MARIJUANA PETITIONS TURNED IN D.C. VOTE SOUGHT ON MEDICAL USE

Organizers of an effort to legalize marijuana for medical purposes in
Washington delivered more than 940 pages of petitions to the D.C. Board of
Elections and Ethics yesterday to put the measure on the ballot.

The measure, known as Initiative 57, needs 17,070 signatures from the
city's registered voters 5 percent of the total pool to be placed on
the ballot. The petitions turned in yesterday, with about 20 signatures a
page, had perhaps 18,000 signatures, which means there is little room for
names to be thrown out as invalid. In addition, the signatures must come
from 5 percent of the registered voters in five of the city's eight wards.

A busy weekend of canvassing supermarkets and Metro stations across the
city ended in frenzied activity at the board's offices at One Judiciary
Square, as nearly two dozen volunteers raced to complete and number
hundreds of pages of signatures by the 5 p.m. deadline.

"This has been a long, hard struggle, and I really hope that we make it,"
said Steve Michael, of ACT UP Washington, the group spearheading the effort
to get the marijuana initiative on the ballot. "But if we fall short, we
will immediately start all over again. In the course of this campaign, we
met thousands of D.C. voters who are behind this issue."

The board has 30 days to verify the signatures, Executive Director Alice
Miller said. The petitions also will be posted for 10 days to allow for
challenges. If the board rules that not enough valid signatures were
collected, organizers could, in theory, start the process over from scratch
and still have time to try to get the measure placed on the September 1998
mayoral primary ballot. The measure would need a simple majority of votes
to be approved.

Initiative 57 would legalize the possession, use, cultivation and
distribution of marijuana if "recommended" by a physician for illnesses
such as AIDS, cancer and glaucoma. It also would require the city to
provide for the "safe and affordable" distribution of marijuana to Medicaid
patients and other lowincome residents whose doctors recommend it.

"This is a movement from the heart," said Patricia Hawkins, associate
executive director of WhitmanWalker Clinic, who visited the board's
offices to support the volunteers. Although the clinic, the city's largest
provider of AIDSrelated services, has not taken an official position on
the matter, Hawkins said, "there is a lot of interest in this among our
clients and our staff."

Similar in many respects to a ballot measure passed in California last
year, the D.C. initiative has made the city the latest battleground in the
fight to legalize marijuana. Locally, the issue has generated little
controversy, and many members of the D.C. Council, as well as Mayor Marion
Barry, signed petitions to put the measure on the ballot.

But the initiative effort has drawn fire from national politicians and
antidrug groups, including Barry R. McCaffery, director of the White House
Office of National Drug Policy, and former GOP presidential candidate
Malcolm S. "Steve" Forbes.

If the measure makes it onto the ballot, supporters and opponents predict
an intense fight in the national spotlight. If the measure wins voter
approval, it still would be subject to review by the D.C. financial control
board and Congress, where opposition to legalization is intense.

The city's last successful ballot initiative was in November 1996, when
voters passed a property tax appeals measure pushed by the Service
Employees International Union. Earlier this year, an effort to recall Barry
failed when organizers couldn't collect the required 34,000 signatures to
put the question on the ballot.