MAJOR CHANGES ARE AT HAND FOR MARIJUANA POLITICS

SAN FRANCISCO -- The medical-marijuana political movement in America
began the night police busted into Dennis Peron's apartment with a
warrant.

They twisted Peron's arms behind his back and placed him in handcuffs.
They forced Jonathan West, Peron's boyfriend, to the ground, and an
officer held him there, Peron said, with a boot on the young man's
chest. When officers learned West had AIDS, Peron said, they put on
rubber gloves.

"He was very skinny, very weak," Peron, a longtime marijuana and
gay-rights activist and former pot dealer from San Francisco,
recalled. "And they were very mean."

That night in 1990, Peron was arrested for possession and distribution
of marijuana he said he was keeping to alleviate West's suffering. A
year later, after West died at age 29, Peron began collecting
signatures to put an initiative on the San Francisco ballot
recommending to state officials that marijuana be allowed for medical
use.

It was the first medical-marijuana initiative campaign in the country,
and it passed with overwhelming support.

"This was my revenge," Peron said recently. "They did that to
Jonathan. What are they doing to other people? I wanted to get even. I
hated those guys."

Two decades later, what started that night in Peron's apartment has
reordered not just the debate around marijuana but also the broader
political landscape.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have started
medical-marijuana programs -- either through ballot initiatives or
legislative action. A 15th, Maryland, allows medical use as a defense
against criminal charges. Only once, in South Dakota in 2006, has
medical marijuana been defeated in a statewide election.

Estimates show more than 600,000 people in the United States can now
possess and use marijuana legally, according to a Denver Post survey
of medical-marijuana states. Given the current growth rates in some
state medical-marijuana programs and the Richard Lee, horticulture
professor, moving marijuana plants in one of the classes at his
Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)
potential for other states to join in -- Arizona and South Dakota
voters will decide this year -- that number could soon top 1 million
state-legal marijuana users nationwide. Already, more than a quarter
of the United States population lives in a state with a legalized
marijuana program.

More than half of the nation's medical-marijuana patients -- an
estimated 350,000 -- live in California, but Colorado is the clear
medical-marijuana capital of the country. With nearly 20 patients for
every 1,000 residents, Colorado has twice the number of
medical-marijuana patients per capita as California.

The state's 809 dispensaries are five times per capita the estimated
number in California. More than 2,000 dispensaries nationwide sell
marijuana at least somewhat openly.

And now all those patients and businesses and dollars have given new
standing to marijuana politics, doing what stoner lobbyists tried to
do for decades but failed: bringing the country to the precipice of
the most ambitious changes in marijuana law in nearly a century.

Muscle behind initiatives

In California, where voters in November will decide whether to
legalize possession of limited amounts of marijuana, it is a
medical-marijuana businessman who is the campaign's primary funder and
cheerleader. The same is true in Oregon, where voters are being asked
to authorize nonprofit dispensaries.

Unions, NAACP chapters and a growing number of politicians -- who see
new political and economic advantages to marijuana -- have flocked to
pot. Political donors -- such as financier George Soros and insurance
honcho Peter Lewis -- have dumped millions into the cause. Some
Democrats have begun openly discussing how marijuana campaign issues
can help their party's candidates at the polls.

"Medical marijuana normalized the issue of marijuana for many
politicians and much of the public," said Kris Hermes, a spokesman for
the group Americans for Safe Access.

"It presents a different face of marijuana users," said Mike Meno, a
spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, another marijuana lobbying
group. "That's why it's going to be more and more likely, perhaps in
2012, that you're going to see two, three or four states with
tax-and-regulate initiatives on the ballot."

A Colorado group -- the Cannabis Therapy Institute, itself a product of
the state's medical-marijuana boom -- has already started what is being
called the Legalize 2012 Project and put up a website where supporters
can make donations toward a promised statewide legalization ballot
initiative.

That all of this sprang from a local campaign intended as a eulogy to
West does not actually surprise Peron. An uncompromisingly big
thinker, Peron said his ultimate goal was to "free America from
oppressive laws" and whatever the pretext was for marijuana
liberalization didn't matter. Peron said he thinks all marijuana use
is medicinal, and he sees the fight to end marijuana prohibition as a
civil-rights issue.

"Potheads," he said one recent afternoon from his sun-splashed
apartment in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, "they're my people.
I never had people. They're my people. And they're being taken
advantage of, ripped off."

After his success with San Francisco's medical-marijuana initiative,
Peron worked to take the campaign statewide and began collecting
signatures for what became California's Proposition 215. He quickly
found himself the object of nationwide attention.

"I gave people hope that things could change," he said. "I was coming
from the heart, and I believed it."

Hope was desperately thin among marijuana activists in the mid-1990s
after years of "Just say no" and "I didn't inhale," said Allen St.
Pierre, now the director of the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. When a handful of the nation's most
prominent drug-policy-reform activists and funders began a series of
invite-only meetings in 1995, St. Pierre said, the discussion was
about just getting a win, any win.

Medical marijuana, which had higher approval in polls than marijuana
legalization, was seen as a new approach, he said. The group latched
on to Proposition 215.

"It was a volunteer effort and going nowhere," said Ethan Nadelmann, a
former Princeton professor who organized the 1995 meetings and who is
now the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Soon George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager and rainmaker
for progressive political causes, wrote a check to Peron's campaign to
help gather enough signatures to get it on the ballot.

By the time the campaign concluded -- with a 10-percentage-point
victory at the polls in November 1996 -- Soros had written checks for
$500,000, according to numerous published reports. Peter Lewis, the
chairman of Progressive Insurance, and John Sperling, the founder of
the University of Phoenix, also cut six-figure checks. George Zimmer,
of Men's Wearhouse fame, made sizeable contributions as well.

Medical-pot successes spread

Nadelmann said each of the funders' motivations differed. Lewis and
Zimmer were keen on marijuana reform. Sperling was concerned about
incarceration rates, he said. And Soros was interested in effective
drug policy and dying with dignity, Nadelmann said.

"Among major donors, some, like Soros, were not interested in broader
marijuana legalization," he said.

Peron said he knew some of the donors through marijuana-reform groups
and said he didn't doubt their sincerity in helping the sick find
relief. But he said he also began to feel squeezed out by their
involvement in the campaign.

"All these people started to give me money," Peron recalled. "And it
was great, I was glad for it. But in the end, they started taking
credit for it."

After the success of Proposition 215, the initiative's funders looked
to take medical marijuana nationwide and continue their winning
streak, without Peron. A new organization called Americans for Medical
Rights backed winning medical-marijuana campaigns in Alaska, Oregon,
Washington, Maine, Nevada and Colorado, often providing the large
majority of funding for those campaigns.

In Colorado, for instance, Americans for Medical Rights contributed
all but $250 of the $242,450 the group Coloradans for Medical Rights
raised in promoting the state's medical-marijuana ballot initiative,
according to state records. Opponents of the measure, by contrast,
raised $147,231, most of that from small donors. The measure passed
with 54 percent of the vote in 2000.

Americans for Medical Rights' political campaigns primarily occurred
in states where marijuana-use rates were already highest. Of the 10
states with the highest average annual ranking for marijuana use since
1998, only New Hampshire and Massachusetts don't allow medical
marijuana, according to federal data. Only one state with a
medical-marijuana program, New Jersey, falls in the bottom half of
that category. Colorado has the fourth-highest average annual ranking.
Nadelmann said the campaign didn't deliberately target high-use states
but rather looked for places with a ballot-initiative process where
medical-marijuana polled well and there were activists in place who
could help.

"The key was to draft something that had local buy-in," he
said.

Though the advocacy groups didn't consider it at the time, St. Pierre
said, the campaigns were also sowing the seeds for the next generation
of marijuana activism, one that may just render the traditional pot
lobby irrelevant.

"No one at that time envisioned that there would be a
medical-marijuana industry that would start," St. Pierre said.

But as the medical-marijuana businesses the campaigns enabled took
root and flourished, they accumulated two things crucial in politics:
money and friends.

Business owners earned money to spend on activism, which in turn
protected their businesses. Dispensaries and medical-marijuana schools
provided natural spots for organizational meetings. And
medical-marijuana patients became an easily tapped source of campaign
door-knockers and phone-bankers.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Oaksterdam, the marijuana-fueled
empire that longtime cannabis activist Richard Lee has created in a
handful of shops and buildings in downtown Oakland, Calif. At
Oaksterdam University, students learn the tools of the
medical-marijuana trade. At Coffeeshop Blue Sky, medical-marijuana
patients purchase lattes at the counter up front and baggies of Green
Kush marijuana at the counter in back. And at the Oaksterdam Gift
Shop, the ganja-tourist can pick up a sweat shirt to commemorate the
day.

Taking steps to legalization

But these days, the real activity is in a sunny storefront filled with
folding tables and telephone lines. It is here where Lee is waging his
campaign to pass Proposition 19, perhaps the most prominent
marijuana-legalization initiative in the nation's history -- because it
is one of the only ones to actually have a chance of passing.

Proposition 19 would allow people older than 21 to possess an ounce of
marijuana or grow as many cannabis plants as they can in a
25-square-foot space. It would also allow cities to develop more
ambitious plans for large-scale marijuana sales and
cultivation.

When Lee began pitching the idea to the established marijuana lobby
two years ago, he was met with a sniff. Too soon, they told him. Wait
until 2012, a presidential election with a predictable higher turnout.
The usual funders largely sat on their wallets.

Undaunted, Lee has spent nearly $1.5 million in direct and in-kind
contributions to fund the campaign himself, according to California
secretary of state's office records.

"The war is now, here," Lee said, in explaining his urgency. "It's
happening."

"He isn't wedded to these same institutions as we are," NORML's St.
Pierre said.

"They have enough money at this point that they can fund their own
liberation."

Polls show the measure with a slim lead, and its relative success has
caused the established marijuana lobby to do an about-face.

"Richard Lee was prescient in many ways in reading the 2010 election
cycle in being a unique opportunity to address the failures of
marijuana prohibition in the depths of this state's fiscal crisis,"
said Stephen Gutwillig of the Drug Policy Alliance, a successor of
Americans for Medical Rights.

In other words, Lee, by arguing about the amount of tax money legal
pot could generate for recession-strapped governments, found a new way
to sell marijuana politics. What's more, without the support of the
usual marijuana groups, Lee went out and sold the idea to an entirely
new set of supporters in a way that has aligned marijuana with
mainstream political interests like never before.

"We're seeing a lot of people supporting us who didn't in the past --
because of the Great Recession," Lee said. "It's freaky almost."

Take, for instance, the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
Months ago, union representative Dan Rush began talking to his bosses
in California about supporting Lee's campaign. At first, Rush said,
they laughed. But gradually they warmed to his argument that legal
marijuana presented an opportunity for the union.

"Jobs," Rush said in summing up the union's interest in the
initiative. "It's taking the underground plantation economy . . . and
turning it into sustainable, single-earner union jobs."

Unusual political allies

Rush has also been crucial, Lee said, in turning other unions into
supporters, a list that now includes California branches of the
Service Employees International Union, the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union and the Communication Workers of America. Lee has
reciprocated the interest by turning Oaksterdam into an entirely union
shop.

"The unions have political muscle," Lee said. "So to have them as
allies is one more step in ending cannabis prohibition."

Proposition 19 has drawn support from other political quarters. (The
measure's primary opponents have been law enforcement groups, social-
values organizations and the alcohol industry.) A smattering of
religious leaders, former law enforcement officials and doctors have
endorsed the initiative.

So, too, has the California chapter of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People. In a commentary posted on The
Huffington Post, California NAACP president Alice Huffman wrote that
ending marijuana prohibition is a civil-rights issue.

"This is a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and
the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor
African-Americans," she wrote.

Lee said the campaign is counting on the energy of nontraditional
voters to help at the polls.

The campaign has largely eschewed traditional rallies in favor of
rigorous online outreach and small, grassroots events. But, during a
late-summer visit, it was clear the campaign still had work to do to
generate enthusiasm about the initiative.

Ambivalence, opposition

In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, home to likely the
highest concentration of glass stores and smoke shops in the country,
shopkeepers said they had heard little discussion about the initiative
and seen no campaigning.

"They must be confident it's going to pass," one reasoned.

Sitting outside the P-Kok clothing store, 23-year-old Caroline Lepman
said she had mixed feelings about the initiative. She supports
legalization, she said. But, in a way, that's what already exists.

"California seems to be doing a pretty good job with its current
legislation," she said.

On a summer day at the Berkeley Farmers Market -- as friendly a turf
for marijuana politics as exists in America -- voters seemed mostly
indifferent. Many walked by the Proposition 19 table without so much
as a glance, giving it the same amount of attention they did to tables
promoting rainwater recycling, urban gardening and a campaign to end
"corporate personhood." The distraction of a nearby bongo
drum-guitar-recorder trio playing "Twist and Shout" also hindered the
modest voter-outreach efforts.

Most voters seemed aware of the initiative and generally
supportive.

But one woman -- she gave her name only as Deborah, for self-evident
reasons -- said she worried the initiative would cut into a crucial
side business for her, that is, growing dope. Legalization could lower
marijuana prices, she said, making it less profitable for small-time
growers like herself.

"Everyone I know either grows or smokes, and we like it the way it
is," she said. "We don't want anybody to take it from us. . . . And I
wouldn't feel any safer at night. It wouldn't do anything for me. I
hate to be selfish, but I have to speak for the grower."

In a state that has more marijuana users than any other state in the
country, this is, surprisingly, a common argument. And it's one that
typically elicits a patient smile and a sigh from Lee. Nowhere is this
concern more prevalent than in the woods of northern California, where
generations have made a decent living as pot farmers, and folks are
now worried that legalization could bring about the loss of not just
income but their lifestyle as well.

Future still uncertain

Speaking before a roomful of marijuana growers this summer in Ukiah,
Calif., Lee attempted to make his typical pitch.

It would keep thousands of small-time offenders out of jail. It would
save the state money and bring in new revenue.

But then he turned blunt.

"I didn't get into this to keep the price high," he said. "I'm sorry.
In my view, getting the price down is a way to reduce the violence."

The expressions on the growers' faces sagged. Lee kept
smiling.

Whether Lee's coalition will hold together until Election Day is, like
many things on the frontier of marijuana politics, uncertain. At a
recent cannabis convention in San Francisco, some in the crowd heckled
Lee, and a Sacramento dispensary just formed a political committee to
oppose the initiative.

But regardless of the outcome, Lee sees his campaign -- feuds and all --
as a positive step forward.

"Whenever I get down that there is infighting," he said, "I think
about how it's a good thing we're big enough to have
infighting."

Meanwhile, across the bay in San Francisco, Dennis Peron is less
optimistic. The man who started medical-marijuana politics has now
seen two generations of activists stand on his shoulders and promise
more. The weight -- and wait -- is getting to him.

Talk of regulating marijuana, he bemoaned, is another form of
criminalizing it. Taxing it, he fumed, is just a bribe to government
to keep from getting busted.

What happens to the movement, he asks, if this thing
loses?

"People are going to lose hope who just found it," he said. "The
nation is going to think California abandoned them."