THE YEAR OF COMMON SENSE?

This year was shaping up to be the year that Nevada finally started to
inject some common sense into its Draconian drug laws, albeit a small,
narrowly tailored and entirely conventional bit of common sense. But on an
issue that has so long gone without, a single step in the right direction
can make up for years of ignoring reality.

Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, had reintroduced her bill
to reduce the penalty for possessing one ounce or less of marijuana from a
felony to a misdemeanor. She'd tried it back in 1999, and it went nowhere.

Voters in neighboring California, meanwhile, had overwhelmingly voted to
legalize marijuana for medical use, for patients who had cancer, AIDS,
glaucoma or other ailments that the drug seems to help. Voters in Nevada,
required to twice pass constitutional amendments, had at the end of 2000
reaffirmed their 1998 support of medical marijuana.

And buttressing these developments, a commission empaneled by the Nevada
Supreme Court last summer also recommended that those caught with small
amounts of marijuana be charged with misdemeanors, not felonies. It was a
repeat of a 1994 commission recommendation that never went anywhere in
Carson City.

Everything, it seemed, was going the right way -- assuming you believe that
casual marijuana users shouldn't be technically classified as felons, even
if most arrests of small time users in Clark County are eventually pleaded
down to misdemeanors anyway.

And then came Jessica Williams.

The former exotic dancer who'd been smoking marijuana before running down
six teens doing roadside trash pickup as community service brought the
illicit use of the drug to the fore. Day after day, headlines and newscasts
explored what effect, if any, the drug had had on her ability to drive, and
whether it was responsible for the March 19 accident. Jurors eventually
decided not to find Williams guilty of driving under the influence of
marijuana; instead, they cited her for driving with a prohibited substance
in her blood, which carries the same penalty. That law, Williams attorney
John Watkins says, won't stand up on appeal, nor should it.

But will Giunchigliani's bill be dragged down because of the Williams case?

The assemblywoman says no. "I just don't see it as an issue here," she
says. "It really doesn't fit to what we're trying to do." What she's trying
to do, she says, is mirror the current practice in Clark County, which is
to plead each small-amount case to a misdemeanor anyway. District Attorney
Stewart Bell says his office is too busy focusing on violent crime and
repeat offenders to worry about casual marijuana users. "It (the
Giunchigliani bill) isn't going to make much difference to us," he says.

It may be a different story in the rural areas of the state, which have few
violent crimes but take offenses like marijuana use a little more
seriously. Giunchigliani says the Nevada Division of Investigations, the
statewide drug-fighting agency, opposed her bill in 1999.

In addition to the "de-felonization" of small amounts of marijuana,
Giunchigliani's bill would codify how medical patients get marijuana,
including a statewide registry, a criminal background check (to weed out
would-be traffickers) and a special card identifying patients eligible to
get the drug. She says she has to be careful, because the federal
government (which has at least two major agencies, the FBI and the Drug
Enforcement Administration, dedicated to fighting drugs) isn't too keen on
states that actually exercise the 10th Amendment states' rights doctrine
and allow sick people to smoke dope.

Although the conventional wisdom is that politicians who take on the drug
laws do so at their electoral peril, Giunchigliani isn't worried. "My
people know where I stand on this issue. I don't hide it," she says. "It
(her bill) doesn't condone (marijuana use). It doesn't advocate drug use.
It just says that we don't think you're a criminal just because you have an
ounce or less or marijuana."

It's a little bit of common sense. But is anybody listening?