Last month The Future of Freedom Foundation held our second conference on ending the drug war at one of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) — Florida A&M University. The conference was hosted by the ACLU chapters at the law schools of FAMU, Barry University, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Our previous drug war conference at a HBCU was at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Before the evening conference at FAMU, we had an informal social featuring free pizza and soft drinks. The program was kicked off by a welcome from FAMU law school student Maryjane Cooper, an ACLU representative on campus, who did a fantastic job organizing and promoting the conference. A student then introduced me and I delivered some introductory remarks about freedom, the drug war, and the racism of the drug war.
We had three main speakers: Ken Williams, a former homicide detective with the Boston police department who now works for LEAP, the organization of former law-enforcement officials that is committed to bringing the drug war to an end. He was followed by Kassandra Frederique, who works for the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the premier organizations devoted to ending bringing an end to the drug war. The third speaker was Laurence Vance, longtime policy adviser for FFF and author of FFF’s great new ebook The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom. Laurence delivered the libertarian case for ending the drug war. We then had a panel discussion which revolved around questions from the audience.
The entire program was videotaped, and you can watch it here. We are having the videos of the talks separated out and will post them soon on our website.
