LOST POLITICAL CAUSES

The undoing of Bill Bradley and John McCain begs for posthumous analysis,
and there is much of it going on. George Will, for instance, identifies one
lesson of the primary -- "that race has lost its saliency with Democrats."
Why? Because "race relations have never been better, and arguably would be
better still if there were less obsessing about them."

Mark Helprin, in a remarkable essay in The Wall Street Journal, reminded
Senator McCain that it is not an effective way of increasing the Republican
vote to adopt a rhetoric that soon sounded as though only Democrats really
make good Republicans. Mr. McCain's proposals were unintegrated, he further
complained, and one of them -- the limit on spending -- honorably rejected
by the common allegiance to free expression.

Some "causes" are known ahead of time to be dead, or sleeping, and ride
without protest in the back of the bus in campaign after campaign, but
someday there will be a Rosa Parks in the act.

Noah Pollak is a very bright student at the University of Vermont who has
written an account of a conglomerate assembly in November of the Students
for Sensible Drug Policy. The drug-reform people operate under almost as
many tents as the communist fellow travelers used to do: There were
hundreds upon hundreds of committees plying for one or another of the
Soviets' myriad concerns (Free Bobby Seale, Fair Play for Cuba, End Jim
Crow in Baseball).

The loose coalition that argues for a reform of the marijuana laws has a
very small cadre. The governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, is the one
successful living political operator who publicly bemoans the drug laws,
though you can add Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore. George
Soros is the patron provider of the movement, acting through the Lindesmith
Center, which is deftly managed by political scientist Ethan Nadelmann. And
there is Richard Cowan, the movement's senior journalist. He has just now
suspended his Web site, Marijuananews.com, after 40-odd years in the
struggle, probably to sit back, have a few tokes, and maybe come back and
fight again when the political weather changes.

It is interesting to compare the relative attention given over the years to
injustices, racial and drug-related. It is glib, but unsatisfying, to
dismiss the question by saying that there cannot be any such thing as a
drug injustice, given that drugs are illegal. That's on the order of saying
there isn't racial injustice, given the disproportionate criminal offenses
committed by minorities. Always there are distinctions that need to be made.

Suppose that the battery of cameras and reporters who bring to our
attention offensive treatment of minorities were to focus on drug victims?
Mr. Nadelmann says it neatly, that the "assumptions are that no one is
really bothered anymore by marijuana laws, drug arrests are declining and
prison sentences are light. And why defend these people anyway? They're
probably rotten."

But those assumptions, which underlie the continuing lack of political
concern over the drug war, are false. In 1998, about as many Americans were
arrested for marijuana offenses as for all violent crimes combined --
682,885. And 88 percent of those arrests were for simple possession.
"Marijuana arrests have doubled during the Clinton years, and have
increased fourfold since 1970. Between 1980 and 1994, the number of drug
convicts in federal prisons increased 850 percent; in state prisons between
1980 and 1992, the increase was 1,055 percent."

The assembly of which Mr. Pollak writes makes only modest projections. The
reformers would like it if five or 10 years from now the attitude toward
marijuana were as it is now in most of Europe -- relaxed, and treatment
encouraged and available for breaking the habit.

Probably it would be sometime after that that sophisticated Americans would
enlist in legions that cried out: Enough! Not one more person sent to jail
for puffing the weed. As a society we'll go only so far as to say: It's a
lousy idea to experiment with psychotropic drugs, but it's also a lousy
idea to forget your morning prayers, and we're not going to send you to
jail for doing either.

Mr. Cowan does believe, as do many others who attended the assembly in
Washington, that the Web world will make a difference: by generating a
knowledge of what it is all about, and of the disproportionate penalties
now imposed on the men and women who light up, and find themselves in jail
for a year or five or 10.