POT PARTY?

I was mildly shocked by some of the responses to R. W. Bradford's article
urging the Libertarian Party to use the drug issue as a wedge to gain
respectable vote totals and build the organization. It would be foolish to
take a viable idea like drug legalization and join it to a lost cause like
the Libertarian Party.

Legalization is poised for a take-off. Two governors -- Minnesota's Jesse
Ventura and New Mexico's Gary Johnson -- support it. Ventura did so before
he was elected. The success of medical marijuana initiatives across the
country is also a good sign, if only because it shows that people are
ignoring their rulers on this issue.

What the issue needs is a well-funded educational campaign to bring the
outrages involved in fighting the war into the public consciousness. If
George Soros were to decide that legalization is a better approach than
harm-reduction, he might start a campaign that illuminated the stories in
the book Shattered Lives (See "Victims All," Liberty, February 1999). This
would make the drug-war atrocities public knowledge.

I'm no Pollyanna, but I believe that most people would recoil at the human
cost of the War on Drugs if they saw the faces of middle-aged home-owners
gunned-down because somebody thought they might be growing pot, or if they
knew that grandmothers are serving 30-year sentences for selling a little
weed.

The Libertarian Party, on the other hand, has spent a generation mired in
irrelevance, trotting its nominees out quadrennially for debates with
nominees from the other nut parties and collecting something less than 1% of
the vote. There is no indication that its platform of near-total abolition
of government will ever have more than a microscopic constituency.

The anti-government program in general has floundered since the 1994
elections, while medical marijuana initiatives have succeeded, often against
strong opposition from politicians like Bob Barr and Steve Forbes, who
otherwise claim to oppose big government.

I'm not predicting a breakthrough on the drug issue. I always bet on the
forces of evil. But there is more hope for that issue than for the success
of the Libertarian Party, especially if the Party is tied down by the
suggestions that some Liberty correspondents make in the January issue.
These readers would send the LP into political battle with empty slogans
like "personal responsibility" and "getting government off our backs." Don't
hold your breath for anything good to happen because somebody shouts that.