SMALL BUT FORCEFUL COALITION WORKS TO COUNTER U.S. WAR ON DRUGS

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 the nation's 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, like 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 A. Nadelmann, director of
the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy center set up in New York with money
donated by the billionaire George Soros. "There never has been a drug-free
society," Mr. 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: the legalization of marijuana and
other drugs. At a Congressional hearing in June, the White House director
of national drug policy, Gen. Barry R. 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 Mr. 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 Ms. Rusche, who likened Mr. Nadelmann to the tobacco industry. "He
denies that drugs have the capacity to hurt people, and takes no
responsibility for the consequences."

Mr. 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 Mr. 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," Mr. 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, Professor
Kleiman said, "a legislator who votes for medical marijuana could lose
votes from people who voted for medical marijuana."

Mr. 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 Mr. 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," General
McCaffrey said.

Mr. 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.

Mr. Nadelmann has advised the campaign putting medicinal marijuana on state
ballots, which is spearheaded by a group calling itself Americans for
Medical Rights, with no mention of marijuana. The campaign's director, Bill
Zimmerman, explained, "You pick the name with a view toward winning support
for the organization." Not all critics of government drug policy want to
make illicit drugs legal.

Some assert that prohibition has not stopped drug use. Others say that
money would be better spent treating addicts who commit crimes rather than
locking them up.

Mr. Nadelmann wants to enlist such people in his cause of repealing all
penalties for drug use. "What we reformers do is to use these coalitions on
one issue to educate our allies about the broader implications of the drug
war," he said.

Rob Stewart, a senior policy analyst for the Drug Policy Foundation,
another group in Washington supported by Mr. Soros, said that lifting
criminal penalties for marijuana use would be sufficient. Writing in the
group's newsletter, he explained, "decriminalization makes the point that
adults should not be arrested for using marijuana as they would use a martini."

Mr. Stewart described the Drug Policy Foundation as "agnostic" about other
illicit drugs. But its founder, Arnold S. Trebach, told journalists in 1997
that everything from cocaine and heroin to steroids should be freely available.

Mr. Nadelmann objects to stigmatizing recreational drug use. "People shall
not be discriminated against based on the substances they consume," he
said. "The extension of the notion of equality is going to have to include
drug users."

The American Civil Liberties Union also endorses the right to consume
drugs. Ira Glasser, its director, said this year, "The A.C.L.U.'s position
is basically that criminal prohibition is inappropriate in matters that
involve a person's own behavior."

Mr. Glasser is also chairman of the Drug Policy Foundation. Holding both
posts, he said, poses no conflict of interest.

Mr. Nadelmann said that a fresh initiative on medicinal marijuana would be
voted on next year in Colorado, where an earlier referendum was declared
illegal, and in Nevada, where the proposal must be approved twice. Other
states that have passed such initiatives, he said, would be encouraged to
get involved in producing and distributing marijuana for medicinal
purposes.