AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY

[...snip...]

For the last 15 or 20 years, the Republicans and Democrats have used what
they call "wedge issues," issues on which people's opinions are strong and
that can therefore be used to induce them to abandon their traditional
political behavior. The first wedge issue that we know about in American
political history was slavery, an issue that, beginning in the mid-1840s,
caused people to abandon their traditional political behavior and
established the Republican Party as the nation's majority party by the end
of the Civil War.

It seems to me that there really is a wedge issue that would allow
Libertarians to be victorious, provided we redefine what "victory" means. I
think the Libertarian Party would enjoy a great victory if it could get 4
or 5 percent of the presidential vote. Of course, that is not a victory in
the sense of electing people to office. But right now we are not even on
the landscape. We are not a factor in the national political dialog.
Getting 4 or 5 percent would put us in league with really credible third
party efforts. Perot got 6 percent. And there's a wedge issue that can get
us our 5 percent.

I am talking about drug legalization.

I'm not talking about medical marijuana; I don't think that impassions
enough people. That's a good issue to use at the state level, because you
can actually get a majority vote for it. But the surveys seem to show that
most people who vote for medical marijuana don't feel very strongly about
the issue. We didn't have revolution in Arizona when the state legislature
undid the results of the medical marijuana initiative there.

But marijuana legalization can get us our 4 or 5 percent of the vote.
Depending on which survey you read, which I suppose depends on how much
people are lying to the pollsters on any given day, somewhere between 5 and
15 percent of Americans claim to have smoked marijuana fairly recently.
These people are not all deranged loners sitting in their garret apartments
smoking marijuana; very often they have families. And most of their
families don't want to see them put in jail. Very often parents who know
that their teenagers are smoking marijuana have another strong reason to
favor legalization; under current practice they are liable to have their
homes taken away because someone in their home possesses marijuana. Even
parents who aren't sympathetic, who are ready to go out and hire a
deprogrammer to kidnap the kid and force him into a drug program, want to
keep their home. I suspect that some of those people would vote for a
legalization candidate because they don't want to lose the family house or
family car.

I think that the constituency for legalization is there, and I think that
if enough noise is made it is possible for an LP nominee to get 5% of the
vote by running on that issue. I'm not saying I'm sure that this would
work, I'm saying that the strategy is plausible. And I don't know any other
strategy that is. Ordinarily, I'm an advocate of testing strategies before
rolling them out -- and testing them on a very low scale. But I don't think
this is an issue that can be tested except at the presidential level. I
don't think that getting a congressional candidate to run aggressively
would work: most people are going to realize that it isn't going to make a
big statement if the LP candidate gets 5 percent of the vote in the 17th
congressional district. A good presidential campaign could easily run ahead
of a congressional campaign.

I have discussed this with Peter McWilliams, a person I thought might be a
good presidential candidate. Peter has AIDS and cancer and is using
marijuana to alleviate the nausea that is a side effect of the anti-cancer,
anti-AIDS drugs he is taking. Peter has two problems about running for
president. First, he can't leave California because, as a person who
publicly admitted to using marijuana for medical reasons, he has been
arrested and charged with a felony. Second, he thinks it would be a better
idea to have a celebrity candidate.

Well, I'm all for a celebrity, but if we can't get one I don't think it
makes a great deal of difference. I think, for example, that if Harry
Browne, the LP's most recent presidential nominee, would follow the
strategy I've outlined, Harry would be a wonderful spokesman. So would Ron
Paul. Both are highly respectable people who present themselves very well.
If either of them were running for president and talked about legalizing
marijuana, I don't think that people would be snickering behind his back
and saying that he's probably running to his hotel room at night to smoke a
few joints.

The important thing, however, is to give this new strategy a try.

We have invented the wheel and we have run it six or seven times, and
except in 1980, when we had a very large amount of money, our method has
resulted in less than half of one percent, no matter how good our candidate
has been, no matter how hard he worked, no matter how hard all of us
worked. As they say, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll
always get what you've always got." In our case, that means spending
millions of dollars and doing tens or hundreds of thousands of hours of
campaigning and getting so few votes that we remain irrelevant, even
invisible.

Making drug legalization the central theme of the Libertarian Party's 2000
campaign is not a magic bullet. It won't allow the LP to elect a president
or even a member of Congress. But it just might help us leap over the
hurdle of irrelevancy, that invisible barrier that keeps the Libertarian
vote well under one percent, that keeps our candidates out of debates, that
leaves us off the political landscape.