Hearing before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, One Hundred Ninth Congress, First Session, February 16, 2005.

Statement of Rev. Edwin Sanders:

I appreciate the opportunity to be able to testify today. Let me do one thing before I begin, and that is to make a more clear and accurate response of who I am. I’m Reverend Edwin Sanders II. I’m the senior servant at Metropolitan Interdenominational Church. To have my reference to being a member of the President’s council is really a misnomer and should not be there. I don’t represent the President’s council. It is a very vast and complex group of people, 30-some of us, who represent many different diverse perspectives with regard to issues. And I do not speak for the council nor could any of us individually.

I am, though, the director of an organization of an organization of an organization called Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy. And that would be a more accurate way to identify my relationship to this. And I thank you. I am especially concerned about the conversation, and it is not important for me to say what I had in my notes. It is clear that much of what I would have said has already been said. But let me say two or three things that I think are very important.

One is, I want to say at least two things about the way we have categorized and framed the debate. I hope we do not spend a lot of time dealing with demonization of people who happen to have alternative positions, and I will tell you why I’m especially sensitive to that. I spend a lot of my time dealing with demonization because I’m a member of the Republican Party and I am a black man. And it is amazing the way which people come to me and talk to me about the Republican Party being a hiding place for white supremacists and talking about the ways in which it ends up being anti-the people that I am most directly connected to. I think that is a misrepresentation. That is the kind of demonization that hurts what I stand for and represent.

The same thing is true in terms of the Drug Policy Alliance. I don’t think I identify with everything that ends up being a part of all the individuals that are part of that body, but I know what it’s like to be in a situation when someone holds up a book like the one that was held up a while ago, which I hope-and I don’t know the content of it completely myself-which I hope is a piece that deals with accurate information sharing with regard to what marijuana is. I hope that’s what it is.

But it occurs to me what happens around sex education. I could see a sex education book that has the title to it, it is a God-given gift and has to be understood in that way. Well, I think no one is talking about promoting early debut, premature debut to sex. And I’m sure that there is no one that I’m aware of on the Drug Policy Alliance who is advocating drug and marijuana use with children. I would be appalled by that. I would have spoken out aggressively against it.

And then the whole question of criminalization, decriminalization and legalization, I must admit, it is semantics in terms of how we use the language. I am definitely not an advocate of legalization. Let me tell you the reason why, and it sounds like what Representative Norton said in terms of the whole issue of how criminalization plays into it. I am an African-American, and I do serve a community that ends up being disproportionately impacted by this horror. And one of the things I have come to realize is that the criminalization of drugs has translated into an even expanded horror. You look at the fact we are 10 percent of the population, and we end up representing 37 percent of the persons who are arrested for drugs. And let me note the fact that, in terms of drug use, most analysis shows it is really white Americans that use somewhere between 70-plus percent of all the drugs in this country, but we end up representing 37 percent of those who are arrested. We end up representing 46 percent of those who are prosecuted. We end up representing 59 percent of those who are convicted and 64 percent of those who go to prison.

Criminalization is a horror in our community because of some of the historical horrors that we still struggle with in this country. I am not advocating for legalization, but I’m advocating for a system that creates the avenue to treatment for all on an equal basis, and that does not happen. So I want that to be understood.

Let me tell you about Metropolitan Church to some degree and, more than the church, just my experience. It was around 1990 that I had my first experience dealing with this whole issue of harm reduction. It was a situation where I was in a public housing project on a Saturday afternoon, part of a group called Minority AIDS Outreach, doing a demonstration of how to clean a needle with bleach, which was the way things were done in those days. Why was I doing that? A cameraman came up and threw a camera in my face and said, Reverend, how could you, a man of God-and I am from Nashville, TN. I don’t just live in the Bible Belt; I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt. And I fully understand and appreciate what it means to be an evangelical fundamentalist Christian. And those are people I relate to everyday in terms of the work that I do.

The guy who threw a camera in my face said, how can a man of God be here doing this and showing people how to clean their needles? And I guess my response was the same I have to this day. My business has something to offer to people who are alive. In the early 1990’s, there were no triple combination therapies. There were no anti-viral drugs. People were dying. It was a short one at that point. And I was concerned with the fact that the disease was shifting; people were still thinking about the disease as being primarily gay white men. I was seeing everyday that, in our community, the disease was starting to spread. And it had to do with a lot of injection drug use. And I started believing in this whole idea of clean syringes, just on the basis of how I keep alive-because I’m trying to offer them salvation and a relationship to a God who is redemptive, loving. That’s the only reason why I’m involved in it. And I appreciate the science that supports it. But that is the reason why, because I need live people to offer what I have in the work that I do.

I see the time is up, and I will try to wind this up and say it is important to me for you to understand that every one of our objectives is built around what we call a bridge to treatment. We don’t do anything, whether methadone maintenance or anything else, that is not ultimately working with people to bring them to treatment. When Dr. Newman talked about the 80 percent of people who are injection drug users that don’t have access to treatment, what that is, is a result of people who really are under the radar screen.

I tell people all the time, we reach out doing work with people who don’t have zip codes, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, correct addresses and, most often, lie about what their name is because they are under the radar screen. They are, in many instances, being out of the loop in terms of folks in society in a way that either allows them to access the avenues to treatment that we have available. We use a bridge as treatment. We establish credibility and establish rapport, and we have a tremendous track record in terms of being able to get people into treatment and off of drugs. I would be glad to go further with questions, but I know I probably used up my time. Thank you.

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