---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 10:31:05 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: The New Politics of Pot
The New Politics of Pot
<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,384744,00.html>
Can it go legit? How the people who brought you medical
marijuana have set their sights on lifting the ban for everyone
By JOEL STEIN
Sunday, Oct. 27, 2002
The drug czar is ready for pro wrestling. He already has the name, and now
he's got the prefight talk down cold. In every speech he makes in Nevada,
where Bush appointee John Walters
has traveled to fight an initiative that would legalize marijuana, he calls
out his
three sworn enemies as if he were Tupac Shakur. The czar has a problem with
billionaire philanthropists George Soros, Peter Lewis and John Sperling, who
have bankrolled the pro-pot movement, and he wants everyone to know he's
ready for battle. At an Elks lodge meeting in Las Vegas, he ticks off their
names and says, "These people use ignorance and their overwhelming amount
of money to influence the electorate. You don't hide behind money and refuse
to talk and hire underlings and not stand up and speak for yourself," he
says.
By the end of a similar speech at a drug-treatment center in Reno, he says,
"Let's stop hiding. I'm here. Where are you?" The czar is bringing it on.
Before the new czar was appointed in December, it was the government's
preference not to address the legalizers. But the pro-pot movement has gained
so much ground they can't be ignored as a fringe element. Americans, it turns
out, aren't conflicted in their attitude toward marijuana. They want it
illegal but
not really enforced. A Time/cnn poll last week found that only 34% want pot
to be totally legalized (the percentage has almost doubled since 1986). But a
vast majority have become mellow about official loopholes: 80% think it's
O.K. to dispense pot for medical purposes, and 72% think people caught with
it for recreational use should get off with only a fine. That seeming
paradox has
left a huge opening for pro-pot people to exploit. Eight states allow medical
marijuana, and a handful of states have reduced the sentences for pot smokers
to almost nothing.
The midterm election Nov. 5 has lighted up the issue even more. While control
of the House hangs in the balance and the race for the Senate is a dead heat,
the political trend for marijuana is clear: support is gaining. The most
interesting
battles on the November ballot are over pot initiatives: to allow the city
of San
Francisco to grow and distribute medical marijuana, to replace jail with rehab
in Ohio and decriminalize marijuana use in Arizona. Many of these proposals
are relatively modest, but the pro-pot forces are also raising the stakes. In
spite of the electorate's contentment with the paradox of loose enforcement,
some particularly powerful people on both sides have taken extreme
viewpoints in an effort to end the political stalemate and force Americans to
choose. Either pot is not so bad and should be legal, or people should be
arrested for smoking it. The battlefield for the showdown is Nevada, where
Question 9 would allow adults to possess up to 3 oz. of pot fo! r personal
use.
In fact, the state government would set up a legal market for buying and
selling
pot. To almost everyone's surprise, the race is too close to call.
While the pro-pot forces have pushed their agenda at the polls, opponents
have tried to use legal muscle to fight back. After a Supreme Court decision
last year reiterating that federal drug laws trumped state ones, the Drug
Enforcement Administration sent federal agents to California to bust
medical-marijuana growers, a move that tended to outrage California voters
who had approved this use. In fact, as the Administration pushes harder
against the pro-pot forces, pot supporters seem to gain ground.
Among the biggest pro-pot players, medical marijuana was actually kind of a
ruse. Sure, there are sick people who really feel they need marijuana to numb
pain, relieve the eye pressure of glaucoma, calm muscle spasms or get the
munchies to help with aids wasting (see following story). But they are not the
people who put the debate into high gear. A few years ago, the Drug Policy
Alliancean organization founded by billionaire philanthropist Soros, who
wants to legalize marijuana and reform drug laws by replacing jail time with
rehabdecided it would fund only those initiatives that could be won. So the
group ran a bunch of polls to find out how America feels about the drug wars,
and the reformers came up way short on everything but three policies: people
preferred treatment over incarceration in some cases, people hated property
forfeiture, and an overwhelming majority felt medical marijuana should be
legal. So Soros & Co. set out to get medical-marijuana legislation. The !
fight
has done quite well, especially when, to their surprise, the Federal
Government
took the bait and started arresting little old ladies and storming peaceful
pot-growing cooperatives. In fact, the pro-pot people have done well enough
that some of them feel it is time to drop the ruse and fight for full
legalization.
Plus, with Britain experimenting with a "seize and warn" policy instead of
arresting pot smokers and Canada flirting with doing the same, the
blunt-friendly were ready to take off the camouflage and fight. And where else
to try this but in Nevada?
That's why the czar is in Vegas, sitting in a room at the Venetian Hotel
guarded
by U.S. marshals. The czar, a smart, likable, earnest man who believes he can
help Americans by fighting the drug war, is derided by the opposition as "Bill
Bennett's Mini-Me." Indeed, he worked for Bennett under Reagan in the
Department of Education and then as Bennett's deputy drug czar in the first
Bush Administration. When George W. appointed him, the President told the
czar to watch the movie Traffic as a way to understand the problem. The czar,
who told Time he has never smoked pot, believes marijuana to be not only a
gateway drug but also incredibly detrimental in its own rightcausing driving
accidents, domestic violence, health risks and crippling addiction. He thinks
the legalization argument is absurd, especially when proposed by libertarian
Republicans who are so doctrinaire he finds them to be outside his party.
"This
is great talk at 2 a.m. in a dorm room, that all laws should be !
consistent. But
the real world isn't consistent. It's ludicrous to say we have a great deal of
problems from the use of alcohol so we should multiply that with marijuana,"
he says. It doesn't take long for him to get back to the three
billionaires: "It's
unprecedented, the amount of money put in by such a small amount of people
over one issue."
The marijuana legalizers, including the billionaires Walters vilifies,
don't have
much kinder things to say about him. In fact, for old rich men, they can sound
a lot like Tupac. One of them, Sperling, 81, is founder of the highly
profitable
nationwide chain the University of Phoenix. He has spent $13 million on
drug-reform campaigns and lots of other money on other pet projects,
including cloning his cat. "Mr. Walters is a pathetic drug-war soul who is
defending a whole catalog of horrors he's indifferent to," Sperling says
from his
office in Phoenix, Ariz. "The government's drug-reform policy is driven by a
Fundamentalist Christian sense of morality that sees any of these illegal
substances used as evil." Sperling says he smoked pot to combat pain
associated with the cancer he fought in the 1960s.
Lewis, 68, former CEO of Progressive, an insurance company, doesn't despise
the czar quite as much, but he has been battling him even harder. The reasons
for Lewis are more straightforward. He has been referred to by colleagues as
a "functional pothead." He spends half the year on a $16.5 million, 255-ft.
yacht, where he smokes pot regularly; he even got arrested in New Zealand
on drug charges a few years ago, he told the Plain Dealer. He is one of the
main backers of the radical Nevada proposal, having given heaps of money to
the Marijuana Policy Project, which is running Question 9 there. "The
absurdity of its illegality has been clear to me for some time. I learned about
pot from my kids and realized it was a lot better than Scotch, and I loved the
Scotch. Then I went to my doctor, and he said, 'I'm thrilled. You're drinking
too much. You're much better off doing pot than drinking.'"
Soros (who has smoked pot but no longer does) declined to be interviewed,
and like the rest of the troika, he won't debate Walters. They are probably
refusing for two reasons: 1) they would likely lose, since none of them are
politicians; and 2) if you were going around the world on a 255-ft. yacht,
would you list "Drug Czar" as one of your ports of call?
So instead they fight federal policy with initiative after initiative,
while also
defending local pro-pot laws. Their side got a major media boost in California
in September, when federal agents busted Santa Cruz's Wo/Men's Alliance for
Medical Marijuana in an early-morning raid. The feds dragged the farm's
owners, who were legally growing pot under California law, to a federal
building in San Jose for breaking federal law and held a paraplegic
resident at
the farm for hours. "I opened my eyes to see five federal agents pointing
assault rifles at my head. 'Get your hands over your head. Get up. Get up.' I
took the respirator off my face, and I explained to them that I'm paralyzed,"
said Suzanne Pheil, 44, who is disabled by the effects of postpolio syndrome.
Her story was broadcast everywhere, since the pro-pot people had basically
been waiting for her to be harassed, punching every phone number on their
media list minutes after the raid. Pot people, surprisingly, can move p! retty
fast when they want to.
The bust couldn't have gone better for the pot folks. California attorney
general Bill Lockyer fired off an angry letter to dea chief Asa Hutchinson,
who
wrote back saying that federal law allows the feds to seize pot. "During the
Clinton years they didn't do this," says Lockyer. "It disappointed me that
they
would be using precious resources to act like a bunch of bullies." San Jose
police chief William Lansdowne was so annoyed by the raid that he withdrew
his officers from the local dea task force, ending 15 years of close work.
Even
Governor Gray Davis, who has been quiet on the marijuana issue, expressed
concern over the feds' bust. A week after the raid, Santa Cruz officials
gathered at city hall to supervise public distribution of marijuana to
members of
the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in front of TV crews, a way of
giving Washington the finger.
To many Republicans, this looks like bad politics for Bush. "It seems to me
about as far from Compassionate Conservatism as you can get," says former
Nixon and Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. "There are an awful lot of people in
their 50s and younger who smoked pot when they were younger and don't
look on it as something that destroyed their lives. I think there is a lot
more
open-mindedness toward pot than there used to be."
In Nevada, popular Republican Governor Kenny Guinn refuses to take a
stand on Question 9, the pot-legalization amendment to the state constitution,
saying he'll go with whatever the people vote for. And he won't really have to
worry about it for a while, since the constitutional amendment will go into
effect only if Nevadans vote yes on Nov. 5 and again in 2004. So Guinn may
be smart to stay out of the debate, because the rhetoric from both sides has
gone out of control. The drug czar's latest commercial, which was actually
focus-grouped with teens and their parents, shows two teens getting stoned in
their father's study, talking apathetically about a bunch of stuff. One
pulls out a
gun from his dad's drawer, the other asks lazily if it's loaded, and the
gun-toting teen shrugs and shoots the other kid. "The suggestion is not to say
too many children are being shot in their dens who are marijuana users,"
Walters said. "It's meant to show that marijuana alters your ability to ! use
judgment." In the other camp, many of the workers lied to voters in the course
of gathering signatures to get Question 9 on the ballot, saying it was a
medical-marijuana proposition, according to several pro-pot Nevadans. The
two camps even fight regularly about how many joints can be made from 3 oz.
of pot, the proposed legal maximum. The pro-pot people claim 80, while the
anti-pot people carry around bags of 250 joints to illustrate their case. Yes,
moms across the state are spending large parts of their nights rolling parsley
and oregano.
The Marijuana Policy Project in Nevada has a chance partly because it is far
better organized than its scattered opposition. The project made a smart move
in hiring Billy Rogers, a Democratic political consultant from Texas, to
run the
Nevada campaign. Rogers sends people door to door daily to target
supporters he can call on Election Day and bus to voting booths. This could
make the difference in what the polls show is an almost evenly split
electorate.
Rogers' office is situated in a Vegas strip mall, just above an Asian massage
parlor, which is right next to a children's tutoring center, which is all
you need
to know to understand why the project is staging this fight in Nevada. The
office looks more like a sorority fund drive than a ^A'60s dorm room. Posters
drawn by children depict images like a teddy bear with a heart labeled vote
yes on 9. Rogers, wearing a collarless white shirt, is still at work at 1
a.m.,
editing a commercial. "In college we'd sit around and talk abo! ut thisthat
when we grew up we were going to change these laws. And now we're doing
it," he says. Rogers, who says he hasn't smoked pot in 15 years, doesn't have
a personal connection to the fight, but it's pretty easy to get him into a
James
Carville mood. When he talks about Walters' oft repeated claim (an assertion
shared by the National Institute on Drug Abuse) that marijuana has much
higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (thc) than it used to, that, in Walters'
words, "it's not your father's marijuana," Rogers goes ballistic. "It's a
plant.
Whatit's not your father's broccoli? Its genetic structure hasn't changed
in 30
years," he says, eating steak for a late-night meal. "These guys will say
anything. If I had a billion-dollar budget, I'd say anything to stay in
business."
That's one of the major conspiracy theories of the pro-legalization
movementa rant right out of the Eisenhower era, that the government is
keeping pot illegal so it can maintain its giant drug-war bureaucracy. Its
advocates also believeas put forth directly in the pro-medical marijuana
commercials of billionaire independent New York gubernatorial candidate
Tom Golisanothat politicians are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical
companies, who fear marijuana is such good medicine that their own products
will suffer. The pro-legalization forces also believe, more convincingly,
that the
right wing of the Republican Party connects drug use with sin and radicalism
and the failure of the family. "I've known John Walters for about 10 years,
and
I don't think this is about drugs for him," says Ethan Nadelmann, head of the
Drug Policy Alliance. "John is a reactionary ideologue. It's the broader
battle
about what we tell kids about life. It's a vehicle for promoting a tougher,
meane! r approach to life and government." Democratic Congressman Barney
Frank of Massachusetts claims the war on drugs is really a war against the
Other. "Alcohol does more damage in many areas of society than drugs,
particularly marijuana, but we treat marijuana as much worse, and that's
because it's associated with the counterculture."
Some Republicans, however, are ready to legalize medical marijuana. Texas
Congressman Ron Paul, a doctor and onetime Libertarian Party presidential
candidate, has been fighting for medical marijuana. "From a humanitarian
standpoint, people should never be denied this kind of help," says Paul. But
fellow Republican Hutchinson stands behind the decision to prosecute. "Why
would they want to authorize behavior under state law that is still a
violation of
federal law?" he says. "It endangers a population, to me. It gives the
green light
on the one hand and a go-to-jail ticket on the other."
Among cops and other law enforcers, there are sharp divisions too. Some, like
Joseph D. McNamara, a former San Jose police chief and now a Hoover
Institution fellow, call for an end to the criminalization of marijuana.
"Most of
the police officers I hired during the 15 years I was police chief had
tried it,"
says McNamara. Like many pot legalizers, he believes the system, which he
says arrests more people for marijuana than for any other drug, is racist.
"Ninety million Americans have tried marijuana. When you look at who's going
to jail, it is overwhelmingly disproportionateit's Latinos and blacks." Not
surprisingly, the topic is radioactive in the police profession. Andy
Anderson,
who was head of his state's largest cop organization, the Nevada Conference
of Police and Sheriffs, announced that his board members unanimously
supported the pro-pot initiative so they could focus on more serious crimes. A
few days later, Anderson was forced to resign. The voice for Nevada cop! s
then became Gary Booker, deputy district attorney in charge of the
vehicular-crimes unit, until he told members of the press he believed the wild
claims of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche that Soros is pro-legalization
because he bankrolls drug cartels. When talking to Time at the Elks lodge
where he introduced the drug czar, Booker awkwardly tried to explain away
his statement: "The word cartel was used, not drug. A cartel is a group of
businessmen who control price, and that's what we've got here. Three or four
guys are controlling the thing." He too stepped out of the role of Nevada
police spokesman.
The pro-pot people feel that victoryeven if it comes not this year and not in
Nevadais inevitable. Each year there are fewer members of the pre-boomer
generation, who tend not to distinguish between heroin and pot. In 1983, only
31% of Americans surveyed had tried pot; the new Time/cnn poll puts the
figure at 47%. And though pot use among teens is down from its ^A'70s highs,
parents sneaking joints when their kids are asleep is a fresh phenomenon. But
the polls show that Americans still cling to pot's forbidden status, which
is why
the pro-pot people are working so hard. "You would think you would get a
change, but you're not going to," says Charles Whitebread, a law professor at
the University of Southern California who has written extensively on marijuana
law. "Even though it did nothing to them, the fear that it will somehow
pollute
their children has made some of the people who used marijuana extremely
freely now say, 'Oh, gee, I wouldn't be in favor of the change in t! he legal
status of marijuana.'" It may be that the major dividing line between the pro-
and anti-legalizers is not party affiliation but parental status. And even
among
parents, moms see more against pot than dads.
So, barring another wave of '60s-like radicalism or a lot more poorly
thought-out co-op busts by the feds, Americans' complicated feelings about
pot aren't going to be reconciled overnight. And recent studies showing that
marijuana can have addictive properties, though in a small percentage of
cases,
is going to make some parents more nervous about their kids turning into
potheads. While alcohol and cigarettes may be more dangerous, a lot of
parents would rather smell beer on their kid's breath than have a 29-year-old
living at home, eating Cheetos and watching SpongeBob.
----------
With reporting by Matt Baron/ Chicago, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco,
Viveca Novak/Washington and Sean Scully/Los Angeles
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