SENTIMENT IS CHANGING ABOUT PUNISHMENT IN DRUG CRIMES

What a difference a few years make. Back in the early 1990s the
country was determined to put criminals behind bars and throw away the
key. Politicians made great hay out of demands for mandatory minimums,
the end of "good time," and new "three-strikes-you're-out"
legislation. Rehabilitation was a dirty word and the penological
community dismissed it as a goal.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the dungeon. Americans may be
perfectly happy to see violent offenders put behind bars for extremely
long periods. But in state after state, the people are using the
initiative process to tell their government it has gone too far on
drug crimes.

This November, voters in Ohio and the District of Columbia will decide
whether to divert certain nonviolent offenders charged with drug use
or possession -- not drug dealing -- into treatment rather than jail.
The initiatives are similar to Proposition 36, passed by California in
2000, and one passed in Arizona in 1996.

These initiatives are gaining purchase as tight state budgets converge
with a backlash against abusive sentencing. The treatment programs
save money and help the very people who seem most redeemable. A study
by the Arizona Supreme Court in 1999 estimated the state has saved
more than $6-million in prison expenditures as a result of the
initiative. And in California, while the program is too new for much
evaluation, a state corrections official said the female prison
population has dropped 5.3 percent in a year. When women go to prison
it is typically for drug crimes.

Treatment for addicts isn't a new idea, but the fact that the general
population is clamoring for it over the traditional punitive approach
of lawmakers, is a veritable sea change. Maybe people have had it with
the hypocrisy of politicians such as Florida Gov. Jeb Bush whose
25-year-old daughter Noelle is in residential drug treatment after she
was arrested in January on charges of falsifying a prescription for
the antianxiety drug Xanax? Any parent would want the same for their
adult child, but Bush appears unwilling to guarantee the parents of
other addicted daughters the same relief. He has denounced a nascent
initiative effort in Florida modeled after Prop. 36. Even though the
initiative hasn't garnered anywhere near the signatures needed to
secure a spot on the 2004 ballot, his administration is already
engaged in a campaign to defeat it.

Another way the public is expressing its disgust over tyrannical drug
laws, is through an initiative on the ballot in South Dakota that
would alert juries to their power to refuse to enforce unjust laws.

The issue was sparked by the case of Matthew Ducheneaux who was
convicted of marijuana possession by a jury whose members later said
how much they regreted the verdict. Ducheneaux smokes marijuana to
relieve the leg spasms he suffers as a result of an automobile
accident that left him a quadriplegic. He wanted to tell jurors they
could disregard the law and acquit him based on the equities but was
barred from doing so.

If passed, the initiative would allow defendants to question a law's
merits and validity, reminding jurors of their inherent power to bring
their own sensibilities to bear.

Why are these issues going straight to the electorate, bypassing the
political branches? Because lawmakers have proven themselves utterly
unwilling to make rational judgments relative to drugs. Putting people
like Matthew Ducheneaux into the criminal justice system is absurd and
cruel. But it guarantees full-employment for special interests such as
law enforcement, the courts, and all the ancillary businesses who serve them.

Fortunately, voters are not beholden to those interests. They
understand the waste in tax dollars and the cost in human misery
associated with nonsensical criminal laws. That's why, in the nine
states, initiatives legalizing medical marijuana have been approved.

Now if only George W. Bush, Drug Enforcement Administration Director
Asa Hutchinson and Attorney General John Ashcroft would get with the
program.

Lately, this group has been on a tear, sending DEA agents on
before-dawn raids of California marijuana cooperatives to keep sick
and dying people from the marijuana they say helps relieve their pain.
For all the Bush administration's claimed fiscal conservatism, this is
the height of irresponsible spending.

The people have lapped the drug warriors. I bet if these raids were
taken to a national vote, Bush would lose by even more than half a
million this time.