POT HEADS TOWARD LEGALIZATION

Marijuana is moving toward legalization. Fourteen states now allow it
as medicine, which has changed people's view of it. The image of a
user is no longer Cheech and Chong, but grandma.

"The states that were the first to legalize medical marijuana will be
the first to legalize marijuana more broadly," predicts cannabis
activist Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Washington will be one of the first states. But how to do it?
Legalizers don't agree.

Earlier this year the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington
refused to support Initiative 1068. The ACLU supports legalization,
but it wants regulations, and I-1068 didn't have any. It would have
removed criminal penalties only. The ACLU's opposition curdled the
initiative's fundraising, and it didn't make the ballot.

Last Sunday, the ACLU held a forum on legalization. Nadelman and
others were here from Washington, D.C. Local organizers of I-1068
were not invited.

Their disagreement is not whether cannabis would be regulated. Of
course it would be regulated. Like beer and wine, there would be
rules about how it could be marketed, who could sell it and who could
buy it. And it would be taxed "" heavily.

Why leave the regs and taxes out of the ballot measure? Partly
because initiatives are for simple questions. Details belong in the
Legislature. The I-1068 folks, who call themselves Sensible
Washington, had an additional reason.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law. If a state sets up a law
permitting it, the feds can ask a federal court to throw that law
out. The Obama administration could ask a court to throw out
Washington's law permitting cannabis as medicine. It has chosen not
to, but it could do it.

If Washington voters passed a law permitting cannabis as a consumer
product, the feds would be inclined to attack it. And if that law
also included repeal of criminal penalties, both could fall and the
criminal penalties return.

And that, says Seattle attorney Douglas Hiatt, the head of Sensible
Washington, is the reason to do repeal separately. Repeal, by itself,
creates nothing to attack. It simply erases. The feds could still
attack any regulations, but the repeal would stand.

Hiatt, who was a history major, discovered that's how the legalizers
of alcohol did it 78 years ago. In November 1932, the people approved
Initiative 61, which repealed all the state laws against alcohol. The
rules and regulations came later, from the Legislature.

"It was a two-step process," Hiatt says. "And it was brilliant. It
remains the only tried and true way to repeal prohibition."

Alison Holcomb, the ACLU's drug-policy director here, argues that
legalization challenges the federal government no matter how it is
done. The defensible position, she says, is "to set up a
well-regulated system."

Hoclomb says "a broad coalition" plans to run a legalize-and-regulate
cannabis initiative here in 2012.

Meanwhile, state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, plans to
introduce a bill in January that would protect medical users from
arrest, which current law does not. Kohl-Welles wants full
legalization, but she told Sunday's forum, "We have to address what's
possible."

Hiatt thinks legalization is possible now, by popular initiative.
He's planning to run I-1068 again, in 2011.

"We're not changing anything in the substance of the initiative," he says.