GROUPS MOBILIZE TO PUSH FOR LENIENT DRUG POLICIES

When pharmacology professor G. Alan Robison launched a group in 1994 to push
for an overhaul of U.S. drug policy, he worked out of his house and could
persuade only 15 others to join.

Today, the Houston-based Drug Policy Forum of Texas has grown to 300 members
and added a Fort Worth-Dallas chapter. Robison still runs the group's
operations from his home office, but with a recent $25,000 donation from
billionaire philanthropist George Soros, he hopes that his group will soon
have a new office and staff.

"It's a big step for us," said 64-year-old Robison, now retired from the
University of Texas Medical School in Houston. "We can do a better job of
informing Texas of what we are about."

Robison's group is part of a growing army of activists -- equipped with more
funding, computer technology and better organization -- who believe that
U.S. drug control policies are unnecessarily harsh and self-defeating. These
groups want the government to drastically change the way it punishes drug
users.

Flush with new confidence, the movement is using grassroots organizing to
push for change. Among their victories, the activists count initiatives
approved by voters in five states and the District of Columbia this year to
legalize marijuana for medical use. However, the results are being
challenged in Colorado and the District of Columbia. Voters in California
and Arizona approved similar initiatives in 1996.

These activists are not united behind a single set of changes. Some focus on
one cause, such as the relaxing of laws regarding marijuana possession.
Others embrace broader changes, such as reducing sentences for drug users or
regulating all or most drugs by setting up a legal market for adults.

The central point on which the activists agree: The nation's war on drugs
has failed. Boosting the movement's once-shaky credibility, a wider range of
voices, including more prominent ones, are joining in. Well-known supporters
include Stanley Marcus, the 93-year-old former chairman and chief executive
officer of Neiman Marcus; former television anchorman Walter Cronkite;
former Secretary of State George Schultz; former New York Police
Commissioner Patrick Murphy; and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman.

Conservatives such as William F. Buckley are joined by liberals such as
former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

Even some who once led the drug war -- including police officers and
judges -- have come to embrace the movement.

"It's the most promising time in 20 years," said Keith Stroup, executive
director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
"Without question, during the last three or four years the debate has been
opening up."

But those involved in the push for less-punitive drug policies are still a
minority -- and are depicted by many government officials as an ill-informed
fringe group that refuses to acknowledge that drug use is harmful.

"One group would be the libertarian right and the second is the traditional
left -- one group that philosophically wants to get rid of all laws on
drugs, the other group that is always hostile to the drug laws for different
philosophical reasons," said Charles Blanchard, chief counsel of the Office
of National Drug Control Policy, the agency that doles out federal funds
directed at combating illicit drugs.

Many continue to brand leaders of the movement as radical and self-serving
baby boomers who want to use drugs but don't want to face the consequences.

"The truth of the matter is if you look at the faces, it's quite an
unchanged group," said Jill Jonnes, a historian and author of Hep-Cats,
Narcs and Pipe Dreams. "Most of them are a bunch of aging baby boomers."

Now, both sides in the debate are attempting to win support of the American
public.

"Most people are in the soft middle, and it's a battle for the hearts of
that soft middle," said Bob Maginnis, senior director of national security
and foreign affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council,
a conservative advocacy group against decriminalization of drugs.

Americans do appear to be torn on drug control policies.

In an analysis of 47 national surveys on drugs conducted between 1978 and
1997, Harvard School of Public Health researchers Robert J. Blendon and John
T. Young identified the "paradox" of future drug policy. Most Americans do
not see the country's problem with drugs as lessening. But at the same time,
they support spending more money generally in the same way it has been spent
fighting drugs.

"What you have is the bulk of Americans feel drugs are a crime issue and
that the national character is affected by drug abuse," Blendon said. "In a
sense, they believe that America would be a different nation if drugs were
to be legalized. That's what makes it such a tough issue."

The public began questioning the success of the nation's drug control
policies in the 1990s as drug use among youths began increasing after a
20-year downturn. The questions have taken on a new urgency as heroin use
among young people has reached historic levels, and more teens have
experimented with cocaine.

Those who are calling for changes argue that policies have to be overhauled
because the government is wasting billions of dollars on a battle it can't
win. Indeed, they say, the war on drugs has made the drug trade only more
profitable, without significantly decreasing the supply. And by demonizing
drugs, the government is unwittingly luring curious youths to experiment
with them, they say.

"Let's be blunt: The drug war has been lost," said Don Erler, a Tarrant
County businessman who considers himself a staunch conservative. "You could
try certain draconian methods which would make it theoretically possible to
win the war, but we would have a society so totalitarian that no one would
want to live here."

Perhaps the movement's strongest argument involves the dramatic increases in
the prison population.

Since the war on drugs was declared in the 1980s, the state prison
population has zoomed from about 500,000 to 1.5 million, according to Marc
Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit
group that conducts research on criminal justice issues.

Activists say that the growing number of incarcerations for minor drug
offenses is expensive and succeeds only in tearing apart families. Many say
the war on drugs has done more damage than drugs have.

Howard Wooldridge, a 47-year-old retired police officer who lives in Keller,
said he became disillusioned with the drug war during a 15-year law
enforcement career. As a patrol officer in Bath, Mich., near Lansing,
Wooldridge said he grew frustrated with handling burglaries and violent
crimes committed by drug users. He said he also became concerned about what
he believed was a widespread policy of officers violating constitutional
rights in searches and seizures.

"What I found out quickly in police work is that officers become so obsessed
with the drug war that they bend or break or completely shatter the Fourth
Amendment," said Wooldridge, who recently joined the Drug Policy Forum to
fight for drug policy changes.

Many activists insist that they are not calling for an unregulated drug
market or for allowing children to use drugs. Instead of legalization, they
say, they prefer decriminalization and policies that reduce the harm that
drugs do to society -- such as the spread of disease, crime and
unemployment.

The country should gradually move toward treating drug users instead of
punishing them, they say.

Activists often hold up alternative drug control policies being tried by
countries such as Switzerland, England, Holland, Germany and Australia as
evidence that such programs can reduce the harm of drugs.

Many government officials counter that changing laws to allow drugs in a
legal, regulated market would only condone drug use -- leading to more
addicts.

"I'm firmly convinced that legalization of drugs will increase its
availability and its acceptance, particularly among teen-agers, and we will
see an increase in use," said Blanchard, of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy.

Some, including Kelly Shackelford, executive director of the Free Market
Foundation in Plano, blame the increasing demand for drugs on a weakening of
society's moral fabric. The answer is not legalization, he said, but
education and parental involvement.

Government officials are calling for stronger efforts to stop illicit drugs
at the country's borders and to arrest drug dealers, but they say that's not
the only answer.

In recent years, the federal government has been pumping more money into
prevention and treatment programs. This year, the government is spending $2
billion on prevention and $4 billion on treatment. The federal government's
anti-drug campaign for 1999 is armed with a $17.1 billion budget -- $1.1
billion more than 1998.

"We're increasing everything, but the biggest increase has been in the
prevention and treatment area," Blanchard said.

Decriminalization activists acknowledge that they face long odds because of
the stigma of drug use.

But activists have gained some financial backing and have adopted new
tactics to broaden mainstream appeal.

Soros, a New York financier, has donated $60 million -- much of it over five
years -- for projects that explore alternative solutions to existing drug
policy, including the medical marijuana initiatives and the establishment of
the Lindesmith Center in New York for research.

Activists are now careful to tell parents that they are against drug use by
minors. That's a lesson learned from mistakes of the past, when groups such
as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws alienated
parents who were worried about their children using drugs, said Stroup, who
returned to the group in 1994 after a 15-year absence.

"In the 1970s, a lot of us were young and probably a little hostile," he
said. "Now a lot of us are older, and that tempers the anger."

Older activists are joined by a growing number of twentysomethings who are
credited with helping the movement outpace the federal government on the
Internet. Many Web sites have popped up to reach mainstream America,
including one touted as "The Largest Drug Library in the World."

The government has responded with its own Internet counterattack. "Speaking
Out Against Drug Legalization," a handbook produced in 1994 to help drug
agents and others successfully argue against any move toward legalization,
is posted on the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's Web site.

In another twist to the debate, both sides are doing their own
public-opinion polling to boost their causes with hard numbers. But the
polling results differ according to the organization and how it poses the
questions.

For example, the Family Research Council concluded that "most Americans," or
55 percent, are more likely to oppose using marijuana as medicine when they
learn that better and legal therapies are available. On the other hand, the
Lindesmith Center found that 68 percent of Americans "oppose punishing
doctors" for prescribing marijuana, regardless of whether state laws permit
it.

Others say the public is pragmatic and should resist being driven into
either camp in the emotional issue.

As the debate becomes more polarized, it may make it impossible to implement
practical reforms, said Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at
the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Two stupid positions are defined and you're asked, `Which one do you want
to support?' " Kleiman said. "It's already set up that there are only two
chairs.

"Americans have been systematically misinformed by both sides."

Marisa Taylor, (817) 685-3819 Send your comments to
marisataylor@star-telegram.com

Susan Gill Vardon, (817) 685-3805 Send your comments to
gillvardon@star-telegram.com

Checked-by: Don Beck