DRUG-LAW FIGHT LAUNCHED

Coalitions Brace For Marijuana Ballot Campaign

For years they've warned of school-yard pushers, of liquor stores that
don't check IDs, of new drugs popping up in teenage bloodstreams.

Now there's a new enemy in Michigan for substance-abuse educators like the
Troy Community Coalition and the Macomb County Prevention Coalition -- an
enemy bigger and better financed than just about anything.

It's a California foundation that has won major fights to ease drug laws in
California and Arizona. Financed by billionaires George Soros and Peter
Lewis, and by multimillionaire John Sperling, the Campaign for New Drug
Policies began an effort last month to do the same thing in Michigan.

The trio hopes to duplicate in Michigan, Ohio and Florida their recent
successes in the West, using the mantra "treatment, not jail" for first-
and second-time drug users.

That news has Michigan's drug-prevention leaders girding for a fight in
2002. The battle is expected be fought with petitions, speeches and
public-service spots leading to the ballot box in November.

Central to the fight will be community coalitions, the mostly volunteer
antidrug groups in scores of Michigan cities, including nearly two dozen in
Oakland County. Under federal law, the nonprofit coalitions generally can
spend up to 20 percent of their budgets "to educate voters," said Betsy
Glick, spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., at the movement's center -- the
Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America.

On Dec. 14, President George W. Bush cheered coalition leaders from across
the country at their national convention in Washington.

Then he signed a bill giving them five more years of federal funding --
$450 million through fiscal-year 2007, hundreds of millions more than ever.

And Bush pointed to Michigan, singling out the Troy Community Coalition for
its success in changing attitudes toward drugs and in helping start other
coalitions across the state and the country.

The Troy coalition's leader, also head of a regional group of 13
coalitions, is Mary Ann Solberg, nominated by Bush last year to be his
deputy White House drug czar.

Awaiting Senate confirmation and choosing her words carefully, Solberg said
last week she couldn't comment on how Michigan's coalitions will fight the
politicking of the Santa Monica-based Campaign for New Drug Policies.

But Solberg said she is determined to see more coalitions spawned and
strengthened. And if confirmed, she is expected to help them play a key
role in opposing any easing of drug laws. Behind the scenes, Solberg is
"spearheading the campaign against this initiative," said Diane Dovico, a
part-time community organizer for the Royal Oak Community Coalition.

"We're all looking to educate people. We'd like to squelch this before
people vote on it," Dovico said.

Solberg's swan song before moving to Washington might be Jan. 26, when
coalition members from across Oakland County are to gather at a Troy church
for a Saturday morning meeting on ways to find and keep volunteers, change
community attitudes and market the coalition movement.

The new petition drive seeks to amend the Michigan Constitution by scaling
back mandatory drug-crime sentences and giving judges more discretion in
sentencing drug offenders. It is expected to make the ballot with 302,711
signatures.

Last year, leaders of metro Detroit coalitions fought another statewide
campaign over drug laws.

Prompted by petition circulators seeking to ease Michigan's marijuana laws,
coalition heads began approaching city and county officials with
resolutions condemning marijuana.

They got hearty support at council meetings in Detroit, Allen Park, Clawson
and Troy. And they won approval from commissioners in Oakland and Macomb
counties.

But at city halls in Berkley and Huntington Woods, elected leaders balked.
That prompted coalition leaders in Oakland and Macomb to call a halt to
further canvassing.

In Huntington Woods, city commissioners met the delegation with silence.
Later, Mayor Ron Gillham said drug debates are best left to voters.

Michiganders are far from uniform in their views on drugs, said Lansing
pollster Ed Sarpolus, vice president of EPIC/MRA consultants. In a 1999
statewide poll, about 55 percent of state residents supported legalization
of marijuana for medicinal use if prescribed by a doctor, Sarpolus said.

Yet Michiganders in other polls overwhelmingly rejected suggestions to
legalize drugs across the board, Sarpolus said.

Many voters seek a middle ground between jail and legalization, said Bill
Zimmerman, executive director of the California foundation that has
launched the Michigan campaign. He cites a nationwide poll last year by the
Pew Research Center for People and the Press, in which Americans by a
52-35-percent majority said drug use should be treated as a disease, not a
crime.

Michigan's drug czar is unreceptive to that softer line.

On Jan. 10, Craig Yaldoo is to deliver a battle cry in the state's war on
drugs to members of the Macomb County Prevention Coalition.

Yaldoo will rev their enthusiasm for the electoral fight ahead at a meeting
open to the public, at 2 p.m. in the Freedom Hill conference center, 15000
Metropolitan Parkway in Sterling Heights. He will call the foundation's
plan "the moral equivalent of giving our children rat poison."

Last week Yaldoo said the foundation's ideas on sentencing guidelines and
treatment plans "are all a hoax." He is a former Wayne County assistant
prosecutor, named last year to head Michigan's Office of Drug Control Policy.

Crucial to stopping the initiative will be the pavement-pounding and
door-knocking of people in community coalitions, Yaldoo said.

"They've always brought in teachers and parents and volunteers of all
kinds, anyone who yearned for a way to get involved" in fighting drugs, he
said.

For more on the Campaign for New Drug Policies, see www.drugreform.org