WHO'S BOYCOTTING THE DRUG WAR? (HINT: IT'S NOT THE DEMOCRATS)

When it comes to the war on drugs, the foremost conscientious objectors in
the halls of government tend to have one thing in common: they're
Republicans.

On that single, crucial issue the multibillion-dollar struggle to arrest and
incarcerate drug users some Republican legislators are way ahead of their
Democratic counterparts.

Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, perhaps the nation's foremost advocate for
legalizing weed, is a Republican. So is Mike Chase, running for Congress
from California's North Coast: he loves guns, hates the IRS and wants to
decriminalize herb for personal use. Jayne Murphy Shapiro, GOP candidate for
state assembly from Los Angeles, touts medical marijuana.

Then there's Tom Campbell, the San Jose Republican who's challenging Dianne
Feinstein for a Senate seat. Campbell, an academic and former congressperson
who lags far behind Feinstein in the polls, is pushing what the state's
daily papers have dubbed a "radical drug proposal."

In fact, Campbell's plan is just the kind of no-brainer stuff liberal
Democrats used to talk about.

He wants the United States to pull out of the Colombian narco-quagmire and
put the $1.3 billion it would save into rehab for addicts in the United
States. He backs medical marijuana.

He wants to see treatment programs in jails and prisons.

And he'd allow doctors to administer banned substances to addicts.

Campbell told us he has long been troubled by the failure of the drug war.
After he was elected to Congress for the second time, he decided to risk the
potential political fallout and take a stand.

"The evidence is overwhelming that incarceration does not work, interdiction
does not work, crop substitution does not work," he said. "All of those are
supply side. Demand reduction is what works, and that means spending money
we are about to waste in Columbia on rehabilitation and education."

Campbell isn't afraid to hit on the racial underpinnings of our current
cops-and-courts bonanza. "A generation of Americans has rotted away in
jail," he said in a recent speech at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. "A
generation, I might add, that is 12 percent African American in drug use but
60 percent African American in state prisons."

Of course, Campbell is still a good Republican: he's got a big thing for the
death penalty, even arguing that dealers who sell speed, heroin, or cocaine
to kids under 12 should be executed.

These right-wing defections from the controlled-substance combat troops may
mark a seismic shift in the political landscape. "It's sort of the
Nixon-goes-to-China syndrome, where the Republicans can do it without
appearing soft on crime," said Ellen Komp, program associate with the
Lindesmith Center, a drug-law reform group. "The fact that it is being
questioned is a harbinger of things to come. That anyone would think [drug
law-reform] could be a viable plank is really new."

Campbell's democratic competitor takes a more traditional stand. "I would
say [Campbell and Feinstein] have a bit of a difference of opinion on how to
deal with the problem of drug control," Feinstein spokesperson Kam Kuwata
told us. "Senator Feinstein would say certainly you should have treatment,
but you have to have interdiction on the supply side. It's a mistake to
totally abandon these interdiction programs."

Feinstein attacks Campbell's plan to let localities try out
decriminalization in a medical setting. "She doesn't believe that even in an
experimental fashion you should go out and let these local treatment centers
give out drugs that are illegal," Kuwata says. The senator is also opposing
Proposition 36, the Lindesmith-backed measure on the November ballot that
would steer nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison.

When asked about the racial bias of the drug war, a pattern thoroughly
documented over the past decade, Kuwata said Feinstein hadn't seen the
studies. "If there's proof that sentences are not being handed out fairly,
the senator would be very concerned with that," the spokesperson told us.

If she hasn't seen recent reports by the Justice Policy Institute and Human
Rights Watch, Feinstein could start with the U.S. Sentencing Commission's
1997 report to Congress which is, after all, where she works.

The commission found that federal cocaine laws have "a disproportionate
impact on African American defendants" and "appear to be harsher and more
severe for racial minorities."

Feinstein has few friends among drug-law reformers. "I don't know anybody on
our side who's supporting her," said Dale Gieringer of the Drug Policy Forum
of California. "Her record is abysmal.

She has about the worst record on drug reform in Congress. Campbell, on the
other hand, has about the best. Medea Benjamin is good too."

Benjamin is running against Campbell and Feinstein on the Green Party
ticket. Unlike either of the two major parties, the Greens have a coherent,
party-wide analysis of the drug war.

"The war on drugs is an excuse for making war on poor communities of color
and an excuse for U.S. intervention overseas," Benjamin told us. The Greens,
she says, "call for harm-reduction policies: needle exchange, medical
marijuana, the decriminalization of marijuana.

We think drug addiction should be treated as a health problem, not a
criminal-justice problem. But we put it in the context of the
prison-industrial complex: there are too many people in prison, serving
sentences that are way disproportionate to their crimes."