CRUSADE'S TARGET: ANTI-DRUG LAWS

When voters in Maine went to the polls in November and endorsed the use of
marijuana as a medicine, it was more than a victory for cancer patients and
others who say marijuana will help relieve their pain.

For a small coalition of libertarians, liberals, humanitarians and
hedonists, the vote was another step forward in a low-profile but
sophisticated crusade to end criminal laws against marijuana and other
psychoactive drugs. Using polls, focus groups and advertising, the
coalition has selected and promoted causes that might arouse sympathy among
Americans, such as giving clean syringes to heroin users to prevent the
spread of AIDS or softening tough penalties for drug use. The most
successful has been medicinal marijuana, which has been endorsed by the
District of Columbia and seven states.

What brought together the disparate elements of the coalition, however, is
a far broader cause: changing the critical way that Americans think about
drugs. Proponents say they want to end a war on drugs that has packed
prisons, offered addicts little treatment and contributed to the spread of
AIDS. Some want to go further and drop criminal penalties for personal drug
use, or even make drugs legal.

The term they have carefully crafted for their goal is "harm reduction":
reducing the harm caused by those people who cannot or will not stop using
drugs.

"We accept drugs are here to stay," said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the
Lindesmith Center, a drug policy center set up in New York with money
donated by billionaire George Soros. "There never has been a drug-free
society," Nadelmann said. "We must learn how to live with drugs so they
cause the least possible harm and the best possible good." Critics say the
agenda is more ominous: legalization of marijuana and other drugs. At a
congressional hearing in June, the White House director of national drug
policy, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, warned of "a carefully camouflaged,
well-funded, tightly knit core of people whose goal is to legalize drug use
in the United States."

Sue Rusche, director of Families in Action, a coalition in Atlanta working
to help parents prevent children from using drugs, accused Nadelmann and
his supporters of systematically distorting the picture of what drugs do.

"Yes, we're concerned about children, but we're concerned about everybody,"
said Rusche, who likened Nadelmann to the tobacco industry. "He denies that
drugs have the capacity to hurt people, and takes no responsibility for the
consequences."

Nadelmann describes his position differently. "Drugs are not bad," he said.
"Drugs are good, bad or indifferent, depending on how you use them."

The movement's supporters range beyond the Lindesmith Center and other
efforts financed by Soros. Supporters include marijuana-smokers represented
by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML,
libertarians who argue that personal drug use is nobody else's business,
and old-fashioned liberals who castigate the government's campaign against
drugs as worse than the problem.

"The core is the people who to my mind get it, the people who connect the
dots," Nadelmann said. "We believe that the war on drugs is a fundamental
evil in our society."

The crusade to make drugs socially respectable has no precedent in the
United States, said Dr. David F. Musto, a medical historian at the Yale
School of Medicine and the author of The American Disease: Origins of
Narcotics Control (Oxford University Press).

"You have these groups funded by wealthy individuals that are a constant
critic of drug policy, and these groups use very sophisticated marketing
techniques," he said.

Surveys show that most Americans still oppose making illicit drugs legal.
While voters have been tolerant of letting ill people smoke marijuana, a
Gallup poll this year reported that 69 percent of respondents opposed
making marijuana legal for everyone.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of
California at Los Angeles, said, "When you look at all these medical
marijuana initiatives, they pass by big margins, but the governors and
legislators go the other way."

Because constituents expect their politicians to be hard-nosed, Kleiman
said, "a legislator who votes for medical marijuana could lose votes from
people who voted for medical marijuana."

Nadelmann said he commissioned a poll to learn whether voters would support
personal cultivation of marijuana; 65 percent of those sampled thought that
growing marijuana should remain a crime. The result of this research into
public attitudes has been the deliberately vague idea of harm reduction.

By casting the issue in friendlier terms that resonate across the political
spectrum, crusaders like Nadelmann say, they hope to induce Americans to
tolerate, if not embrace, the elimination of criminal penalties against
marijuana -- and as a few see it, the eventual legalization of all
psychoactive drugs.

Critics call the medicinal marijuana issue a stalking-horse for drug
legalization. "My guess is the real agenda is to promulgate marijuana as a
benign substance outside the boundaries of conventional medicine,"
McCaffrey said.

Nadelmann did not contradict him. "Will it help lead toward marijuana
legalization?" he said. "I hope so." But he said that reports of his
support for harder drugs have quoted him out of context.