MONEY, OPINION PROPELLED PROP. 36

Note: Drug treatments OKd By 61% of votes.

The landslide victory of Proposition 36, the drug treatment measure on last
week's ballot, appears to have been caused both by a genuine change in
voters' views about drugs and a well-financed election campaign that buried
its opponents.

Proponents say that the lopsided 61 percent yes vote demonstrates a sea
change in public attitudes about drug policy and a disenchantment with the
war on drugs that began during the Reagan administration.

Public opinion experts indicate that the measure's backers weren't
exaggerating.

"We have asked a general question about public support for the legalization
of marijuana for the last 25 years," said Tom Smith, director of social
survey for the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

"Support went up in the '70s and back down in the '80s. But since 1990, it
has been going up steadily -- from 16 percent to 33 percent this year."

"When you see a doubling of support for anything in a decade, that
indicates a pretty substantial shift of public opinion about it," Smith said.

However, the landslide seems to have also been the result of a campaign
that spent more than $3.8 million -- much of it on well-designed direct
mail advertising.

Proposition 36 requires that first- and second-offense drug violators be
sent to drug treatment programs instead of facing trial and possible
incarceration. The measure makes $60 million available immediately to
expand treatment programs and adds an additional $120 million each year
afterward. It prohibits drug testing and also bars sending offenders to
jail as soon as they violate probation for a drug offense.

According to campaign spending reports filed with the California secretary
of state by Oct. 26, one week before the election, the California Campaign
for New Drug Policies, organized and run by Zimmerman and Markman, a Santa
Monica political firm, spent more than $1 million just on the petition
drive to qualify the measure for the ballot.

The committee -- which was largely bankrolled by billionaire philanthropist
George Soros and his allies, Peter B. Lewis and John Sperling, followed up
with $1.6 million in television spots, $261,932 in slate mailers and other
campaign literature, and at least $65,000 worth of radio advertising.

Direct mail slate cards from groups as diverse as the Parents' Ballet Guide
and the Save Proposition 13 Committee carried the pro-36 message. In a
canny move, proponents stressed the potential tax savings promised by the
measure in order to convince conservative voters who otherwise might have
opposed reducing the punishment for some drug offenses.

The spending blitz by Proposition 36's supporters left the measure's
opponents in the dust. By Oct. 26, Californians United Against Drug Abuse
had raised only $223,804 -- less than the amount the pro campaign spent on
slate mailers alone.

They had spent only $32,223 on direct mail and other literature, and only
$55,000 -- about one-thirtieth of the Pro-36 total -- on television ads.

Ray McNally, who ran the anti-36 campaign, said his group spent about $400,
000 in opposing the measure -- and were outspent nearly 10 to 1.

"When we got an opportunity to sit down with people and explain the
shortcomings of Prop. 36, we were overwhelmingly successful in getting them
to change their minds and vote against it," McNally said.

"If we had had the money to go over the details of the measure with the
voters, it would have lost . . . But if you don't have the money to contact
the voters, you can't change their minds."

All the advertising in the world will not convince people to buy a product
they do not want. And proponents say that California's voters were simply
ready for Proposition 36.

Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center told The Chronicle that
U. S. voters have been slowly turning against the punitive approach on all
criminal justice issues in recent years and have become far more supportive
of less stringent law enforcement strategies.

"There has been a drop in support for the punitive or 'get tough'
approach," Smith said. "In large measure, it is because the crime rate has
been dropping and people just don't think of crime as being such a big
problem."

Similarly, he said, the public has become a great deal friendlier toward a
therapeutic approach for drug abusers instead of reliance on prosecution
and incarceration.

"When we ask people about government spending priorities, more people
support rehabilitation than simply spending more money on drug
(enforcement), which has a more punitive sound to it," Smith said. "There
has been a general drop in support for the punitive approach. The support
has been for the public health approach over the punitive, and proponents
have been arguing that it is simply more cost effective to do it that way."

The same sort of shift in attitudes among U.S. youth has been spotted in
the "Monitoring the Future" opinion surveys conducted by the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Michigan.

"In the 1990s we saw a reduction in the proportion of high school seniors
who thought that personal marijuana use should be prohibited by law," said
Lloyd Johnston, a principal investigator in the project.

Johnston said that in 1990, 56 percent of the youth who responded to the
survey thought that smoking marijuana should be outlawed. Last year, the
number had dropped to 39 percent. "That's a pretty substantial shift in
public opinion, " he said.

Equally significant is the upswing in the number of young people who
believe that marijuana should be legalized outright. Sixteen percent of the
teens sampled for the study in 1990 said they thought marijuana should be
legalized. Last year, 27 percent supported legalization.

"There's been a major shift in both of those in a more liberal direction,
if you will," Johnston said.