Sanho Tree is a Fellow and Director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. The project works to end the domestic and international “War on Drugs” and replace it with policies that promote public health and safety as well as economic alternatives to the prohibition drug economy. The intersection of race and poverty in the drug war is at the heart of the project’s work. In recent years the project has focused on the attendant “collateral damage” caused by the US exporting its drug war to Colombia and Afghanistan. Establishing humane and sustainable alternatives to the drug war fits into the IPS mandate as one of the major contemporary social justice issues at home and abroad. He was featured in the ABC/John Stossel documentary on the drug war and has also appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Currently, he serves on the boards of Witness for Peace and the Andean Information Network.
Mr. Tree is also a former military and diplomatic historian and he has collaborated in the past with Dr. Gar Alperovitz on The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (Knopf, 1995). From 1996-97, he assisted entertainer Harry Belafonte and continues to work as an occasional consultant for him on international issues. He was also associate editor of CovertAction Quarterly, an award-winning magazine of investigative journalism. In the late 1980s he worked at the International Human Rights Law Group.
Recent Work
Op-Ed
What Darwin Could Tell Us About the "War on Drugs"
December 27 - With every passing year the drug problem seems to get worse. The U.S. government responds by pumping billions more dollars into the war on drugs. Federal spending for this "war without end" is more than twenty times what it was in 1980 and still the drug traffickers appear to be winning. Despite more than six billion dollars spent on "Plan Colombia" alone, cocaine production has actually increased in that country. Now the Bush Administration is asking for $1.4 billion more to aid the Mexican government's drug crackdown through the "Merida Initiative." By Sanho Tree, published in AlterNet, Common Dreams, Evening Telegram (Herkimer, NY), Evening Times (Little Falls, NY), News-Times (Hartford City, IN), The Reporter (Palos Heights, IL).
Column
Postcard from ... Colombia
October 23 - As the U.S. "War on Drugs" rages on in Colombia, more and more of its farms have been turned into swaths of scorched earth. Aerial fumigation -- intended to cut off the production of coca (the plant from which cocaine is derived) at the source by wiping out farms -- has unfortunately destroyed much more than a simple illicit plant. Colombia, the second most bio-diverse country in the world, has now had more than two million acres of its land blighted by U.S.-funded spray planes. By Sanho Tree, published in Foreign Policy In Focus.
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