WAR AGAINST MARIJUANA GOES ON

The war against marijuana took two interesting, and very divergent, turns
last week. In Ukiah, California, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors
placed a measure on the November ballot to decriminalize the personal
cultivation and use of marijuana. In Sacramento, the Assembly Public Safety
Committee voted to reimpose California's "Smoke a Joint, Lose Your License"
law.

Mendocino County is where the state's war on marijuana began 21 years ago.
In a headline-grabbing event that helped fuel his gubernatorial ambitions,
then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, accompanied by automatic
rifle-toting, flak-jacketed agents, descended by helicopter on a northern
Mendocino County garden. Since then, billions of dollars have been spent
annually on all aspects of the marijuana war, and the weed is more
prevalent than ever.

The message from this state of affairs is so plain and simple that only a
politician could miss it --- prohibition doesn't work. But the war on
marijuana has never been about stopping marijuana use so much as it has
been about pandering to a public that is legitimately concerned about
health and safety, especially the health and safety of children. Pandering
is where Governor Gray Davis and the Assembly Public Safety Committee come in.

The "Smoke a Joint, Lose Your License" mandate was devised by the Bush
administration as an attack on California's marijuana decriminalization law
under which possession of less than an ounce is deemed an infraction rather
than a misdemeanor. To this day, the feds withhold transportation funds
from states that refuse to take drivers' licenses from drug offenders,
regardless of whether the drug offense has any relationship to operating a
vehicle. States that don't wish to abide by the mandate can "opt-out" with
the signature of the governor. Thirty-two states, including every state
west of Texas, have taken advantage of the "opt-out" option. Despite polls
showing that two-thirds of Californians disagreed with him, former Governor
Pete Wilson chose to support the Bush mandate. That Wilson law is due to
expire in July 2000.

Now, to the shock of many of those who supported his bid for high office,
Governor Davis has made it clear that he wants the Wilson policy extended.

This, despite the fact that California will be forced to continue spending
millions processing minor pot offenders, whose charges would otherwise be
dismissed with a ticket, to come back to court in order to defend their
licenses. This despite the fact that the law Davis supports, AB 2595, would
make it a worse offense to have a joint in your pocket or purse at home
than to be caught speeding, driving recklessly, or with an open liquor
container in your car.

The governor and our misinformed state legislators need to pay heed to the
discussion now going on in Mendocino County. Sheriff Tony Craver signed the
initiative to legalize the personal cultivation and use of marijuana. He
did this not because he supports marijuana use but because as a longtime
law enforcement official he has seen that prohibition is a bust. If the
initiative passes, he believes it will "send a message to policy makers in
Sacramento and Washington that despite decades of efforts to suppress
marijuana, the number of users and amount of plants seized continues to
increase."

Mendocino supervisors were urged by County Counsel Peter Klein to perform
their ministerial duty of putting the initiative on the ballot, but then to
challenge its legality in court. Klein argued that the initiative was
unenforceable because it preempts state and federal laws prohibiting the
possession and use of marijuana.

However, as Supervisor Richard Shoemaker pointed out, Proposition 215, the
1996 "medical marijuana" initiative, purportedly had similar problems and
is now being successfully implemented. Supervisor David Colfax reminded the
Board that it would be "bizarre" to challenge the marijuana initiative
while continuing to subsidize the county's robust wine industry. The Board,
which has a conservative majority, voted unanimously to reject their
counsel's advice and move forward to a test of the voters' will in November.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it is in the county where the
pot war got started that it's now winding down. Mendocino County has
experienced many of the negative effects of illegal pot. Millions of
dollars spent by law enforcement, skewing priorities and clogging the
courts. Thousands of casual users arrested, sometimes imprisoned and left
with indelible marks on their records. The hypocrisy of preaching against
pot while pushing more dangerous drugs. A culture of greed and occasional
violence brought about directly by astronomical prices. The unseemliness of
an economy whose largest cash crop is an illegal weed.

Meanwhile, in the halls of the State Capitol, our leaders, eager to prove
how much they care about kids and despise crime, sip their martinis and
condemn pot smokers. Many of them have no doubt "experimented" themselves.
Even more, no doubt, have children who have. When those kids get in trouble
they are typically "diverted" from the system, given clemency due to the
extenuating circumstance of having a powerful parent. For the rest of our
kids, and ourselves, it's "smoke a joint, lose your license," or worse.