PROFESSOR LEADS THE CHARGE IN BATTLE AGAINST DRUG WAR

For all he knew, G. Alan Robison was deep in enemy territory. Arrayed
before him were the Texas City elite, Rotarians momentarily preoccupied
with a lunch of barbecued baked potatoes. Soon, the tweedy Houston
professor and drug law activist knew, he would have to drop the bomb.

Robison advanced to the podium.

Drugs are bad, but the nation's war on drugs is worse, he told them. It's
an abomination; an expensive, racist, corrupting farce, and, worse, it's
being lost. End the drug prohibition, he urged. Decriminalize marijuana.
Rethink the handling of those addicted to heroin or cocaine. That's the
only way to end drug violence, to return the nation to sanity.

Rotarians -- among their guests a local district attorney -- grew restless.
Club president Dennis Jennings, a local port official, chuckled to himself.
Robison was a good comedian.

"It was one of my tougher audiences," Robison later admitted. But the
gray-haired founder, executive director and chief proselytizer for the Drug
Policy Forum of Texas is used to chilly receptions -- and worse.

From small-town civic clubs -- he addresses as many as two luncheons a week
-- to the 10 p.m. news, Robison increasingly is visible on the front lines
of the war against America's $18 billion drug war.

In September, he picketed the Governor's Mansion in Austin, demanding that
George W. Bush -- who claims he hasn't used illegal drugs since at least
1974 -- grant pardons to some of the state's 28,000 incarcerated drug
offenders. This month, he championed the cause of a 24-year-old Houston
woman who lost custody of her children after smoking marijuana to ease
labor pains.

"Things are getting worse," he said, "not better."

Robison, whose rapid-fire delivery often fades into inaudibility, is a most
unlikely foe of drug warriors.

For two decades, he chaired the prestigious pharmacology department at the
University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. In 1979, he was the
first recipient of the National Academy of Science's award for scientific
reviewing. The 65-year-old research scientist currently is a distinguished
professor of pharmacology at the medical school and at the M.D. Anderson
Cancer Center.

He is past president of the Houston Philosophical Society.

"Back in the 1970s, and perhaps into the '80s, he was regarded as one of
the nation's finest researchers in the field of pharmacology," said Steven
Leslie, dean of the UT College of Pharmacology in Austin. "If you mention
the name of Al Robison to most senior scientists in the field, they will
immediately know who you're talking about."

Robison, a native of a small town in Alberta, Canada, already was
middle-age when he came to Houston in 1971. For the professor, the '60s,
that decade of hair, happiness and hashish, were only a blur -- not because
of indulgence in drugs, but because he never left the laboratory.

"I knew Kennedy had been shot," he said. "I would go to cocktail parties
and hear people arguing. I knew about Vietnam, but I wasn't interested at
all in public policy. I was a pure scientist."

All that began to change in 1972, the fourth year of President Nixon's War
on Drugs, when Robison discovered "something utterly insane" was going on.
At the time, Texas drug laws were among the nation's most stringent, and
possession of even small amounts of marijuana could bring a life sentence
in prison.

As a member of the medical school's admissions committee, Robison found
himself counseling bright college graduates who, though they might survive
medical school, would never be allowed to practice in Texas because of drug
convictions.

"They were sending people to prison for fooling around with this crap," he
said. "They were not letting them enter medical school when they could go
two blocks in any direction and get all the tobacco or alcohol -- really
dangerous drugs -- they wanted."

Marijuana, he believed, was relatively innocuous -- at least in terms of
toxicity. He was among the first researchers to study its active
ingredient, THC, in the lab, and he felt the toxicity of nicotine posed a
far greater risk to society.

He buttonholed colleagues about his concern, and uniformly was rebuffed.
"Look at the trouble we have with alcohol and tobacco," they'd say.
"Legalizing marijuana is crazy. It will make things worse."

"I really didn't have a good answer," Robison admitted.

Attired in coat and tie, the starchy professor attended a meeting of the
newly formed National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws.

"They thought I was a narc," he recalled.

Robison, whose father had owned an appliance store, was drawn to
pharmacology by a burning desire to "know how drugs worked."

"Just trying to figure out how drugs do what they do fascinated me," he
said. "I was intrigued by the mode of chemical actions that can make your
heart beat faster, or make you urinate or hallucinate or God knows what."

As a graduate student, Robison participated in a psychology study in which
he ingested the psychedelic psilocybin. Later, he took a number of mood-or
consciousness-altering drugs, all the better to be able to lecture on their
characteristics.

He smoked marijuana.

"Like many people who come to it later in life, I wasn't that taken with
it," he said.

In 1979, he was busted for misdemeanor possession when a marijuana plant
belonging to one of his relatives was found in his yard by police.

"It was right out in plain view," he said. "I just didn't think anything of
it." Robison was cleared of the charge in a 1980 jury trial.

Though convinced that the nation's drug-fighting efforts were misguided,
Robison's activism remained muted until he retired four years ago. It was
then, in concert with a handful of like-minded individuals, that he formed
the DPFT.

Under Robison's stewardship, membership in the group has grown from 15 to
about 450. Branch chapters have formed in Austin and Dallas.

Officially, DPFT's goal is to create a forum in which scientists,
professionals and political analysts can consider the success or failure of
the nation's war on drugs. Through such debate, the public can be offered
factual information about drugs and the issues that surround them.

In the emotionally charged atmosphere of the national debate over drug
policy, even that mission might prove controversial. But, as the group's
chief spokesman, Robison pushes much further.

"We are advocating the end of drug prohibition," he said.

"The problem with our so-called war on drugs is that it relies primarily on
the criminal-justice system to discourage drug abuse. Ending abuse is a
rational goal. A second goal is to make America drug-free. And the point I
make is that our present drug policy has failed to achieve either of those.
And an unintended consequence is that it now causes more harm to society
than the prohibited drugs themselves."

The policies advocated by the nation's "drug czar," White House drug policy
chief Barry McCaffrey, have "created the biggest black market the world has
ever seen," Robison charged. In its wake have come crime, violence, police
corruption and the incarceration of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders,
he said.

Robison challenged his opponents to rebut his claims. DPFT, in fact, has
offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who nominates a drug warrior to argue in
favor of punishing people for possession of small quantities of drugs. To
claim the reward, the debater must show up and allow his comments to be taped.

"They would love that," McCaffrey spokesman Bob Weiner said when told of
the debate offer. "That would enhance their status."

"They are the ones who need to offer rebuttal," Weiner said. "The rebuttal
is theirs to the fact that there has been a 13 percent drop in drug use;
the rebuttal is theirs to the fact that kids who see our ads have a reduced
proclivity to drug use. Theirs is to rebut that our strategy is not to lock
people up and throw away the key; theirs is to rebut that one of our
highest priorities is to provide treatment to those in the criminal justice
system."

"McCaffrey talks a pretty good game, all the things they advocate in
treatment," Robison said. "But two-thirds of all that money goes to things
that don't work, crop eradication, interdiction. ... It's an $18 billion
war on drugs, but I'd bet that it comes to more like $100 billion when you
factor in costs for prisons and other things."

Ending the prohibition against drugs is not a panacea, Robison admitted.
"If we make drugs legal, then we're still left with the harm drugs
themselves cause. ... Legalizations -- the drug warriors have appropriated
the term and demonized it. What does it mean? Legal like milk? Bananas? Or
like aspirin? Or like whiskey or morphine?"

"I really do believe in a drug-free childhood," Robison said. "And as
adults, it's our duty to explain to kids what drugs can do. That it's not a
good idea to use them. That it's not a great idea to fool around with
addicting drugs. I put the emphasis on children. If you can manage to make
drugs hard for kids to get, you can solve the problem in the long run. Most
people get hooked on drugs while a kid."

Heroin, he suggested, should be "medicalized." Rather than incarcerate its
users, they should be allowed to acquire maintenance doses free at
government-operated clinics. He cites as his model experimental programs in
the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Crack cocaine is more problematic, although Robison believes a first step
would be to legalize coca leaves for use in tea.

"I think marijuana should be legalized," he said. "But it is not a harmless
drug. It is dangerous, especially for kids."

Though the drug should be openly available, he said, diligent efforts
should be made to limit its advertising.

Such suggestions leave his opponents aghast.

Donald Hollingsworth, drug policy coordinator for Mayor Lee Brown,
McCaffrey's predecessor as national "drug czar," warned that marijuana is a
"gateway" drug to more insidious substances.

Tom Arp, assistant commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety's
narcotics unit, concurred.

"I could tell him of a student in high school, a football player who was
academically high in his class who got strung out on speed and hanged
himself," he said. "I can cite numerous personal accounts of people who
were straight-A students and now they're behind bars because of drugs. When
we make an arrest, we have the suspect fill out a form that asks about the
first drug used. I've probably handled several hundred in my career. With
one exception, the first drug used was marijuana."

Calvina Fay, a one-time Houston anti-drug crusader who now heads the St.
Petersburg, Fla.-based Drug-Free America Foundation, said she visited
clinics in Switzerland where heroin was dispensed to addicts.

"It was insane," she said. "It was very noncompassionate. They are not
helping people who could be helped. They are enabling them to continue on a
downward spiral. It would be analogous to treating an alcoholic with alcohol."

Fay said she talked with police in Switzerland about the heroin program's
impact on crime.

"They can't hold down steady jobs," she said of the maintained addicts.
"They have no spending power. No way of buying food, clothing, shelter --
any of the luxuries in life that we all enjoy. They go back to crimes. Even
when their drugs are supplied, there are other things in life they need to
exist."

Even Jennings, the Texas City Rotary Club president, took exception to
Robison's assertions.

"I'm not an expert on the issue in any shape, form or fashion," Jennings
said. "But I noted several instances where he made judicious omissions. The
facts that he spouted, though factual, were not necessarily complete. ...
And I never once heard him mention individual responsibility. That we're
responsible for obeying the law.

"I personally laughed at about half of everything he said."

Robison attributes some of the resistance to the DPFT positions to the fact
that "the people we're trying to help are drug users, and they're not
sympathetic victims."

"Trying to fight cancer -- that's easy," he said. "Everybody hates cancers.
Fight a war on drugs, everyone thinks that's a good idea. If you oppose it,
you're unpopular with the good people; the drug lords are the ones making
money off the present system. The only way you keep going is to think about
all the horrible policy decisions we've made in the past.

"Slavery. Women once couldn't vote; now they can vote. We used to burn
witches in Salem; now we don't. We used to have child labor. Little kids
worked 14 hours a day underground, and now they got away from that. Unions
couldn't organize. With the war on drugs, the only solace is that you know
it will end sooner or later.

"Despite the amount of harm, you know it's going to end some day."