POT POLITICS

Or "Dude, Where's The Grassroots Party At?"

Will Disjointed Drug Reformers Burn Themselves Out?

The hundreds of groups that form the drug policy reform movement nationwide
seem to have taken their political cues from Monty Python's Life of Brian.
While the organized resistance to America's official war on drugs is not a
comedy set in Christ's Jerusalem, a look inside the movement reveals
reformers doing exactly what makes Life of Brian so hilarious: adopting
acronyms, holding meetings, bickering over trivialities 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 job in middle
management 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 legalization and regulation of
marijuana, and the medicalization of 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 Alderman, 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.

These groups represent only a few of the leaves of the plant of protest that
keeps growing both in Connecticut and nationwide. Across the U.S., there are
more than 400 drug policy reform organizations that include think tanks,
political parties and non-profit education centers, according to Aaron
Wilson, who works for the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information.
About 350 of these have formed in the last decade.

They have formed to respond 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, that number
had jumped to 695,000. Clinton's regime has arrested 2.8 million smokers to
date, more than presidents Nixon, Reagan or Bush. Data shows that 87 percent
of those arrested were for simple possession of less than an ounce or 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 conservatives from William Buckley to 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. The government can invoke asset
forfeiture laws and seize property, including houses, cars and bank
accounts. Accused users are left broke, unable to afford legitimate counsel.
The Department of Children and Families can use an arrest as grounds to
declare an unfit family, and break up the family unit.

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 an overburdened jail 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, about 23.8
percent of whom are in for non-violent drug offenses. The ancillary
expenses, such as health care for the prisoner with AIDS or tuberculosis,
add up as well.

Even for those not arrested, the 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 on the highway for driving while black, or the
ineffective Drug Abuse Resistance Education, which increasing numbers of
studies indicate wastes valuable classroom time and possibly goads students
into experimenting.

Yet in 5,000 years of use, marijuana has never been credibly linked with a
death. The Office of National Drug Control Policy figures that illegal drugs
cause an estimated 9,300 deaths annually, as compared to the 430,000
estimated deaths from cigarette smoking. Yet drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who
runs the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has a record $17.8 billion
budget for 1999. Throw in the state and local police funding, and Adam Smith
of DRCNet -- the Drug Reform Coalition Network, estimates national spending
for fighting drugs is
$50 billion a year.

If strength in numbers were all it takes, the battle against questionable
drug policy might have had a larger policy 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, however, if groups were more united. The
more than 400 reform groups have almost just as many agendas. Missions range
from wanting to legalize pot only to legalizing cocaine and heroin, to
providing clean needles, to shortening the sentences of drug offenders.

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," Thornton says.
"The word is that it had to be a multi-pronged attack."

Others get angry about all the johnny-come-latelys. "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."

And others insist the diversity and the apparent working at cross purposes
is exactly what is necessary for success. Take Ethan Nadelmann, director of
the Lindesmith Center in New York City. The Open Society Institute,
bankrolled by Greek billionaire George Soros, finances Nadelmann's think
tank, which distributes money to local
reform groups such as Efficacy.

The movement needs numbers of community groups, Nadelmann says. "Playing
ball locally is what is most important in any democracy." Plus, small sizes
can confront issues immediately as they spring up, he says.

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 says. The West coast medical marijuana initiatives
passed by distancing themselves from decriminalization. The 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. "That paradox may be fading, but it slows things
down," Nadelmann says. That contradiction is vital, maintains Chuck Thomas
of the D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project. "If you lump the issues
together, you lose supporters for any of the particular issues that might
have done well on their own merits," he says.

Despite the various factions, some inroads have been made. On the West
Coast, in the last four years, five states -- California, Arizona, Nevada,
Oregon and Washington -- have voted to make marijuana legal for medical
purposes. In Connecticut, legislative changes have produced cutting edge
treatment programs that attempt to shift the burden off of the criminal
justice system.

Still, it's a conundrum, Gogulski of the Connecticut Cannabis Police 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."

Nadelmann, Thomas 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 accomplished more. "When my friends and colleagues
bemoan the growing elements of conflict within this movement, my response is
'Get real,'" Nadelmann says. "Our level of internal conflict is in all
likelihood less than that in the gay rights movement or the civil rights
movement." 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 to work for legal
herb. Running the Grassroots Party from his mountain top 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. Chapter outlines to date would
feature egos, agendas and personality clashes. "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 spend money on a central printer for the movement
and a central 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. Boyd is fighting two cases now. But it's not the pack
of lawyers Lane envisions.

Otherwise, he says, "We get a lot accomplished with a little money." Indeed,
his leadership elevated the Grassroots gang to major party status, alongside
Vermont's 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 "a'light" 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. "It was successful, but one
always wishes it was more successful."

Even so, it wasn't the galvanizing moment that, say, the 1963 March on
Washington and Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was 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," says.

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 that the current laws
prevent doctors from prescribing drugs that could be of use to patients:
"Doctors should be up on their hind legs in outrage," says King. The doctors
were the first on board. As early as 1937, the AMA testified in favor of
medical marijuana before Congress. 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 onto that
post for 32 years, crushed the AMA-ABA committee by scaring away sources of
funding. King continued to work, lobbying elected officials and writing
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 in the
late 1960s. 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 by then, 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 Keith Stroup, the founder of NORML, tensions rose when Amorphia
- -- which sold rolling papers to finance its activities -- told Playboy that
NORML was full of middle-class sell-outs.

"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 decriminalization of pot. That momentum crashed in 1978 after
NORML founder 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."

Attorney King, then retired from the full-time practice of law, also
returned to the fold. In 1986 his friend Arnold Trebach invited him to the
advisory board of the infant Drug Policy Foundation, another think tank. Ira
Glasser, the head of the ACLU, is also on the board.

King resigned last week at the annual DPF conference in Bethseda, Maryland.
Once again, he says, he was disillusioned at the slow pace of change and the
fractured movement.

Last week's DPF conference -- attended by leaders like East Haven's Lawlor
and the Lindesmith's Nadelmann -- was held to hash out ideas, plans and
programs for cooperation. But Hamden activist Gogulski sat through sessions
including a panel discussion about what direction the reform movement takes
from next, and says the conference never really got around to dealing with
it. "With the exception of one out of the six speakers, that question wasn't
addressed," he says. Only Deborah Small, from the Lindesmith Center,
addressed the idea of compromise
over pursuing ideology.

The differences between the stoners and the suits are magnified by the fight
over funding, especially when miscommunication and competition leads similar
groups to approach the same foundations for money. Compared to the $50
billion war chest held by the temperance folks, the opposition is poor. "The
overall funding for the [drug reform]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 issue has grown faster than the funding," he adds. "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 ans-wer. "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 campaign to pass California's
ballot proposition 215 in 1996, which was financed by Soros. "Those two
would be the closest, but they are not national figures, and they are not
taken seriously by the media," he 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," Hager concludes. Even California's Peter
McWilliams, an AIDS patient unable to attain marijuana despite the
referendum, can't get national press, and his book, Ain't Nobody's Business
If You Do is a New York Times bestseller.

Attorney King wants a well-known African-American, someone like Charles
Rangel, the eight-term Democratic congressman from Harlem, to step forward.
Rangel chairs the select committee on substance abuse. "He was a real hawk.
I've got Charlie eating out of my hand now," King says. "He put in a bill to
equalize cocaine crack penalties."

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 model to look to
is that of the early years of the 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 analogy with the civil rights movement
may not be a fair one. The civil rights movement had millions of supporters,
while at most, the total memberships of NRG and ARO adds up to 550,000 --
and that includes the 300,000 members of the ACLU, who may be lukewarm,
personally, when it comes to legalizing drugs. "The difference makes the
need for us being unified even more important," he says.

Maybe the unity won't happen until there are more people, Gogulski of the
Connecticut Cannabis Policy Forum postulates. "Maybe we have to get to 1,000
groups before it starts to happen all by itself," he says. "I hope not."

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 to President Clinton, and
has attracted dozens of signatories, such as the Evangelical Lutheran
Church, the Children's Defense Fund, Family Watch, NOW and FAMM, which
stands for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that 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 cause. For instance, FAMM only approves of Zeese's prose when it
concerns mandatory minimums. Julie Stewart, a native of Washington state,
set up FAMM after her brother was arrested for growing marijuana in 1990.
FAMM, based in Washington, D.C., began in 1991 at the onset of his five-year
term.

"Our purpose is to restore judicial discretion to judges," she says, noting
that the group is against cookie cutter sentencing for guns as well. "This
is not a drug issue for us; this is a justice issue."

The inability of activists 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 Python's Life of Brian, she says. "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?"