MEDICAL MARIJUANA - The Six-State Sweep

The American people want marijuana Legalized for medical use.

Why isn't W A S H I N G T 0 N listening?

NEWT GINGRICH AND THE Republicans were not the only losers in Washington,
D.C., in this fall's elections. The War on Drugs took a big hit, too.
Voters approved every pro-medical-marijuana measure put before them: in
Washington state, Oregon, Arizona and Alaska. In two other states and the
District of Columbia, technical matters have hung up electoral victories --
legal snarls voided the Colorado win; in Nevada, voters will have to pass
the measure again in 2000, when the state amends its constitution.

In the District of Columbia, a medical-marijuana referendum promoted by ACT
UP Washington and the Marijuana Policy Project won easily but not
officially. Though ballots had already been printed, right-wing Republicans
in Congress inserted a nasty little rider in the omnibus budget bill,
passed in October, that prohibited District of Columbia election officials
from spending any funds to tally votes and report the outcome. This is
possibly the first time in U.S. history that the federal government has
tried to stop voters from finding out how they voted in their own election.
The medical-marijuana campaign, however, paid for an election-day exit poll
that showed D.C. voters overwhelmingly ratifying medical uses of marijuana
by sixty-nine percent to thirty-one percent.

Altogether, with California's 1996 approval, voters in seven states and
D.C. have now endorsed this drug-use reform. It's like a citizens'
guerrilla army marching on the nation's Capitol from the West (with one
squad attacking from behind enemy lines).

Bill Zimmerman, a Los Angeles political consultant who is the national head
of the movement, summarizes the political meaning: "More than one-fifth of
the American electorate has now voted in the majority to give patients the
right to use marijuana. If the federal government doesn't respect that vote
and change its attitude, we're fully prepared to go to the rest of America
with this issue."

Most of the people working to legalize medical marijuana are neither
hippies nor radicals. In Seattle the statewide campaign was led by a young
hospice physician, Rob Killian, who sees cancer and AIDS patients wasting
away and suffering every day--suffering that can be alleviated by smoking a
joint.

"I saw I had to prescribe marijuana for my patients, and I saw that it
worked," Killian says simply. "All drugs have dangerous side effects, but
as physicians, we are trained to administer pharmaceuticals in a safe,
appropriate manner. My patients who are suffering and dying are not
criminals."

During the campaign, Killian debated with local prosecutors across the
state but says he felt all along that he was "really running against the
federal government." Or at least against organized conservative interests,
which have portrayed medical-marijuana initiatives as being gateways to
overall legalization. For instance, in the run-up to the election, the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America's famous fried-egg commercials ("This
is your brain on drugs.. . .") were broadcast frequently. The measure's
leading opponent was Brad Owen, Washington's lieutenant governor, who
received a $190,000 drug-awareness grant from the Office of National Drug
Policy. His efforts were also aided by money from presidential hopeful
Steve Forbes, which was used to broadcast anti-initiative messages on radio
stations.

In the end, Washington voters legalized medical applications of the
long-demonized drug by a margin of fifty-nine percent to forty-one
per-cent. At press time, the initiative had carried thirty of thirty-nine
counties in the state.

In Arizona, where the issue won more narrowly, the "medical rights for
marijuana" campaign was called The People Have Spoken. Arizona Voters had
already approved the proposition back in 1996, but the state legislature
overruled them. This year they went back to the polls and stuffed the
legislature, fifty-seven percent to forty-three percent. "The opposition
used every trick in the book and they still lost," says campaign leader Sam
Vagenas of Phoenix. "They used schoolchildren a props at their press
conference. Their group called itself Arizonans Against Heroin. It
mentioned every Schedule One controlled substance -- heroin cocaine, LSD,
PCP. Can you imagine voters looking at that? Yet fifty-seven percent of
them saw through it."

IF THIS YEAR'S OUTCOME TURNS out to be an important turning point, one
explanation may be that the 1998 referendum proposition were different.
They were designed be law-enforcement friendly, and the included new
regulatory rules that avoid much of the legal ambiguity and conflict that
followed California's decriminalization vote in 1996.

One problem with the referendum passed by California voters was that while
authorizing medical use of marijuana, it included no provision for
addressing the overall legal status of the drug. Thus, police arrested some
patients for possession. The Feds raided marijuana clubs set up to sell the
stuff. At a Washington, D.C. press conference in late 1996, heavy hitters
from Bill Clinton's Cabinet threatened reprisals against doctors who
prescribed cannabis to their patients. Doctors might lose their licenses,
officials warned, or become ineligible to receive Medicare reimbursements
for their services.

"You can imagine the impact this had on California doctors," Zimmerman
says. "They were being threatened with losing their livelihoods."

The new measures approved in states like Washington solve many of these
problems for doctors and law enforcement officers. State-issued ID cards
will be required for patients entitled to use marijuana. Doctors must
provide a diagnosis justifying the prescription for victims of cancer, AIDS
glaucoma, multiple sclerosis or epilepsy. The patient then takes that to
state health agency and receives credentials to purchase the drug (though
this process doesn't entirely settle the question of who can legally
produce or sell it).

"If federal agencies try to block implementation, as they did in
California, they will have to take on state agencies rather than marijuana
clubs," Zimmerman explains.

Dr. Ethan Nadelmann is a leading authority on banned drugs and an architect
of the medical-rights campaign, largely financed by George Soros' Open
Society Institute. Nadelmann -- director of the Lindesmith Center, a
drug-policy institute -- expects each referendum victory to produce more
new ideas and practical solutions for regulating sales and use. Each
victory also puts more elected leaders on the spot.

"Those politicians who thought there was no cost to indulging in drug-war
demagoguery may now find themselves in an argument with their own voters,"
Nadelmann says. "They don't want to face up to that, but the American
people will no longer be duped by such inflammatory language."

BACK IN WASHINGTON, D.C., the drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, responded in
muted terms to this new setback for his war. He reminded everyone that
state referendums do not change the fact that marijuana possession is
against federal law. Still, the statement from his Office of National Drug
Policy sounded almost conciliatory: "The U.S. medical-scientific process
has not closed the door on marijuana or any other substance that may offer
therapeutic benefits. However, both law and common sense dictate that the
process for establishing substances as medicine be thorough and
science-based."

McCaffrey's opposition is not impressed.

They speak in two different voices," Nadelmann says. "One ridicules medical
marijuana, the patients and doctors. The other approach is to say, 'Let the
science prevail' Yet any time the medical-marijuana studies come up through
their system of scientific review and gain legitimacy, they are cut off by
political decisions."

McCaffrey's spokesman, Bob Weiner, denies this, but he then argues that if
research ever establishes marijuana's medical benefits, the results might
take the advocates somewhere they don't want to go. "What they don't want
to hear is that smoke is not a medicine and has never been approved as a
way to deliver medicine," Weiner says. A better delivery method for medical
pot, he playfully suggests, might prove to be suppositories.

Independent scientific studies that seem to confirm benefits or refute
negative complaints have had zero impact on drug-war politics so far.
That's why grass-roots activists started the campaign. They see no prospect
of the Republican Congress (or the Democratic president, for that matter)
allowing the Federal Drug Administration or the National Institutes of
Health to do a genuine, thorough investigation of what doctors and patients
already know from their own experience.

"When I started in this campaign, I began to meet patients with AIDS and
cancer who told me marijuana saved their lives," says Zimmerman, who with
two physicians co-authored Is Marijuana the Right Medicine for You?, a book
published this year. "I was skeptical at first. Then I learned that
one-third of cancer and AIDS patients drop out of their chemotherapy
treatment because they can't stand the side effects. They were willing to
risk death instead. A lot of these people told me how marijuana would
instantly stop the pain and nausea. They returned to treatment and survived."

One living example is Keith Vines, an assistant district attorney in San
Francisco. "He was wasting away with AIDS, started using marijuana to
stimulate his appetite, gained forty pounds and then was admitted to the
drug-therapy program," Zimmerman reports. "Today he's fully functioning as
a prosecutor. He attributes his life to marijuana."

Law-enforcement officers are correct in their suspicions, of course. The
medical issue will help to soften the image of pot, which, in turn, may
create a political climate for relaxing the criminal laws aimed at the
drug. Many advocates think that the consumption of cannabis, regardless of
the user's purpose, should be regarded in the same way as the consumption
of alcohol -- dangerous only if it is abused. Not all advocates entirely
agree. George Soros has donated millions to campaigns against the nation's
unduly harsh drug laws and for medical use of marijuana, but he is
explicitly opposed to full legalization. Californians who voted for medical
marijuana in 1996 were asked in a survey whether they favored legalizing
pot: Sixty-one percent were opposed.

Meanwhile, despite the grass-roots counterattack, the War on Drugs rolls
forward at both state and federal levels, employing prison as its mightiest
weapon against drug abuse. From 1991 to 1995, Nadelmann points out, the
number of marijuana arrests doubled, more than half of them for possession
alone. In 1996, 642,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses.

This larger battlefield is much more formidable, but citizen guerrillas are
also winning some victories here. In Oregon, for instance, the state
effectively decriminalized pot in the early 1970S -- minor offenses were
treated more or less like traffic tickets. Last year, however, the state
legislature re-criminalized marijuana by a two-thirds majority.

In the October elections, Oregon voters reversed the legislature's action
- -- approving a referendum that repealed the re-criminalization law. The
vote was sixty-six percent to thirty-three percent.

"What this says to me," Nadelmann reflects, "is that people feel we have
over-criminalized marijuana. We're supposed to spend millions of dollars to
go after small amounts of marijuana. The people in Oregon said, `No, we
don't want that.' "

THE REPUBLICAN FLAME-throwers in Congress, led by the lately departed Newt
Gingrich, have always blamed the Sixties for whatever ails the republic --
the moral decay launched by drugs, sex and rock & roll. Wouldn't it be a
hoot if the Sixties wins the pot debate just as Newt gets pushed offstage
by his own conservative colleagues?

Alas, the political struggle to establish rational laws on drugs and drug
abuse is a long way from resolution. While state voters were introducing a
touch of reason to the debate, the federal government was ginning up for
another expensive attempt at drug interdiction. The new budget provides at
least $690 million more for quasi-military efforts to block cocaine from
entering the country through Latin American. That buys lots of high-tech
hardware to police our vast borders -- surveillance planes, ships and
helicopters -- but drug importers have always found a way around them.

That money might have opened a lot of new treatment centers instead - a
less sexy solution to drug abuse but one that demonstratably works. The
government is not yet ready to declare such an armistice, but sane voices
from popular campaigns -- and especially their score card of victories --
make it harder and harder for politicians to blink away the contradictions
and injustices of the drug war.

If the federal government does not rethink its hard-line policy against
medical marijuana, then the campaign will move on to more states and
collect more victories. Zimmerman says that Maine citizens are expected to
vote on the issue in 1999. In 2000, Colorado and Nevada must vote again to
complete adoption. The groundwork is being laid to put medical marijuana on
the ballot in Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Florida.

Florida will be tough. In national polling on the subject, medical
marijuana draws majority support in every region except one - the South. If
it can win in Florida, the matter will be virtually decided.

The issue, in other words, raises the same question that both parties are
now pondering about national politics: Has the Republican "Southern
strategy" finally run out of steam? Targeting Southern voters and states
has proved a great success for the GOP, the key to its congressional
majority. But it also has tripped the party into dominance by hard-right
attitudes that moderate voters are now rejecting.

Does it make sense to allow the nation's most conservative politicians to
dictate their reactionary social values and public policy to the rest of
us? Republicans will have to answer that question for themselves, but so
will two other successful Southern politicians: Bill Clinton and Al Gore.