WHO RUNS THIS JOINT?

A fractured drug reform movement struggles for unity.

The organized resistance to America's War on Drugs seems to have taken its
political cues from Monty Python's Life of Brian: forming hundreds of
groups, adopting acronyms, holding meetings, bickering over trivia and
espousing conflicting political stances while the enemy runs roughshod.

Yes, Connecticut's drug reform movement certainly has its equivalents of the
Popular People's Front, People's Front of Judea and Popular People's Front
of Judea:

Three years ago Cliff Thornton left his $70,000-a-year middle management job
at the phone company to start Efficacy, a non-profit organization dedicated
to ending the War on Drugs. He and his wife, Maggie, work out of their
Windsor home full-time, telling anyone who will listen that rather than
enforcing antiquated and unjust prohibitions, the common sense answer is
legalizing and regulating marijuana and medicalizing hard substances such as
cocaine and heroin.

Mike Gogulski of Hamden juggles his 9-to-5 job at a computer firm with his
passion for stopping the madness of prohibition. Gogulski considered joining
Efficacy, but instead in January, he and a few others formed the Connecticut
Cannabis Policy Forum. Their mission is to remove all penalties for
marijuana consumption by adults in Connecticut.

Former state legislator and four-time mayor Bill Collins of Norwalk sparked
up A Better Way in 1994 to lobby for legislative change in drug policy. In
1995, he pushed for the Connecticut Law Revision Commission's landmark study
that eventually concluded the solution was harm reduction: that is, treating
substance use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice
problem.

Jelani Lawson, who serves on the New Haven Board of Aldermen, runs the
Connecticut Drug Policy Leadership Council in his spare time. The council
formed in 1997 to rally support for the Law Revision Commission report.

And over at Western Connecticut State University, the Nutmeg State's oldest
drug policy reform group carries the banner for NORML, the National
Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws.

War on Dopes

These groups represent only a few of the leaves of the plant of
protest that keeps growing in Connecticut and nationwide. Across the U.S.,
there are more than 400 drug policy reform organizations, including think
tanks, political parties and non-profit education centers, according to
Aaron Wilson of the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information.

About 350 of these have formed in the last decade, responding to the
government's escalating war on drugs and users. According to FBI statistics,
arrests for possession of marijuana alone have soared since 1992, the year
before Bill Clinton assumed the presidency. That year, 342,000 people were
arrested. By 1997, the number more than doubled, to 695,000. Clinton's
regime has arrested 2.8 million smokers to date, more than presidents Nixon,
Reagan or Bush. Of those arrests, 87 percent were for simple possession of
less than an ounce of marijuana.

While the generals in the drug war would point to these figures as proof
that the battle is being won, increasing numbers of people from divergent
parts of society are reaching an entirely different conclusion. In recent
years, federal judges, conservatives like William F. Buckley and cops such
as former New Haven Police Chief Nicholas Pastore have come out in favor of
some kind of legalization.

Their reasons are myriad. One arrest for even a minor marijuana-related
indiscretion can throw a life into turmoil. Based simply on an arrest,
before trial, the government can seize houses, cars and bank accounts.
Accused users are left broke, unable to afford counsel. The state Department
of Children and Families can use an arrest as grounds to declare a family
unfit and take children away.

The burden on the criminal justice system prevents cops, courts and jails
from putting their resources into ending truly violent crime. Thanks in part
to a prison system filled with minor drug-related offenders, a murderer can
spend less time behind bars than someone convicted of crack cocaine
possession. Housing a prisoner costs at least $25,000 annually. Connecticut
alone has about 16,653 men and women serving time, nearly a quarter of whom
are in for non-violent drug offenses. Ancillary expenses, such as health
care for prisoners with AIDS or tuberculosis, add up as well.

The drug war's tentacles stretch into virtually every facet of life --
whether it is random drug testing in the workplace, the fear of being pulled
over for driving while black or the ineffective Drug Abuse Resistance
Education program -- usually known as D.A.R.E. -- which, increasing numbers
of studies indicate, wastes classroom time and possibly goads students into
experimenting.

The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy figures that illegal
drugs cause an estimated 9,300 deaths annually, as compared to 430,000
estimated deaths from cigarette smoking. Yet drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who
runs that office, has a record $17.8 billion budget for 1999. Throw in state
and local police funding, and you get an estimated $50 billion a year
nationally going toward fighting drugs, according to Adam Smith of DRCNet.

Stoners & Suits

If strength in numbers were all it takes, the battle against
questionable drug policy might have had more impact by now. But toppling the
governmental Goliath has proved no easy feat for this band of stoners, suits
and grassroots activists.

Efforts could be further along if groups were more united. The more than 400
reform groups have almost just as many agendas. Missions range from
legalizing pot only to legalizing cocaine and heroin, to providing clean
needles, to shortening drug sentences.

Some say this diversity adds strength, because everyone picks at different
areas of the problem. "Never in the history of the drug policy movement have
there been this many people who have stayed in this long," says Thornton,
the founder of Windsor-based Efficacy. "The word is that it had to be a
multi-pronged attack."

That's why the Lindesmith Center, a New York City think tank, distributes
money to local reform groups such as Efficacy.

"Playing ball locally is what is most important in any democracy," says
Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith, which itself is bankrolled by
billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute. Plus, he says, small
groups can confront issues immediately as they spring up.

And there's been progress. In the last four years, five Western states --
California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington -- have voted to make
marijuana legal for medical purposes. In Connecticut, the legislature has
adopted cutting-edge treatment programs that attempt to shift the burden off
the criminal justice system.

Still, Nadelmann recognizes how growth paradoxically can create weaknesses.
"Any one issue on drug policy reform moves forward by disassociating itself
from other issues," he notes: The West Coast medical marijuana initiatives
passed by distancing themselves from decriminalization. An industrial hemp
law recently approved in North Dakota separated itself from recreational
use. Needle exchangers won't pull for methadone, the same way people against
mandatory minimum sentencing laws disavow legalization.

"Sometimes I get pissed when there are more and more groups," says Denny
Lane, who instituted the pro-pot Vermont Grassroots Party in 1994. "We
should just stick together and strengthen what we have."

It's a conundrum, Gogulski of the Connecticut Cannabis Policy Forum agrees.
"Everybody is pulling in different directions at the same puzzles," he says.
"We are all trying to undo the same knot, and we are all pulling at
different strings."

A Million Joints Alight

Nadelmann and others take comfort in history.

Abolitionists, women's suffragists and Gandhi's Indian satyagrahi were even
more divided than the pro-drug movement, but they accomplished more. "Our
level of internal conflict is in all likelihood less than that in the gay
rights movement or the civil rights movement," Nadelmann says. Indeed, he
predicts that as the voices against prohibition grow louder, internal
struggles will worsen.

Vermont activist Lane doubts that more division within the movement is even
possible. To date he has spent almost every penny he has working for legal
herb. Running the Grassroots Party from his mountaintop cabin 45 minutes
southeast of Burlington, Lane recently ended a six-year drought of living
without a car or running water. He's also been under DEA surveillance since
1972.

Lane dreams of writing a book titled The Nuances of Bickering and Infighting
Among Freedom Fighting Hemp Activists. "Too many people want to be chiefs
and there are not enough Indians." There's no money except from Soros, Lane
says, and that money isn't going to the grassroots types. It's going to the
suits.

Lane would like Soros to pay for a central printer for the movement and a
central legal counsel. Along that line, the American Civil Liberties Union
just assigned New Haven attorney Graham Boyd to work on legalization issues
in court, full-time. (See accompanying story.) Boyd is fighting two cases
now. But it's not the pack of lawyers Lane envisions.

Still, he says, "We get a lot accomplished with a little money." Indeed, his
leadership elevated the Grassroots gang to major party status in Vermont,
alongside the Republicans and Democrats.

While Lane chose the name Grassroots Party for solidarity with the
semi-successful Minnesota Grassroots Party, he figures a common name for all
these drug reform groups could lend credibility. But Lane then deals with
heads calling him at 3 a.m. asking, "Dude, where's the grassroots party at?"

Connecting the burners and book-benders is one of the movement's biggest
challenges, agrees Steve Hager, editor-in-chief of High Times. "There has to
be an event that galvanizes everybody and unifies all of the separate
issues," he says. "We haven't had the spark that transforms the millions of
cannabis users into cannabis activists."

The May 1 Million Marijuana March tried, rallying about 200,000 people in
about 30 cities around the world. The biggest gatherings were in London, New
York, San Francisco, Seattle, Montreal and Chicago, says organizer Dana
Beal. He wanted a million joints "alight" in one day, he says, and he thinks
it may have happened.

"It was the first time we've ever had a worldwide coordinated protest," says
Beal.

Even so, it wasn't the galvanizing moment that, say, the 1963 March on
Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech were
for the civil rights movement. "If it is a true coalition, then it builds on
consensus. It is very hard to do that with the stoners," says Hager. "It is
like trying to herd a bunch of kittens to focus and unify."

NORML Relations

The drug policy reform movement didn't start out as a mix of
pot smokers and policy wonks. It started, unbelievably, as a coalition of
doctors and lawyers.

In 1951, a Yale-educated lawyer named Rufus King, who had been a clerk for a
U.S. senator in Washington, began criticizing the Boggs Act -- the first of
the federal mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws. By 1957, King had built
a coalition between the American Medical Association and the American Bar
Association to restore the Bill of Rights.

King, now 82 and still living in Washington, says current laws prevent
doctors from prescribing drugs that could be of use to patients. "Doctors
should be up on their hind legs in outrage," he says.

As early as 1937, the AMA testified before Congress in favor of medical
marijuana. But based on the testimony of Harry Anslinger, the head of the
Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the feds
outlawed all usage. Anslinger, who held that post for 32 years, crushed the
AMA-ABA committee by scaring away sources of funding. King continued to
lobby and write books, but by the mid-1970s, he dropped out in disgust.

The splintering began in the 1960s, when beat poet Allen Ginsberg and
friends gave birth to Legalize Marijuana, or LeMar, in San Francisco. That
faded and in 1970, NORML opened shop in Washington, D.C. In southern
California, a group of heads called Amorphia formed to free the weed, and
the internecine bickering had begun.

NORML was the best and strongest of the litter in the early years. It had
better political connections and scored a grant from the Playboy Foundation.
According to NORML founder Keith Stroup, tensions rose when Amorphia --
which sold rolling papers to finance its activities -- told Playboy that
NORML was full of middle-class sellouts.

"We were openly fighting, trying to undermine their efforts, and they were
doing it to us," says Stroup. "Fortunately, before it became public, cooler
heads said we were on the same side." The leader of Amorphia became NORML's
West Coast boss, and its business manager moved to D.C. to keep NORML's
books.

The union grew and pulled enough weight to convince President Jimmy Carter
to consider decriminalizing pot. That momentum crashed in 1978 after Stroup
and White House aides were caught partying together with narcotics. Stroup
resigned, only to return in 1994.

Now, in his second tour as the head of the organization, Stroup says he has
noticed a drop in quarreling. "I don't want to suggest there's perfect
harmony," he says. "There are still a limited number of funders, and we
still have the problem of more than one organization approaching the same
person for what is the same work."

Compared to the $50 billion war chest held by the temperance folks, the
opposition is poor. "The overall funding for the movement, if you had to pin
me down, in 1999, I would say it is probably $6 or $7 million," says Smith
of DRCNet.

"The comedy is when the drug czar stands again and again to warn about the
well-funded, well-organized legalization cabal. I'm not sure which is
funnier, the well-funded or well-organized part."

Given the combination of fiscal woes and conflicting goals, some suggest
choosing a central spokesman for the cause might be the answer. "If you have
a charismatic leader and that person becomes the messiah for the movement,
it can help unify people," High Times' Hager says.

He envisions a leader like legendary hempster Jack Herer, the author of The
Emperor Wears No Clothes, a groundbreaking book on the "conspiracy" to keep
hemp illegal; or Dennis Peron, who fronted the 1996 campaign for
California's Proposition 215 on medical marijuana,. "But they are not
national figures, and they are not taken seriously by the media," Hager
says. "Back in the 1960s, it was easy for Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to
get national attention. Now it is relatively impossible to get national
attention."

Attorney King wants a well-known African-American, someone like Charles
Rangel, the eight-term Democratic congressman from Harlem, to step forward.
Rangel chairs a House committee on substance abuse.

Kevin Zeese, a 20-year veteran who once headed NORML but now runs Common
Sense for Drug Policy, another D.C. think tank, thinks the best model is
that of the early civil rights movement, in the 1950s.

"Under a unifying force, the civil rights movement became more effective;
then they really started to see changes in the laws. They really started to
see national legislation passed," Zeese says. "I'm not sure it would have
been achieved without coalition."

That's why he started the Alliance of Reform Organizations, which uses the
Internet to engage national leaders from Efficacy to the ACLU in regular
e-mail strategizing sessions.

Zeese acknowledges, however, that the civil rights movement had millions of
supporters, while membership in the various drug reform groups is in the
hundreds of thousands. "The difference makes the need for us being unified
even more important," he says.

Perhaps looking outside the movement for support will help. Zeese has formed
an even broader cooperative called The National Coalition for Effective Drug
Policies. He pens various missives to Congress and President Clinton, and
has attracted dozens of signatories, such as the Evangelical Lutheran
Church, the Children's Defense Fund, Family Watch, NOW and FAMM, or Families
Against Mandatory Minimums, which objects to federally mandated, stiff
penalties for illegal drug and gun use.

The problem is that these groups are only interested in supporting their
particular causes. For instance, FAMM approves of Zeese's prose only when it
concerns mandatory minimums. Julie Stewart set up FAMM after her brother was
sentenced to five years for growing marijuana

"Our purpose is to restore judicial discretion to judges," she says. "This
is not a drug issue for us; this is a justice issue."

Activists' inability to find an amicable aim doesn't surprise Nora Callahan
of Washington state. Callahan joined FAMM in 1994 while her brother was in
the can on cocaine conspiracy charges. He's been in since 1989 and at this
point, has 14 years left.

But because FAMM doesn't go far enough in criticizing drug policy, she
parted on good terms in 1997 and, yes, she established her own group, too --
the November Coalition.

"We go a little further in criticizing drug policy," Callahan claims.

It is, she admits, a little bit like Monty Python's Life of Brian. "We laugh
about it all the time," Callahan says. They rehearse the skit in the
offices: "'Are you the Coalition of November?' 'No, we're the November
Coalition. Fuck off.'"

And she knows that disunity won't free her brother.

Ironically enough, when she talks to her brother in jail, he says prisoners
find hope in the very fact that so many people are challenging drug reform
from so many different angles.

"I've thought about strategy. Should we all do the same thing? It's a huge
brick wall -- should we be barreling into the same spot?" Callahan asks. "Or
should it come down brick by brick?"