'FAILED WAR ON DRUGS' SPURS PRESIDENTIAL BID

O.C. Judge Wants To Carry Libertarian Party Banner And Seek Decriminalization.

The epiphany was trigged by a young thug's war whoop, a triumphant
"yee-ha!" as he was led away in handcuffs for a short stint in jail.

The punk was 17. Dangerous. Mixed up in drugs, with a nasty habit of
robbing prostitutes and roughing them up.

Judge James P. Gray was sitting on the Municipal Court bench back then,
enforcing a plea bargain that was worked out up the food chain, in Superior
Court. The kid would be behind bars for a few weeks. It was nothing. "He
had gotten away with it, and he knew it," Gray says. "It was wrong."

Gray got angry. Day after day, the same low-level drug offenders shuffled
in and out of his court room. So much money spent on processing them,
warehousing them, setting them free and then arresting them again. It
wasn't helping anyone, he thought. And it cost so much that there wasn't
anything left to really hold the bad ones accountable.

The judge had been a lifelong Republican. A federal prosecutor who sent
drug dealers to the slammer. But on a balmy April day 11 years ago, Gray
stood on the courthouse steps and made a startling declaration: America has
lost the war on drugs. It's time for a new plan of attack: decriminalization.

This invoked a firestorm in Orange County. The sheriff vowed to run him out
of office. People wondered what he was smoking. Many of his colleagues
disapproved. But Gray remained steadfast in his conviction that the war on
drugs is an abysmal failure and is now taking his crusade national.

In February, the lifelong Republican quit the party, re-registered as a
Libertarian and is exploring a run for president or Senate. He has spent
the past three months traveling across the country - New York, Texas,
Nevada, North Carolina, Florida - and has emerged as a leading contender
for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in 2004.

He could be Orange County's first presidential contender since Richard Nixon.

Gray holds no illusions that he will ever sit behind a desk in the Oval
Office. He just wants to legitimize debate about the drug war, focus a
national audience on the issue, and force the major parties to deal with it.

"I want the Libertarian Party to make repealing drug prohibition the
centerpiece of every state and federal campaign around the country," Gray
said. "The bugaboo of all third parties is that so many people agree with
their positions, but when it comes time to vote, people don't want to feel
like they're throwing their votes away, and they go with the lesser of two
evils.

"But if every vote for the Libertarian Party is seen as a vote for change,
a vote against drug prohibition, we could win with 10 percent.

"If I can help my country turn away from this hopeless war on drugs, it
would be the largest and most lasting gift I could give."

THE STRAIGHT DOPE

Gray has written an entire book on the subject - "Why Our Drug Laws Have
Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on
Drugs," published by Temple University Press in 2001. Former Secretary of
State George P. Shultz is quoted on the back cover ("We can fight drug use
and abuse and still explore viable options"). As is Walter Cronkite
("Drives a stake through the heart of the failed War on Drugs and gives us
options to hope for in the battles to come").

The signs of failure abound, Gray says. One of every 32 American adults was
behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of 2001, according to a
recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice. In federal prisons, more
than 60 percent of inmates are there on drug-related crimes. In state and
local prisons, drug-related offenders fill up nearly a quarter of the beds,
according to the state Department of Corrections.

The war on drugs has resulted in tremendous prison growth, higher taxes,
increased crime, loss of civil liberties and a diversion of resources that
are needed to address other problems, Gray says. Laws get tougher,
punishments get stiffer, but drugs remain in plentiful supply.

His alternative would look something like this: Drugs like marijuana and
heroin would be decriminalized and sold at licensed pharmacies for
dramatically less than they fetch on the street. They could be taxed to pay
for drug treatment and education programs.

The rug would be pulled out from under the druglords, he says. The profit
motive would disappear, and with it much of the attendant violence. "This
would reduce crime a minimum of 20 percent the first year," Gray says. Many
things in our society are dangerous, but making them illegal is not the
answer, he says. Tobacco and alcohol are dangerous, but government
regulation ensures some control over their sale and use. "We have no
controls at all with these illicit substances, because they are controlled
by the mob," Gray says. "Have you ever heard of a drug dealer asking for I.D.?"

GRAY FOR PRESIDENT

The Libertarian Party is often the butt of jokes.

"The old one is, a Libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot, or a
Democrat who's against taxes," says Mark Selzer, southern vice chairman of
the Libertarian Party of California. "We're the un-authoritarian end of any
political spectrum. The live-and-let-live end."

The party attracts people who are a little right of right and a little left
of left. The editorial board of this newspaper, which has no control over
news content, adheres to a Libertarian philosophy of smaller government and
personal freedom.

In Orange County, there are 9,320 registered Libertarians - less than 1
percent of registered voters. But in the 2000 election, the Libertarian
presidential ticket received 382,892 votes (of 105.4 million cast, or about
3.6 percent). Gray hopes to nearly triple that in 2004.

Even without formally declaring his candidacy- he won't decide until the
end of the year - Gray has raced to the front of the presidential pack. His
main competition would be Don Gorman, owner of a small chimney sweep
business in New Hampshire; and Gary Nolan, a radio talk-show host from
California. He's also interested in Barbara Boxer's Senate seat, which he
thinks might be a more realistic goal.

"As a former drug warrior judge turned drug reformer, he speaks with an
authority on the issue that few can match," writes Ron Crickenberger,
political director of the national party in Washington, D.C. "Judge Gray
has brought credibility, dignity, and insight to the drug reform movement,
and we would heartily welcome him into the race for our nomination."

If the 2004 presidential election is as close as the 2000 presidential
election was, "he could be the guy who throws George Bush out of office,"
Selzer says.

That wouldn't necessarily disappoint the former Republican. "I believe that
John Ashcroft (Bush's U.S. Attorney General) and Osama bin Laden, each in
their own way, are working together to turn our country into East Germany,"
Gray says. By greatly expanding surveillance and detaining people
indefinitely without charges, "Ashcroft is an extremist who is creating
permanent damage to the Constitution."

Libertarians love the sound of that, but some are wary. "I like the man,"
says Aaron Starr, chairman of the Libertarian Party of California. "But the
drug war is one issue, and it's not the only issue we have. I don't want us
to be thought of as a single-issue party. ."

THE MAN

Those who know Gray well don't think the Libertarians will be disappointed.

"I respect him very much for what he's trying to do," says Dale Dykema, a
prominent Republican who sits on the board of the Lincoln Club, the local
GOP's fund-raising powerhouse. "He has only the best intentions at heart.
Jim is not a radical. He's just interested in creating alternative methods
of solving the problem."

Gray is a man who plays piano, who breaks into song in his chamber, who
wears ties with smiley-faces beneath his somber black robes. He spent two
years in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, teaching health and physical
education in a tiny Costa Rican village ("I probably set the world record
for brushing my teeth in front of elementary school classes"), was a judge
advocate and attorney for the Navy in Guam, has scuba-dived to the wreck of
a Japanese ship in Micronesia's Truk Lagoon and sat in the seat of a
Japanese Zero fighter plane more than 60 feet under water.

He goes river rafting with his two sons (one of them adopted from Vietnam),
plays tennis each afternoon during his lunch hour (squaring off with other
judges), and is writing a musical called "Americans All" (which celebrates
diversity and will be performed at a local high school this fall). Gray
brought his new wife to tears when he serenaded her with a ballad he had
written especially for their wedding, "It's Been a Long, Long Way to You."

He's the son of the late U.S. District Court Judge William P. Gray, a local
legal legend with a hard-nosed reputation for reform. The elder Gray held
the sheriff and Board of Supervisors in contempt of court over jail
overcrowding and inmates' rights, took a woman to lunch at a men-only club
to protest its policies and supported attorneys accused of being communists
during the 1950s.

Gray follows in his father's activist footsteps. He set up the Peer Court
program in 12 schools, which refers non-violent youthful offenders to a
jury of their classmates, who are often far more pointed than any adult
could be. He set up one of the first programs to force drunk drivers to get
counseling and blood tests as well as jail time. And it was Gray who
brokered the landmark $5.2-million settlement between the Catholic Church
and a local man who said he was molested by a priest as a teen, ushering in
a new era of accountability.

"He was brilliant in what he did," says Kathy Freberg, the attorney who
represented Ryan DiMaria against the Diocese of Orange and the Los Angeles
Archdiocese. "He called us in and said, 'Before we even talk about money,
we're going to talk about policy changes that L.A. and Orange can adopt to
prevent molestations in the future.' He said, 'You can make some real
change here.' "

In the end, both sides agreed on a new code of conduct for the church,
including a toll-free phone number Web site victims can use to report
abuse, educational pamphlets and a promise by priests not to abuse.

"He may just be the single most responsible person in Los Angeles and
Orange counties in protecting Catholic children from molestations," Freberg
says. "It was just so unusual to have a judge that really was insisting on
all of us looking at the bigger picture, at the impact we could have beyond
the courtroom."
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Register staff writers Ronald Campbell, Peter Larsen and Larry Welborn
contributed to this report.