VOTERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST DRUG WAR

Five Of Seven Statewide Initiatives Pass

IN THE YEAR 2000, THE U.S. prison population hit 2 million including more
than 500,000 nonviolent drug offenders and on Election Day, voters
rebelled. In California, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Nevada, ballot
initiatives that challenge law enforcement's blanket treatment of drug
users as criminals passed by wide margins.

Leading drug-policy reform activist Ethan Nadelmann says the victories on
medical marijuana, treatment instead of jail and limiting police property
seizures signal a desire for a new approach. "The success or failure of
drug policy should be evaluated," he says, "not primarily according to
whether drug use went up or down last year, but whether the death, disease,
crime and suffering associated with both drug use and drug policy go up or
down."

In Colorado and Nevada, voters gave patients permission to use pot upon a
doctor's recommendation, and registries are to be created to protect users
from prosecution. This brings to nine the number of states that have
approved medical marijuana including Maine, Alaska, Oregon, Washington,
Arizona, Hawaii and California despite opposition from the federal drug
czar's office.

Law enforcement took another blow in Oregon and Utah, where initiatives to
restrict police from keeping seized property passed by large margins.

In virtually every state, police departments and anti-drug task forces in
particular - earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year by confiscating
property from suspected users or dealers, selling it and retaining the
proceeds, even if no one is convicted of a crime.

Harry Detwiler, a retired special-education teacher in Ashland, Oregon, put
a face on the otherwise impenetrable topic of asset forfeiture by telling
his story on radio talk shows and commercials. Detwiler sold some rural
property to a man who then grew marijuana on the land; Detwiler's name
remained on the land title.

During a police raid on Detwiler's house, officers found $35,000 in cash,
his life savings, stored in a safe (he didn't want to keep it in a bank).
They seized the money, and despite the fact that Detwiler was never
convicted or even accused of being involved with marijuana, he never got it
back. "I'm one of tens of thousands of innocent victims out here who have
no place to turn," he says.

The logic behind civil asset forfeiture, says David Smigelski, spokesman
for the Oregon campaign, "was to use drug-dealer money to pay the salaries
of drug investigators. In the early days, in the Eighties, it was supposed
to be limited to huge forfeitures, but as it filtered down into municipal
police departments, it just became a big money grab." In fiscal 1998,
federal agencies reported receiving $697 million in forfeited assets.

An initiative in Massachusetts would have redirected the money that results
from seized property in drug cases into addiction-treatment programs.

It failed, organizers say, because those who might receive treatment as an
alternative to jail included some street dealers, if they could prove they
were selling drugs to pay for their own habits.

Opponents of the initiative, which included all eleven district attorneys
in the state and almost every police chief, ran radio ads warning that the
initiative would benefit drug dealers. "It appears," says Bill Zimmerman,
executive director of the Campaign for New Drug Policies, "that the
sympathy people have for drug users does not extend even to the lowest
level of drug dealers."

Six of the seven anti-drug-war initiative were funded, in part, by three
billionaires who oppose legalizing hard drugs but take pride in using their
money to help compel a debate on the drug war. George Soros, a New York
financier and one of the top philanthropists in the world; Peter Lewis,
chairman of the Progressive Insurance Company; and John Sperling, a former
businessman and chairman of the University of Phoenix, each gave $2 million
for the six initiatives. Of the $6 million, about $3 million was directed
to Proposition 36 in California, the boldest of the proposed reforms.
Proposition 36 mandates that when someone is convicted of simple
possession, or other personal drug-use violations, treatment must be
offered as an alternative to jail. If the offender does not complete the
treatment program, or otherwise violates probation, he can be incarcerated
for one to three years.

The landslide passage of Proposition 36 - sixty-one to thirty-nine
percent - might be interpreted simply as a sign of taxpayer fatigue.

With the largest prison system in the U.S., at 162,000 inmates, California
is feeling the cost, at roughly $20,000 per prisoner per year. California's
nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office has estimated that Prop 36 will
divert about 36,000 people per year from the state's prisons and jails into
treatment programs.

Many of these users are nonviolent parolees who would have been sent back
to prison by failing a drug test. Since the cost of treating people is
about $4,000 per year, the LAO estimated that the measure would save state
and local governments $290 million per year and would allow legislators to
cancel the planned construction of a new prison, a one-time savings of half
a billion dollars.

But saving money was not the only factor in the success of Prop 36.
Traumatized parents of drug addicts played a key role in persuading voters
that treatment, with the threat of prison, was a rational option for drug
users with no serious prior offenses.

Pushing users into prison doesn't work, says one such mother, Gretchen
Burns Bergman of San Diego, whose heroin-addicted son was sent to jail for
relapses three times, worsening his problem. "When they're in the midst of
their disease, homeless, dying, any kind of threats usually don't make much
difference to them, even prison," she says. Before the initiative was
drafted, Bergman had formed a group of parent activists; after becoming the
Prop 36 chairwoman, she put her network behind it. "San Diego was the most
active region for us," says Dave Fratello, who helped r draft the
initiative. He notes that libertarian activists were chagrined that Prop 36
made treatment compulsory.

One failure at the ballot box, the initiative in Alaska to legalize
marijuana, was not supported by the two best-funded drug-reform groups,
Campaign for New Drug Policies and Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation. "At this point, legalization of recreational drug use will not
be approved by a majority of voters in any state," says Zimmerman. "For
that reason, we're not going to waste our time trying to pass laws that
can't succeed on Election Day. At the local level, however, voters approved
reducing pot possession to a civil violation, like a traffic ticket, in
three voting districts in Massachusetts and in Mendocino County, California.

Focusing on recreational pot use can seem like a luxury to those who seek
to help hard-core drug addicts in prison. "Law enforcement thinks they're
dealing with a behavioral problem and can use tough love," says Dr. Gary
Jaeger, president-elect of the California Society of Addiction Medicine.
"Tough love is not a way to treat a primary disease of the brain."

As the prices of heroin and cocaine continue to fall, new illegal narcotics
enter the market and marijuana arrests skyrocket, ballot initiatives will
only become more crucial.

Says Nadelmann, "We see Congress and the White House as the last place
where we'll see sensible drug policy being implemented."