POT IS MORE MAINSTREAM THAN EVER, SO WHY IS LEGALIZATION STILL TABOO?

More members of Congress have publicly questioned whether President
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii than have endorsed legalizing marijuana.

This comes despite the birth announcements printed in the Honolulu
Advertiser in August 1961 and marijuana's deep inroads into the
cultural mainstream.

Almost every voter under 65 in this country has either smoked cannabis
or grew up with people who did. Among its erstwhile users are the last
three presidents, one Supreme Court justice and the mayor of the
nation's largest city. The pot leaf's image pervades popular culture,
from Bob Marley T-shirts to billboards for Showtime's Weeds.

So why is actually legalizing it still considered a fringe issue? Why
haven't more politicians -- especially the ones who inhaled -- come
out and said, "Prohibition is absurd and criminal. Let's treat
cannabis like alcohol"?

Allen St. Pierre, head of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, blames the hypocrisy of the "baby boomer elite." There
are many people in Washington's political and media circles "who know
the right end of a joint to light, but are too embarrassed to admit
their knowledge," he says. There are members of Congress, he adds, who
will greet him at a party with "Allen, got any weed?" but are afraid
to go out on a limb for legalization.

Only two current members of Congress have openly advocated ending
cannabis prohibition: Reps. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Ron Paul,
R-Texas.

Even in a Congress inhabited by Republicans Tom "Lesbians Are
Terrorizing Our High Schools" Coburn of Oklahoma and Michelle "Carbon
Dioxide Is Natural, It Is Not Harmful" Bachmann of Minnesota, the
left-liberal Kucinich and the libertarian-conservative Paul might be
the two most widely derided as kooks.

A handful of others, such as Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., have given
some indications that they would support legalization. Rep. Barney
Frank, D-Mass., has sponsored a bill to end federal penalties for
possession of less than 100 grams, but has not explicitly endorsed
making marijuana as legal as alcohol.

In contrast, Salon in July identified 17 members of Congress as
"birther" sympathizers who had either openly questioned Obama's birth,
co-sponsored a bill on the issue or refused to answer yes when asked
if they believed he was a natural-born citizen. The 17 included Sens.
James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

St. Pierre particularly resents the way the media treat the issue as a
joke, in which almost any headline has to include a bad pun on
"doobie," "high" or "mellow."

It's deadly serious when more than 800,000 people a year are arrested
for it, he argues. Obama's "chuckle," he says, was emblematic. When
legalizing marijuana was the top issue cited by visitors to Obama's
transition Web site, the president dismissed it with a joke implying
that there must be a lot of stoned people on the Internet.

"It's still an issue people are giggling about, not taking seriously,"
says Noelle Davis, former head of Texans for Medical Marijuana.

State legislators who have sponsored marijuana-related bills say that
the two biggest obstacles are fear and cultural stereotypes.

"Elected officials are largely very concerned about being labeled
'soft on drugs,'" says New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried.
Gottfried, a Manhattan Democrat who sponsored the state's 1977
decriminalization law, has introduced several bills to legalize
medical marijuana.

Polls have shown medical marijuana to have the support of 70 to 80
percent of New Yorkers, he says, but "many legislators are afraid to
touch it."

Washington State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles says that many legislators,
particularly in the state's more conservative rural areas, "buy into
the cultural stereotypes about marijuana," such as the idea that it's
a gateway to harder drugs.

The Seattle Democrat, who is sponsoring a bill to reduce the penalty
for less than 40 grams of pot from a misdemeanor to a civil
infraction, says that the state's prosecutors' support for legalizing
medical marijuana gave conservatives political cover to vote for it
but that law enforcement has largely opposed her decriminalization
bill.

One reason for the lack of urgent political pressure, says Deborah
Small of Break the Chains, is that the people most likely to get
busted for pot are the ones who "don't have a political voice" --
young people of color from poor neighborhoods. In Atlanta, Baltimore
and New York, which have among the highest marijuana-arrest rates in
the nation, three-fourths of those popped are black or Latino and
under 25, she points out. Adults and more affluent youths are largely
safe from arrest, she adds.

Frontlines of the Debate

California is the one state where legalization is legitimately on the
agenda. "Obama might have dismissed it, but we're having the most
serious conversation in 35 years," says Quintin Mecke, spokesman for
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano. Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, is
sponsoring a bill that would legalize marijuana in California. It
would let people grow up to 10 plants for their own use and license
commercial cultivation and sales, with a smoking age of 21 and a
$50-an-ounce tax.

Hearings on the bill are scheduled for January. It would obviously
conflict with federal law, but Mecke says, "the intent is to provoke a
states' rights conversation A lot of folks are looking to California
to push that issue."

Several factors make legalization politically possible in California,
Mecke explains. First, it has had legally regulated medical marijuana
for 13 years, and people have "seen that the sky did not fall.
California may be in a fiscal crisis, but it's certainly not due to
marijuana." Taxes and fees on cannabis could raise $1.4 billion in
revenue for the cash-strapped state, the state Board of Equalization
estimates. In addition, marijuana cultivation is an integral part of
the local economy in many areas, especially the rural north.

"We're not expecting this to happen overnight," Mecke says. "But
looking at the poll numbers, it will happen."

A Gallup poll conducted in early October backs that prediction. It
found 44 percent of the people surveyed supporting legal marijuana,
with 54 percent against. In contrast, previous surveys showed
Americans rejecting legalization 73 percent to 23 percent in 1985 and
64 percent to 31 percent in 2000.

An overwhelming majority of liberals supported it, as did more than
half of Westerners, Democrats and people under 50. Opposition was
strongest among Republicans, conservatives and people over 65, but
even in those groups, more than a quarter backed legalization.

"Public mores on legalization of marijuana have been changing this
decade and are now at their most tolerant in at least 40 years," the
Gallup organization stated. "If public support were to continue
growing at a rate of 1 to 2 percentage points per year, as it has
since 2000, the majority of Americans could favor legalization of the
drug in as little as four years."

Disconnect Between the Country and Its Capital

There is a "huge disconnect" between the corridors of power in
Washington and the rest of America on marijuana, contends St. Pierre.

Today, even the hardest-line prohibitionists rarely argue that people
should go to jail for possession. In Washington, says Kohl-Welles,
police and prosecutors claimed that decriminalization would be
unnecessary because they don't put a lot of resources into making such
minor arrests.

In New York, where Mayor Michael "You Bet I Did -- And I Enjoyed It"
Bloomberg has continued Rudolph Giuliani's war on pot smokers, a
police department spokesperson tried to convince reporters that there
was no such crackdown, because the number of summonses issued for
marijuana possession declined over the last decade. (Having less than
25 grams carries only a $100 fine under state law, but possession in
public is a misdemeanor. New York City police have been arresting more
than 40,000 people a year on that charge, mostly young black and
Latino men.)

Liberal politicians who believe that the laws are too harsh but don't
want to take the risk of siding with stoners often support
decriminalization as a middle ground. Decriminalization has definitely
been an improvement -- as Gottfried points out, it's made the
difference between spending a night in jail and a year in prison for
having a small bag of pot -- but it is actually a harsher regime than
alcohol Prohibition was. Under Prohibition, home winemaking and
medical use of alcohol were legal, and people could keep liquor
acquired before the law went into effect in 1920. (The New York
governor's mansion had one such stash of booze, and the Yale Club in
Manhattan stockpiled a 14-year supply.)

Obama's Oct. 19 guidelines that federal prosecutors not pursue
medical-marijuana cases in states where it's legal are encouraging. On
the other hand, like so much in Obama's tenure, they might also be far
more symbolic than real. They contain enough wiggle room to permit
federal aid to local prosecutors who go after medical marijuana, such
as Steve Cooley in Los Angeles.

In general, Obama's positions have evolved in a typically hypocritical
manner. He endorsed decriminalization when he was an Illinois state
legislator campaigning on a college campus, but he now states flatly
that he does not support legalization -- although he wrote in his
autobiography that while pot didn't solve your problems, "it could at
least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all
the bullshit and cheap moralism." (There are photos of Obama as a
straw-hatted college student, smoking an ambiguous cigarette with his
thumb and forefinger and looking blissfully slit-eyed.)

"Legalization is not in the president's vocabulary, and it is not in
mine," federal drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has reiterated, although he
is relatively liberal on other drug issues.

According to St. Pierre, the staff of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
D-Calif., specifically warned the pot-legalization movement not to
pressure the Obama administration or congressional Democrats because
they were preoccupied with the economy, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and health care. The message, he says, was "We are not
going to advance this issue, and you need to cut us some slack."

Change You Can Put in Your Pipe

What can be done? What would change the political climate to enable a
reasonable discussion of legalizing and regulating marijuana?

Deborah Small says it would take a society that cared about black and
Latino youth instead of criminalizing them in the name of "quality of
life" policing.

Politicians talk about keeping young people in school and getting them
jobs, but then they support "policing tactics guaranteed to bring them
into the criminal-justice system for relatively minor offenses." If
Obama had been busted for pot when he was a young man, she asks, would
he be president today? "Certainly not."

She finds it remarkable that the hip-hop generation that emerged after
the crack epidemic of the late '80s eschewed hard drugs in favor of
marijuana -- and the system responded by arresting them more, with
policies that rewarded large numbers of petty-possession busts.

Kohl-Welles says legalizing cannabis would take a critical mass of
legislators, and that budget issues might help create the climate for
that. Gottfried says that it will take "very strong public support for
it to become part of mainstream debate, let alone pass the
Legislature."

To win that support, St. Pierre says, the legalization movement needs
to sustain grassroots activism and become more multiracial instead of
being almost all-white and mainly male. Advancing legalization would
also need the support of charismatic politicians early in their
careers, as "it's impossible to flip a 50- or 60-year-old alpha male
in Washington."

Another danger, he says, is politicians who modify their positions to
suit their ambitions. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, he notes, was
an early and "full-throated" supporter of medical marijuana, but is
now running for governor of California and opposes
legalization.

In Texas, says Noelle Davis, activists face the daunting task of
trying to persuade legislators in the Republican majority -- and the
primary voters who elect them. This would require educating them about
the safety of marijuana versus alcohol and the economic benefits that
cannabis cultivation and sales could bring to the state.

One largely overlooked issue in Texas, she says, is drug violence on
the border. Infighting among rival smuggling gangs has claimed
hundreds of lives in the Mexican cities of Nuevo Laredo, just across
the river from Laredo, and Juarez, across from El Paso.

For all the hype about potent domestic homegrown, commercial-grade
Mexican dominates the cheaper end of the cannabis market, and "a lot
of marijuana comes up IH-35," from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin
and Dallas.

"We're still putting our hands over our ears and saying 'la-la-la,' "
she says. "If marijuana were legal on a federal level, it would
dramatically reduce the deaths associated with the drug trade."

Meanwhile, she says, the "silent majority" of pot smokers has to
overcome their fear and get vocal. "When I was circulating a petition
for medical marijuana, often people would giggle and say 'I'm not
putting my name on a list,' " she recalls. "Don't be afraid of your
legislator. Take time and build a relationship."

St. Pierre agrees. "We have not achieved the political legitimacy of
the gay and lesbian community," he concludes. "As long as 0.1 percent
of cannabis consumers are involved with their own liberation, reform
is unlikely." If just 1 percent of the nation's estimated 36 million
pot smokers would get involved, he says, that would be a constituency
of 360,000 activists.

Legalizing cannabis may not be as life-and-death an issue as health
care, global warming or the war in Afghanistan, but it is not a
frivolous cause. Not any more than repealing Prohibition was in the
depths of the Depression.

When the nation is mired in an economic and environmental crisis, why
should we waste lives and money enforcing repressive, racist and
crime-creating laws? In May 1932, thousands of people marched in the
streets of New York, Detroit and other cities to demand the
legalization of beer. They carried signs reading "We Want Beer and We
Will Pay the Tax" and "We Want Beer but We Also Want Jobs."

Later that summer, the Democratic party, battered for being "wet" in
the previous presidential election, endorsed the repeal of
Prohibition. On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment went into effect, and
Americans could legally drink again.

Of course, there was a fanatical former Prohibition official named
Harry Anslinger, who had recently become head of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics -- and was looking for a new way to advance his career.