conference hosted by Rice University's James Baker Institute. Segments of the forum, "Moving Beyond the 'War on Drugs'," including the Zeese-Hutchinson debate, are available as streaming video. A listing of articles in which Kevin appears is available by clicking here.
He was the author of Drug Testing Legal Manual, Drug Testing Legal Manual and Practice Aids and co-author of Drug Law: Strategies and Tactics, all published by Clark Boardman Callaghan. Kevin served as editor of Drug Law Report for Clark Boardman Callaghan from 1983 to 1998. In addition, he was the author of Drug Prohibition and the Conscience of Nations. Mr. Zeese was the editor of Friedman and Szasz On Liberty and Drugs and edited numerous books on drug policy and manuals on criminal defense.
Kevin Zeese litigated a variety of drug policy-related issues. Among these are the medical use of marijuana, the use of the military and national guard in domestic drug enforcement, the spraying of herbicides in the United States and abroad on marijuana, drug testing of government workers and the right to privacy as it relates to marijuana in the home. He had been a legal advisor to needle exchange workers prosecuted for their anti-AIDS efforts, buyer's clubs who distribute marijuana to the seriously ill, and medical marijuana patients prosecuted for the medical use of marijuana.
Kevin facilitated the Alliance of Reform Organizations, a network of all the major reform organizations in the United States. He served on the Executive Committee of the Harm Reduction Coalition. He served on the Board of Directors of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas and was a Board member emeritus of the DrugSense.
He was a co-founder of the Drug Policy Foundation (now renamed the Drug Policy Alliance), where he served as Vice President and Counsel, and is a former Executive Director and Chief Counsel of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
Zeese served on Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's Mayor's Working Group on Drug Policy Reform and served on San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan's Harm Reduction Council. Both were efforts to implement a model urban drug policy. Zeese was also involved with advocacy related to the fatal shooting of Esequiel Hernandez, the legal rights of patients, doctors and their caregivers in California, and the UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs (the UNGASS).
In 2000, Kevin Zeese was the recipient of the Richard J. Dennis DrugPeace Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Drug Policy Reform from the Drug Policy Foundation at its 13th Annual International Conference on Drug Policy Reform.
"In February 2023, Mexico's federal government closed the country's only methadone manufacturing plant, Psicofarma, following concerns about quality control.5 In Mexican-U.S. border cities, such as Ciudad Juarez, Mexicali, and Tijuana, where the prevalence of OUD is among the highest in the country, methadone clinics are turning new clients away as they run out of medication, limiting doses, providing doses only on alternate days, or not dosing altogether.
"The number of unintentional poisoning deaths increased from 12,186 in 1999 to 20,950 in 2004. The annual age-adjusted rate increased 62.5%, from 4.4 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 7.1 in 2004. The increase among females, from 2.3 to 4.7 per 100,000 population (103.0%), was twice the increase among males, from 6.5 to 9.5 per 100,000 population (47.1%) (Table 1). Among males, rates among whites, American Indians/Alaska Natives, and Asians/Pacific Islanders all increased approximately 50%.
"In 2021, the world set ambitious law reform targets to remove criminal laws that are undermining the HIV response and leaving key populations behind. Recognising decriminalization as a critical element in the response, countries made a commitment that by 2025 less than 10% of countries would have punitive legal and policy environments that affect the HIV response. The Global AIDS Strategy set as a target that less than 10% of countries would criminalise sex work, possession of small amounts of drugs, same-sex sexual activity, and HIV exposure, non-disclosure and transmission."
"Globally, some recent changes in cannabis policies have experimented with different ways of regulating the sale and use of cannabis. Evolving cannabis policies raise numerous potential concerns about negative side-effects.
"Some participants noted that in their country there was a move towards greater recognition of the need for public health-oriented approaches to tackle drug problems accompanied by a shift in the goals of drug policies towards reducing drug-related harms. However, the relatively limited set of indicators that has historically been used to evaluate drug policy may have limited utility for informing on outcomes relevant to this perspective.
"Long-term retention on OAT in trials and observational studies is suboptimal, which limits the effect of OAT with regard to reducing drug-related deaths.131 There was consistent evidence that retention was slightly better on methadone than buprenorphine across RCTs and observational studies at timepoints beyond 1 month, although few RCTs examined long-term retention.
"This study also demonstrates that available technologies fail to fully meet the needs of drug checking programs. As legal avenues for drug checking services expand, additional resources at the local, state, and federal levels should be directed towards the improvement of portable spectrometry devices and other technologies that might be useful for drug checking.
"Perhaps our most significant finding is that all of this SSP’s success in implementing drug checking was achieved in spite of, rather than thanks to, the legal and policy environment in which it operates. The COVID-19 pandemic made drug checking practically impossible, but only after systematic police violence against participants and threats against staff had already curtailed provision of this harm reduction service. Indeed, it is likely that drug checking could have persisted during the pandemic absent the very real risk of police interference.
