Speaker Biographies
David Boyum is an independent consultant in New York City. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in health policy research at Yale University and a research fellow in the Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard. He is coauthor (with Derrick Niederman) of What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World (Broadway Books, 2003).
Rand Beers is currently the president of the Coalition for American Leadership and Security, a national security communications organization, and an adjunct lecturer on terrorism at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He most recently worked as the national security advisor for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. He began his career as a Marine officer and rifle company commander in Vietnam (1964–1968). Beers entered the Foreign Service in 1971 and transferred to the Civil Service in 1983. During most of his career, he served as deputy assistant secretary for regional affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, focusing on the Middle East and Persian Gulf. He was assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs from 1998–2002 andheld four positions on the National Safety Council (NSC) staff at the White House during four administrations. His positions included director for counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, director for peacekeeping, and senior director for intelligence programs (1988–98). His final government position was as special assistant to the president and senior director for combating terrorism on the NSC staff from 2002–2003. He resigned in March 2003 and retired in April before joining the Kerry campaign in May 2003.
Edwin Meese III holds the Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based public policy research and education institution. A former U.S. attorney general, Meese was among President Ronald Reagan’s most important advisors. As chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Drug Policy Board, and as a member of the National Security Council, he played a key role in the development and execution of domestic and foreign policy. During the 1970s, Mr. Meese was director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management and a professor of law at the University of San Diego. He earlier served as chief of staff for then-Governor Reagan and was a local prosecutor in California. Mr. Meese is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London.
Peter Reuter is a professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland, and a senior economist in the Drug Policy Center at RAND. He is the author of Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (MIT Press, 1983), and coauthor (with Robert MacCoun) of Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and (with Edwin Truman) Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering (Institute for International Economics, 2004). From 1999 to 2004, he was editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. His research focuses on international drug policy issues.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a syndicated columnist. He is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin) and For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health (Free Press). Sullum’s weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, is carried by newspapers across the U.S., including the New York Post and the Washington Times. Sullum, who was also the articles editor of National Review and a newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, is a recipient of the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties and the Drug Policy Alliance’s Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism.
James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families (Harper Collins, 2002), Moral Judgment (Basic Books, 1997), and The Moral Sense (Free Press, 1997). In addition, he has edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and the prevention of delinquency among children. Dr. Wilson has served on a number of national commissions concerned with public policy. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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