JOHNSON'S DRUG STAND GOES NATIONAL

With a little help from the Cato Institute, Gov. Gary Johnson is cutting a
new national image for New Mexico. Could our Land of Enchantment, our
little Camelot of federal dependency, become recognized as a Xanadu of
personal freedom?

Cato, dedicated to the Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty,
limited government and free markets (plus peace), has the intellectual
horsepower to legitimize the business-formed governor's instinctive
libertarian beliefs.

School vouchering, which would force the public schools into free market
competition, is one Johnson cause that Cato has argued for eloquently in
its publications. Some of the think-tankers reason from the premise that
education is too important in a free society to be under the control of
government.

Johnson, expressing faith that private entrepreneurs can do what unionized
educators have failed to do, received international acclaim from
conservative business publications for his hard-headed just-do-it stand on
school vouchers. The Legislature did nothing -- he was trying to govern by
ultimatum.

Now he's receiving even greater publicity for his drug decriminalization
rap. The governor has been interviewed by big city newspapers and cable TV
news shows. He has accepted an invitation to be the keynoter for the Oct. 5
Cato forum, "An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century."

Cato's approach is to equate drug policies with Prohibition, the failed
attempt by the federal government under the influence of moral zealots to
outlaw alcohol in the 1920s. Cato executive vice president David Boaz
testified before Congress in June: "The long federal experiment in
prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs has given us
unprecedented crime and corruption combined with the manifest failure to
stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability."

And his institute has done the research to back up that statement. The
federal government is spending $17 billion a year on drug interdiction.
Drug convictions account for 80 percent of the increase in the federal
prison population. But there has been no resulting decrease in drug use or
drug availability, says Boaz. "As long as Americans want to use drugs and
are willing to defy the law and pay high prices to do so, drug busts are
futile," he has said. (A column by Boaz praising Johnson's drug stand will
appear on Monday's OpEd page.)

Johnson says, more simply, that the war on drugs has failed, so let's put
the money on "the problem side." When he first called for a national
discussion on drug decriminalization, speaking both as a politician and as
a youthful user, the Journal was deluged with letters of support from all
over the nation. The fine distinction between advocating decriminalization
and just discussing it was lost on this group.

Suddenly, in the fast-moving national eye, the voucher governor had become
the pot governor.

And the publicity affects the reputation of the state, all of us. It's a
matter of image association, to use the Madison Avenue concept. Yes, New
Mexico is associated with a novel, athletic, governor who does not play
politics as usual. Think: youth, creativity, personal freedom.

The downside -- at least for people under 50 looking for bright new tekkie
frontiers in the 21st Century -- is the reassociation of New Mexico with
the '60s. Think: grass, communes, bad trips, bad movies like "Easy Rider,"
student riots, brutal repression. Last weekend was the 30th anniversary of
Woodstock, and the long National Public Radio reminiscence reminded the
nation that the Hog Farm commune that did so much to feed the hungry and
save the overdosed at the mother of all rock concerts was from New Mexico.

Perhaps it's a liberal reputation many people in the state enjoy and
deserve. We are one of the first to exempt peyote used in religious
ceremonies from the controlled substance laws, one of the first to
decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, which is a native
plant that has been a remedio for centuries. We were the first, in 1978, to
enact a medical marijuana law, a precursor to the California initiative.

And we elected and re-elected Gary Johnson. He acknowledged early in his
first campaign that he tried cocaine in college. That was the end of the
issue. Nobody brought it up again. Johnson, however, does not come from the
Sixties counterculture, the psychedelic marijuanos of the North. He comes
from the straight, risk-taking, entrepreneurial culture of skiers and ski
patrollers.

It, too, is associated with pot. As recently as 1992, supported by federal
war-on-drugs money, the Taos County Sheriff and the New Mexico National
Guard, using drug-sniffing dogs on the ground and a helicopter in the air,
set up a surprise roadblock on the road to Taos Ski Valley one Saturday
morning -- to catch skiers with joints. Some 3,000, many of them
out-of-state visitors, were questioned and detained in lines of cars for up
to an hour. It was a public relations disaster that inspired at least one
lawsuit and one publicized jailing of an Australian journalist for taking
pictures.

This bizarre exercise proved two things: First, New Mexico is not a drug
haven where the laws are not enforced, at least for outsiders, and, second,
the war on drugs is an expensive failure, just as Gary Johnson and the Cato
Institute are telling us.