NEVADA'S REEFER-ENDUM

On Tuesday, Nevadans will vote on an amendment that would legalize the
use and possession of marijauna. Will it pass?

LAS VEGAS - Two weeks before an historic reefer-endum that could change the
landscape of American life, Elvis Aron Presley comes striding into a shrine
of short-order happiness on the famous Las Vegas Strip.

"Thankyouverymuch," he says, smiling effulgently, extending a jewelled hand.

The walls of the Graceland Wedding Chapel -- open 24 hours -- are papered
with photographs of the King of Rock 'n' Roll, posing with the newly
connubial. (Jon Bon Jovi and Lorenzo Lamas were married here, but not to
each other.) Elvis has a ceremony to attend this very afternoon -- if the
bride and groom sober up.

I know, I know -- he's probably not the real Elvis. But his city is the
greatest of all U.S. monuments to fantasy, and in Las Vegas, even a
low-roller such as me owns the right to dream. Especially now.

On Tuesday, Nevadans will vote on an amendment to the state constitution
that would legalize the possession of marijuana by citizens and visitors
over the age of 21. If the measure passes this year, and again in 2004, the
Silver State will become the first jurisdiction on our weed-loving continent
to democratically countenance the possession, ignition and delectation of
the demonized herb.

They're not talking about merely decriminalizing pot here, as the Canadian
Parliament is musing, or reducing fines or shortening terms in jail. And
it's not about medical use for qualified sufferers; that initiative was
passed here last year. It's not about Bill Clinton's collegiate inhalations
or Ross Rebagliatti's Olympic gold.

This would be full legalization of up to three ounces anywhere in Nevada --
enough for perhaps a hundred joints -- a step believed to be unprecedented
anywhere west of Rotterdam. All sales would be handled through
state-approved stores, taxes would be levied and underground trading and
underworld trafficking would shrivel up and die. At least in theory.

It is exactly the sort of policy that the Senate of Canada believes would
best serve Canada's national interest. (From the age of 16!) But that is
merely a position paper, and this is the real thing, Question 9 on the 2002
ballot, to be decided by secret suffrage at the grass roots.

To the measure's proponents, success in Nevada would give a whole new
meaning to the U.S. mantra -- "Let's roll!" Opponents argue that Nevada
already has more than enough sin to go around, without turning Main Street
into North America's Reeferbahn.

Some recent public opinion surveys have Yay and Nay nearly deadlocked here.
Big Money and Big Government have been moving in from Washington in recent
weeks, sensing the importance of this contest as a national precedent. With
the California behemoth right next door, the stakes are enormous.

In Nevada, as election day approaches, the campaign has become emotional,
expensive, plangent, nasty and rude. So whom better to talk to than Elvis?

"I don't smoke it myself," says the King. "It makes me stupid."

"Have you ever?" I ask.

"Maybe about 10 times," he replies. "The first time, I think I was about 16,
and my friend and I had been drinking, and we didn't know what you were
supposed to do with it, so we ate it. We put it on Ritz crackers with salad
dressing and we kept asking each other, 'Are we stoned yet?'

"But I just didn't like it. When I smoked, I didn't want to do anything. I
just lay in front of the TV. It didn't seem that productive. I thought if
I'm really going to do drugs, I want to hallucinate!"

My Elvis, I soon discover, is a 33-year-old crooner from Los Angeles with a
degree in Fine Arts from UCLA who could pass as the twin brother of the real
Presley in the Blue Hawaii years. When he moved to Las Vegas about seven
years ago, Brendan Paul tried making his own music before he discovered that
he could filch more than US$200,000 a year as a great pretender.

"I guess I'll milk it for as long as I can," Mr. Paul allows. "I mean, there
are guys doing Elvis in this town making a hundred grand, and they suck."

There's more to my Elvis than small talk and big hair -- Brendan Paul
encapsulates the Nevada marijuana referendum, and the American culture of,
and futile war on, illicit drugs.

Twenty years ago, he lost a cousin, a heroin addict, to a contaminated
needle. She was one of the first women in Arizona to die of AIDS.

He remembers his father, a recovering alcoholic, warning him: "If you smoke
one joint, next thing you know, you're shooting up."

"Do coke one time, and you're addicted," the father would say.

"Dad, I've already done it," the child would reply.

Now he is a full-time entertainer, and he has a bride, a Southern Baptist
from Kentucky who reviles drugs and their ruinous toll. They have two sons
under the age of three.

And yet Brendan Paul, son and husband and father, has no doubts -- he will
vote Yes on Tuesday.

"I'm for legalizing any amount, even though I don't smoke it," he says. "If
alcohol and cigarettes are legal, then pot should be legal. We might as well
make it legal and tax it."

On this very same afternoon, America's drug czar is standing at a podium
just a few blocks from the Graceland Chapel. John P. Walters has flown in
from the nation's capital to campaign for a resounding No. He is a
well-spoken and amiable commissar with a master's degree from the University
of Toronto. Uniformed officers and men with wires in their ears bully every
doorway and block the street.

"I am not here as a federal official to wag my finger," Mr. Walters says,
standing before a couple of reporters, a few dozen anti-drug activists, and
staff members of a treatment centre called Westcare. But he wags it anyway:
"The states do not have the right to decriminalize and sell drugs!"

Under United States law, marijuana remains a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance
("high potential for abuse"). If Question 9 passes, the legal mess -- Nevada
versus Washington -- could be intractable.

The federal government is adamant in its avowal that marijuana is a gateway
to much more insidious dependencies. An information packet handed to
reporters covering the czar's visit to Nevada cites regular use as the cause
of "frequent respiratory infections, impaired memory and learning, increased
heart rate, anxiety and panic attacks."

The drug czar's kulaks hand out samples of a new national magazine
advertising campaign, featuring clever "warning labels" for reefers, ganja,
Buddha, blunts and spliffs:

Instructions: Cut out, roll around joint.

WARNING: Pot is Addictive. It Goes Something Like This: First You Smoke Pot,
Then You Keep On Smoking Pot, Then You Can't Have Fun Without Pot, Then You
Can't Do Anything Without Pot, Then You're That Skeevy Loser Who Hangs Out
All Day In Front of the Arcade.

"No community is better off with more drugs," Mr. Walters says, and flies
away.

In Las Vegas, he may be preaching to the perverted.

I wander into a shop a few kilometres from the Strip that sells
"tobacco-related" equipment such as blown-glass bongs, water pipes, and
T-shirts with five-pointed leaves on them that say things like "Mother Herb"
and "Don't Worry -- Get Stoned."

A man behind the counter is wearing a red T-shirt that sighs, "I ?
Strippers."

"I'm like a chess player," the clerk says. "I look at the whole picture. The
federal government is the thing that rules our world. If Question 9 passes,
we'll lose our highway funding. We'll lose all our funding. It's just
another way of keeping us under control."

"I assume you've tried marijuana," I suggest.

"So have you!" the man in the T-shirt rebuts.

But he's wrong.

He runs through the opposition's litany:

"Addictive? No. Good medicine? Yes. Gateway to other things? No -- that's
not true. That's all about peer pressure and weak tendencies. I don't blame
the drug. I blame the people."

I mention that one local official, railing against legalized pot, recently
warned that it would turn Las Vegas into "a Grateful Dead concert, 24/7."

"That would be an improvement," says Mister I ? Strippers.

The most prominent public advocate of Yes on Question 9 is a
special-education teacher and state assemblywoman named Chris Giunchigliani
-- june-killy-annie. It was she who pushed through last year's
medical-marijuana bill; it was she who ended Nevada's status as the last of
the 50 states in which merely possessing pot was a felony. Yet, she does not
seem to be a Skeevy Loser.

We meet at a city park, where the Yay side is taping a television commercial
that depicts a host of respectable-looking people in business suits
affirming their desire for legalized dope. Ms. Giunchigliani is positioned
in the front row -- a lovely, chatty, Boomer-aged woman in a crimson dress
and jacket, a portrait in sensibility.

Like virtually everyone I meet in Las Vegas, she has come here from
somewhere else; in her case, Chicago. (This city's population has quadrupled
in the past 20 years.) And like virtually everyone I meet, she admits to
sampling Cannabis Sativa.

It was back in the Seventies, she says, while watching Saturday Night Live
with friends. It made her hungry and a little high, but then so did Roseanne
Rosannadanna. Of course, weed was a whole lot weaker back then than today's
ferocious homegrown varieties, such as Vancouver's famous ass-kicking BC
Bud.

"It was so mellow," the assemblywoman remembers. "You didn't go out and get
in a fight."

Such is the essence of the Yes side's argument -- the theory of relativity.
As Ms. Giunchigliani puts it, "I think it's less addictive than alcohol,
cocaine or nicotine. It's an easy issue, if you can keep to the message:
people are going to smoke it anyway. I think it's time we stop making
criminals out of everybody."

But she may walk an easier road to Yes than other politicians -- she has no
children of her own, and she is running unopposed. (Her district in a
somewhat seedy part of downtown Las Vegas includes the Golden Nugget, the
Four Queens, the Lady Luck, and the Graceland Wedding Chapel.) Few of her
legislative colleagues have come out on the pro side, but Ms. Giunchigliani
claims numerous judges and district attorneys have called her to whisper
their off-the-record approbation.

"You hear people say, 'We don't want to tarnish our reputation,' " she tells
me. "But people come to Las Vegas because of the titillation. Why else come
here?"

DON'T BE FOOLED BY QUESTION 9, the opposition says in a printed handout.

The flyer continues:

- The marijuana initiative will increase injuries and fatalities on our
roadways.

- The marijuana initiative will increase auto, home and health insurance
costs for all Nevadans.

- The marijuana initiative will harm employers.

- Children who know an adult marijuana user are nine times more likely to
use the drug.

For the No side, the consequences of legal pot are clear and chaotic. Anyone
could smoke up at home, then drive a car, or a truck, or a school bus, as
sky-high as Otto on the Simpsons. Anyone could laugh at a workplace drug
test; hey, man, don't you know it's legal? Anyone could leave a pack of
state-sponsored bud on a shelf at home for the under-21s to find after
school.

"A lot of law-abiding citizens, if it was legal, they'd try it," Randy Oaks
suggests. He's a veteran Las Vegas cop, now risen to the rank of captain,
who is running for sheriff of Clark County. "I am adamantly opposed to
Question 9," Capt. Oaks proclaims. "I don't see any good that can come out
of it. As the bill is written, it wants the State of Nevada to farm
marijuana! Are we not just taking the sting out of the War on Drugs? I mean,
if it's bad, isn't it bad?"

We're at a luncheon meeting of the Nevada Seniors Coalition. Capt. Oaks is
among several candidates for various offices who have come to court the Grey
Power vote. Another is Brian Sandoval, a Republican state legislator
("Endorsed by every major law enforcement organization in Nevada") running
for attorney-general.

"It's not like drinking," Mr. Sandoval tells me. "You can have one drink,
and you're no danger to anybody. But with this, you're instantly a danger
that can affect others."

Mr. Sandoval and Capt. Oaks avow that they have never smoked a joint in
their lives. Neither has the captain's daughter, a high school teacher -- he
is certain of it -- but there also is a boy, now 19, who lives with his
mother in California. For the son's rectitude, he cannot safely vouch. But
the father's stand is unwavering.

"I had a girlfriend come over once," Capt. Oaks says. "And all of a sudden,
she starts lighting up a joint! I said, 'What are you doing?' I took it out
of her hand and flushed it down the toilet! I mean, she knew I was a cop!"

There is more to Nevada than Las Vegas; not a lot of people, perhaps, but a
richness of mountain, sagebrush and sky. So I search the gazetteer for a
smaller town in which to take the public temperature and stumble upon the
sublime: a hamlet called Weed Heights. It's nearly 600 kilometres from Elvis
and the Strip, 'way up toward Reno.

Weed Heights, Nev., turns out to be a small community of refurbished
workers' houses, perched above a huge and abandoned open-pit copper mine.
(Clyde E. Weed was chairman of the board of the Anaconda Company, circa
1954.) The vista is singularly ugly -- tailings and rusted machinery -- but
the people are as welcoming to me as summer rain in the high desert.

There's a small restaurant called the Patio Cafe next to the miniature golf
course. Enjoying lunch there are a mother and daughter, and two of the
daughter's five little kids. The older adult is undergoing chemotherapy for
cancer, and they both are smoking Marlboro Milds.

"I never once tried it," the younger woman, Amanda Mitchell, says when I ask
about marijuana.

"I did!" confesses her Mom, Gayle Snider.

"Mother!" Amanda yelps. She didn't know.

"I had three teenagers," Ms. Snider says, by way of explanation. "I wanted
to see what it was like."

"What was it like?" I wonder.

"I tried it at lunch, went back to work, worked like a dog, went home, felt
like I'd been on a three-day drunk and went to sleep."

"Your mother's a pothead," I inform Ms. Mitchell.

Both the user and the abstainer will be voting Yes on Question 9. "Why don't
they just legalize it?" asks Gayle Snider. "Anybody who wants it gets it
anyway."

The old syllogism again: Dope Springs Eternal.

Five kilometres below Weed Heights is the larger town of Yerington. This is
garlic and onions country, and endless hay fields, turning brown now as
autumn closes in. Hay is Nevada's biggest cash crop. Marijuana, the Yes side
posits, is second.

I wander into the Lyon County Jail and ask whether there is anyone in
custody for possession of marijuana. Yes, I am told -- there are many. Even
in this county seat on the road to no place in particular.

They steer me into a small cell to meet with my prisoners. The room has one
narrow slit for a window on the rolling brown hills, a stainless steel
toilet and sink, a wooden bench along one wall, and a heavy, clanging door.

Dale Reagan comes in and laughs when I ask whether he is related to Ron and
Nancy. He's 20, with "one kid already and two more on the way," and he
doesn't mean twins. He means two different mothers at the same time.

"If you knew me when I was doing drugs, I would have beat you up and taken
your wedding ring, just to get more drugs," Mr. Reagan says.

Even in Yerington, Nev., one may not be secure. It's his seventh time in
this cinderblock compartment for possession of one thing or the other. With
the dwindling residue of his old street swagger, he tells me that he was
doing cocaine at the age of 12. Yet he played varsity soccer for the
Yerington Lions, and graduated in the Millennium Class of '00. "I did OK for
a little dopehead," he says. "I did pretty damn good."

"Is pot the gateway drug?" he asks himself. "That's bullcrap. The gateway
drug is whatever drug you start on. And it's not addictive -- the weed is
the only thing that keeps me sane. It shouldn't even be called a high,
'cause you're not high."

Guess what? If he gets out of the Lyon County Jail, resident Reagan is
voting Yes.

"Sell it in the store and tax the hell out of it," he reasons. "If you can
go to the store to buy it legally, who's going to fuck with a drug dealer?"

Chris Giunchigliani, left, and Sandy Heverly are on opposite sides of the
debate. Giunchigliani, a Nevada assemblywoman, supports the use and
possession of a small amount of marijuana. Heverly, co-founder of a group
dedicated to stopping violent crime, opposes marijuana use. The bag on the
scale, filled with parsley, is used as a visual aid in her campaign.

QUESTION 9:

Amendment to the Nevada Constitution

Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to allow the use and possession of
three ounces or less of marijuana by persons aged 21 years or older, to
require the Legislature to provide or maintain penalties for using,
distributing, selling or possessing marijuana under certain circumstances,
and to provide a system of regulation for the cultivation, taxation, sale
and distribution of marijuana?