DRUG-REFORM DILEMMA TOUCHES 3 STRIKES

SAN FRANCISCO -- With her bluntly cut blond bangs, pale blue eyes and quiet
voice, Ninon Mayrbaurl is not someone you would expect to be sent to jail
15 times.

The 31-year-old resident of Santa Rosa has been convicted of burglary, but
her major offense is what she considers a medical condition: a drug
addiction that may have started when she tried marijuana at age 7, snorted
cocaine at 15 or smoked crack at 18.

She has watched much of her 20s drift by in the concrete cells of various
Bay Area jails. After a few weeks or months back on the street, she is
arrested on another drug-possession charge or fails a drug test and
violates her parole.

"I would get out and do the same thing and end up back in jail. The same
thing happened every time," said Mayrbaurl, now a client at a
substance-abuse treatment center run by San Francisco-based Walden House.

There were 17,671 other stories like this in California last year. That's
the number of men and women sent back to prison for drug offenses they
committed while on parole.

They mostly smoked crack cocaine. Some smoked a joint. Some did heroin.
They're drug addicts.

Now, a group of wealthy philanthropists, drug reformers and medical
marijuana promoters have learned that a wide-ranging initiative they have
written will go before California voters to address this growing problem.

The Campaign for New Drug Policies measure, scheduled for the November
ballot, would require people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses --
including nonviolent prison parolees -- be sent to drug-treatment centers
instead of prison or county jail.

If they complete their treatment program, their drug offense would be
erased from their record. If they fail, a judge could send them back to
prison or jail for up to 16 months.

The measure would be the most significant reform to the drug laws since
California passed its 'three strikes' sentencing law in 1994.

"We're trying to treat drug abuse as a health issue rather than a criminal
justice issue," said Dave Fratello, spokesman for the initiative.

"We believe -- and the studies back this up -- that drug users are much
better served by enrolling in some sort of treatment services than simply
being warehoused."

Beyond almost certain opposition from the prison guards union and from Gov.
Gray Davis, who has become one of the nation's most conservative governors
on crime issues, other politicians and anti-crime groups are sure to work
against the measure because it touches the third rail of California
politics: three strikes.

The three-strikes law requires those with one felony conviction to have the
sentenced doubled if they commit another felony. Anyone with two felony
convictions must be sent to prison for 25 years to life on the third
conviction, regardless of the type of crime.

Under the initiative, convicted felons who stayed out of trouble for at
least five years would not be sentenced under the three-strikes law for
committing a nonviolent drug offense. They would be sent to drug treatment
instead.

Jeff Thompson, a lobbyist with the California Correctional Peace Officers
Association, said the measure would endanger businesses that hire people
for sensitive jobs such as teacher or bus driver, because drug offenses
would be erased from the books.

Thompson said the measure would forbid parole officers from sending someone
back to prison if he or she tested positive for drugs. And that, he said,
could endanger the public as well.

"One of the reasons (parolees are sent back to prison) is they don't have a
job and they are supporting their habit through criminal activity,"
Thompson said. "If they haven't been caught doing that yet, drug use is
generally a good indicator that they are back to their original behavior."

Other law-enforcement groups say they see troubling signs with the
initiative as well.

District Attorney Tom Orloff of Alameda County said that because the
initiative requires drug treatment, not jail time, for a first and second
drug offense, it might prompt defense attorneys to demand jury trials and
clog the courts.

Their clients would have nothing to lose by taking a case to trial and
trying to get an innocent verdict, Orloff said, since there would be no
threat of jail time if convicted.

Fratello, however, said the hassle, expense and stress of demanding a trial
means few drug offenders would take this option. They would more likely, he
said, take the drug treatment right away and begin working off their
sentence, with the threat of jail over their heads.

California would not be the first state to pass such a measure.

In 1996, when state voters approved the medical marijuana initiative,
Arizona included drug-reform provisions in its own medical marijuana measure.

The Arizona Supreme Court, which reviewed the state's 1996 law as required
under the initiative, said it has resulted in "safer communities and more
substance-abusing probationers in recovery."

The group that launched California's medical marijuana initiative is being
helped on the new initiative by a trio of wealthy drug reformers -- New
York philanthropist George Soros; Peter Lewis, founder of Progressive
Insurance; and John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix business
college.

The budget, coming mostly from these three men, was about $1 million to
gather the 715,000 signatures reviewed by the secretary of state. Only
419,000 valid signatures were needed to qualify for the ballot.

"For him, this is also something of a human-rights issue," said Ethan
Nadelmann, an adviser to Soros on drug issues. "The notion of incarcerating
people who are addicted to drugs just because they are addicted doesn't
seem right."

Some influential groups, including the state legislative analyst, have been
warning for years that California is ignoring a significant problem: Drug
addicts in prison are being treated like criminals when what they really
need is medical treatment.

An estimated 25,000 prisoners could be diverted from lockups and into
treatment centers if the initiative passes, saving the state up to $250
million a year in daily prison costs and up to $575 million to build new
facilities, according to the state legislative analyst, Elizabeth Hill.

Davis and the Legislature have since 1998 taken a balanced approach to the
prison overcrowding problem by asking for building more prisons while
increasing the number of drug-treatment beds in the 33-prison system and
expanding treatment programs for parolees.

Some prison-reform advocates argue that putting drug addicts in prison only
exacerbates their problems. Drugs remain easy to obtain in many prisons and
jails, smuggled in by visiting family members and friends and sometimes by
correctional staff.

Bill Kanios, 46, a San Francisco native who ran a successful construction
company until he succumbed to depression and his addiction, spent much of
the last two decades selling drugs. To him, prison was a place to find new
clients.

"Whenever I had a chance to get back into the prison system, my contacts,
my network system would reopen," said Kanios, who was released six weeks
ago from Solano State Prison, where he served time for a parole violation
for using methamphetamine.

"I told this to the parole board the last time they violated me. I go, 'You
people are stupid to send me back to prison because all this is, is a
business in the end.' "

The governor is asking for $126 million in the 2000-01 budget for various
parolee and inmate treatment programs, much of it for drug rehabilitation.
But so far the state only has 8,000 beds devoted to drug treatment out of
162,000, when an estimated 70 percent of all inmates enter prison with some
kind of drug in their system.