More than 400 doctors, public health officials, and drug-law reformers gather in Los Angeles today to try and inject more empirical data into the reefer madness of California’s drug policy at the first New Directions California conference. The overflowing one-day event starting this morning is the third sponsored by the Drug Policy Alliance, after confabs in New York and Washington, DC, and it arrives amid rapid changes in the state, DPA spokesperson Margaret Dooley-Sammuli says.
“The premise is the war on drugs has failed and we need a health approach, so how are we going to get that?” she says. “These voices on the health side have been sidelined.”