-The Six-State Sweep

The American people want marijuana Legalized for medical use.

Source: Rolling Stone (US)

Copyright: 1999 Rolling Stone

Pubdate: 24 Dec 1998 - 7 Jan 1999

Page 111

Author: William Greider

Contact: letters@rollingstone.com

Why isn't W A S H I N G T 0 N listening?

NEWT GINGRICH AND THE Republicans were not the only losers in Washington,

D.C., in this fall's elections. The War on Drugs took a big hit, too.

Voters approved every pro-medical-marijuana measure put before them: in

Washington state, Oregon, Arizona and Alaska. In two other states and the

District of Columbia, technical matters have hung up electoral victories --

legal snarls voided the Colorado win; in Nevada, voters will have to pass

the measure again in 2000, when the state amends its constitution.

In the District of Columbia, a medical-marijuana referendum promoted by ACT

UP Washington and the Marijuana Policy Project won easily but not

officially. Though ballots had already been printed, right-wing Republicans

in Congress inserted a nasty little rider in the omnibus budget bill,

passed in October, that prohibited District of Columbia election officials

from spending any funds to tally votes and report the outcome. This is

possibly the first time in U.S. history that the federal government has

tried to stop voters from finding out how they voted in their own election.

The medical-marijuana campaign, however, paid for an election-day exit poll

that showed D.C. voters overwhelmingly ratifying medical uses of marijuana

by sixty-nine percent to thirty-one percent.

Altogether, with California's 1996 approval, voters in seven states and

D.C. have now endorsed this drug-use reform. It's like a citizens'

guerrilla army marching on the nation's Capitol from the West (with one

squad attacking from behind enemy lines).

Bill Zimmerman, a Los Angeles political consultant who is the national head

of the movement, summarizes the political meaning: "More than one-fifth of

the American electorate has now voted in the majority to give patients the

right to use marijuana. If the federal government doesn't respect that vote

and change its attitude, we're fully prepared to go to the rest of America

with this issue."

Most of the people working to legalize medical marijuana are neither

hippies nor radicals. In Seattle the statewide campaign was led by a young

hospice physician, Rob Killian, who sees cancer and AIDS patients wasting

away and suffering every day--suffering that can be alleviated by smoking a

joint.

"I saw I had to prescribe marijuana for my patients, and I saw that it

worked," Killian says simply. "All drugs have dangerous side effects, but

as physicians, we are trained to administer pharmaceuticals in a safe,

appropriate manner. My patients who are suffering and dying are not

criminals."

During the campaign, Killian debated with local prosecutors across the

state but says he felt all along that he was "really running against the

federal government." Or at least against organized conservative interests,

which have portrayed medical-marijuana initiatives as being gateways to

overall legalization. For instance, in the run-up to the election, the

Partnership for a Drug-Free America's famous fried-egg commercials ("This

is your brain on drugs.. . .") were broadcast frequently. The measure's

leading opponent was Brad Owen, Washington's lieutenant governor, who

received a $190,000 drug-awareness grant from the Office of National Drug

Policy. His efforts were also aided by money from presidential hopeful

Steve Forbes, which was used to broadcast anti-initiative messages on radio

stations.

In the end, Washington voters legalized medical applications of the

long-demonized drug by a margin of fifty-nine percent to forty-one

per-cent. At press time, the initiative had carried thirty of thirty-nine

counties in the state.

In Arizona, where the issue won more narrowly, the "medical rights for

marijuana" campaign was called The People Have Spoken. Arizona Voters had

already approved the proposition back in 1996, but the state legislature

overruled them. This year they went back to the polls and stuffed the

legislature, fifty-seven percent to forty-three percent. "The opposition

used every trick in the book and they still lost," says campaign leader Sam

Vagenas of Phoenix. "They used schoolchildren a props at their press

conference. Their group called itself Arizonans Against Heroin. It

mentioned every Schedule One controlled substance -- heroin cocaine, LSD,

PCP. Can you imagine voters looking at that? Yet fifty-seven percent of

them saw through it."

IF THIS YEAR'S OUTCOME TURNS out to be an important turning point, one

explanation may be that the 1998 referendum proposition were different.

They were designed be law-enforcement friendly, and the included new

regulatory rules that avoid much of the legal ambiguity and conflict that

followed California's decriminalization vote in 1996.

One problem with the referendum passed by California voters was that while

authorizing medical use of marijuana, it included no provision for

addressing the overall legal status of the drug. Thus, police arrested some

patients for possession. The Feds raided marijuana clubs set up to sell the

stuff. At a Washington, D.C. press conference in late 1996, heavy hitters

from Bill Clinton's Cabinet threatened reprisals against doctors who

prescribed cannabis to their patients. Doctors might lose their licenses,

officials warned, or become ineligible to receive Medicare reimbursements

for their services.

"You can imagine the impact this had on California doctors," Zimmerman

says. "They were being threatened with losing their livelihoods."

The new measures approved in states like Washington solve many of these

problems for doctors and law enforcement officers. State-issued ID cards

will be required for patients entitled to use marijuana. Doctors must

provide a diagnosis justifying the prescription for victims of cancer, AIDS

glaucoma, multiple sclerosis or epilepsy. The patient then takes that to

state health agency and receives credentials to purchase the drug (though

this process doesn't entirely settle the question of who can legally

produce or sell it).

"If federal agencies try to block implementation, as they did in

California, they will have to take on state agencies rather than marijuana

clubs," Zimmerman explains.

Dr. Ethan Nadelmann is a leading authority on banned drugs and an architect

of the medical-rights campaign, largely financed by George Soros' Open

Society Institute. Nadelmann -- director of the Lindesmith Center, a

drug-policy institute -- expects each referendum victory to produce more

new ideas and practical solutions for regulating sales and use. Each

victory also puts more elected leaders on the spot.

"Those politicians who thought there was no cost to indulging in drug-war

demagoguery may now find themselves in an argument with their own voters,"

Nadelmann says. "They don't want to face up to that, but the American

people will no longer be duped by such inflammatory language."

BACK IN WASHINGTON, D.C., the drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, responded in

muted terms to this new setback for his war. He reminded everyone that

state referendums do not change the fact that marijuana possession is

against federal law. Still, the statement from his Office of National Drug

Policy sounded almost conciliatory: "The U.S. medical-scientific process

has not closed the door on marijuana or any other substance that may offer

therapeutic benefits. However, both law and common sense dictate that the

process for establishing substances as medicine be thorough and

science-based."

McCaffrey's opposition is not impressed.

They speak in two different voices," Nadelmann says. "One ridicules medical

marijuana, the patients and doctors. The other approach is to say, 'Let the

science prevail' Yet any time the medical-marijuana studies come up through

their system of scientific review and gain legitimacy, they are cut off by

political decisions."

McCaffrey's spokesman, Bob Weiner, denies this, but he then argues that if

research ever establishes marijuana's medical benefits, the results might

take the advocates somewhere they don't want to go. "What they don't want

to hear is that smoke is not a medicine and has never been approved as a

way to deliver medicine," Weiner says. A better delivery method for medical

pot, he playfully suggests, might prove to be suppositories.

Independent scientific studies that seem to confirm benefits or refute

negative complaints have had zero impact on drug-war politics so far.

That's why grass-roots activists started the campaign. They see no prospect

of the Republican Congress (or the Democratic president, for that matter)

allowing the Federal Drug Administration or the National Institutes of

Health to do a genuine, thorough investigation of what doctors and patients

already know from their own experience.

"When I started in this campaign, I began to meet patients with AIDS and

cancer who told me marijuana saved their lives," says Zimmerman, who with

two physicians co-authored Is Marijuana the Right Medicine for You?, a book

published this year. "I was skeptical at first. Then I learned that

one-third of cancer and AIDS patients drop out of their chemotherapy

treatment because they can't stand the side effects. They were willing to

risk death instead. A lot of these people told me how marijuana would

instantly stop the pain and nausea. They returned to treatment and survived."

One living example is Keith Vines, an assistant district attorney in San

Francisco. "He was wasting away with AIDS, started using marijuana to

stimulate his appetite, gained forty pounds and then was admitted to the

drug-therapy program," Zimmerman reports. "Today he's fully functioning as

a prosecutor. He attributes his life to marijuana."

Law-enforcement officers are correct in their suspicions, of course. The

medical issue will help to soften the image of pot, which, in turn, may

create a political climate for relaxing the criminal laws aimed at the

drug. Many advocates think that the consumption of cannabis, regardless of

the user's purpose, should be regarded in the same way as the consumption

of alcohol -- dangerous only if it is abused. Not all advocates entirely

agree. George Soros has donated millions to campaigns against the nation's

unduly harsh drug laws and for medical use of marijuana, but he is

explicitly opposed to full legalization. Californians who voted for medical

marijuana in 1996 were asked in a survey whether they favored legalizing

pot: Sixty-one percent were opposed.

Meanwhile, despite the grass-roots counterattack, the War on Drugs rolls

forward at both state and federal levels, employing prison as its mightiest

weapon against drug abuse. From 1991 to 1995, Nadelmann points out, the

number of marijuana arrests doubled, more than half of them for possession

alone. In 1996, 642,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses.

This larger battlefield is much more formidable, but citizen guerrillas are

also winning some victories here. In Oregon, for instance, the state

effectively decriminalized pot in the early 1970S -- minor offenses were

treated more or less like traffic tickets. Last year, however, the state

legislature re-criminalized marijuana by a two-thirds majority.

In the October elections, Oregon voters reversed the legislature's action

-- approving a referendum that repealed the re-criminalization law. The

vote was sixty-six percent to thirty-three percent.

"What this says to me," Nadelmann reflects, "is that people feel we have

over-criminalized marijuana. We're supposed to spend millions of dollars to

go after small amounts of marijuana. The people in Oregon said, `No, we

don't want that.' "

THE REPUBLICAN FLAME-throwers in Congress, led by the lately departed Newt

Gingrich, have always blamed the Sixties for whatever ails the republic --

the moral decay launched by drugs, sex and rock & roll. Wouldn't it be a

hoot if the Sixties wins the pot debate just as Newt gets pushed offstage

by his own conservative colleagues?

Alas, the political struggle to establish rational laws on drugs and drug

abuse is a long way from resolution. While state voters were introducing a

touch of reason to the debate, the federal government was ginning up for

another expensive attempt at drug interdiction. The new budget provides at

least $690 million more for quasi-military efforts to block cocaine from

entering the country through Latin American. That buys lots of high-tech

hardware to police our vast borders -- surveillance planes, ships and

helicopters -- but drug importers have always found a way around them.

That money might have opened a lot of new treatment centers instead - a

less sexy solution to drug abuse but one that demonstratably works. The

government is not yet ready to declare such an armistice, but sane voices

from popular campaigns -- and especially their score card of victories --

make it harder and harder for politicians to blink away the contradictions

and injustices of the drug war.

If the federal government does not rethink its hard-line policy against

medical marijuana, then the campaign will move on to more states and

collect more victories. Zimmerman says that Maine citizens are expected to

vote on the issue in 1999. In 2000, Colorado and Nevada must vote again to

complete adoption. The groundwork is being laid to put medical marijuana on

the ballot in Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Florida.

Florida will be tough. In national polling on the subject, medical

marijuana draws majority support in every region except one - the South. If

it can win in Florida, the matter will be virtually decided.

The issue, in other words, raises the same question that both parties are

now pondering about national politics: Has the Republican "Southern

strategy" finally run out of steam? Targeting Southern voters and states

has proved a great success for the GOP, the key to its congressional

majority. But it also has tripped the party into dominance by hard-right

attitudes that moderate voters are now rejecting.

Does it make sense to allow the nation's most conservative politicians to

dictate their reactionary social values and public policy to the rest of

us? Republicans will have to answer that question for themselves, but so

will two other successful Southern politicians: Bill Clinton and Al Gore.