BREAULT'S FIGHT AGAINST POT A JOINT EFFORT

William Breault, chairman of the Main South Alliance for Public
Safety, is a hard-core activist, a steamroller, a man who likes to
Bogart every community health and safety issue.

He is homegrown - born on Bell Hill, raised in Main South, he
graduated from South High Community School and worked in the
maintenance department at the College of the Holy Cross for 34 years.

He has stood as a vanguard to combat the decline in his neighborhood,
working tirelessly and passionately to make it a decent and safe
place to live, and he has had some success.

Working with his dad, the late Theodore Breault, who also was a
community activist, he railed against rooming houses as drug and
prostitution joints until the city revoked the licenses of these
establishments.

The heavy lumber he wielded in wasting the proponents of needle
exchange programs here and in Springfield has won him legendary
status among those opposing needle exchange programs around the country.

You can't help but feel, however, that he's just blowing smoke when
it comes to his fight against marijuana.

In 2008, he blitzed the state, working unsuccessfully against the
ballot initiative that led to the Massachusetts law decriminalizing
the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Mr. Breault won't give up the chase, however.

He is back with a petition requesting that the City Council raise the
fine on possession of small amounts of marijuana to $300. Chances are
the council, which increasingly is viewing every resident as a
bagman, will get the munchies big time for this requested change.

"It is decriminalized. It is not legalized," Mr. Breault said of marijuana use.

"This (higher fine) is to make them think twice. I see people walking
in drug houses near me smoking a joint on the way in and smoking a
joint on the way out. Well, if you are going to smoke in the open,
you are going to pay a high fine."

But he hasn't always been a straight one. He used to drink, but
doesn't anymore. He doesn't smoke, either.

In the late '60s, when he was in the prime of his youth, and many of
the more adventurous of his generation were drifting toward San
Francisco and Haight-Ashbury to find peace and love, he stayed home
to help out in his dad's television repair shop.

But while he might have missed the flower child decade, he finally
got buzzed on the marijuana issue about 20 years ago when Lea
Palleria Cox, president of the Hanover-based Concerned Citizens for
Drug Prevention, "introduced me to some people on the national level."

"From everything I have read and seen it is a gateway drug," Mr.
Breault said. "It leads to other drugs. If you don't use pot, you
have a 70 percent chance of never going on to other drugs."

Mr. Breault has been known to play fast and free with the facts when
it suits his purposes, and it might well be the case here.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, for
example, says, "Statistically, for every 104 Americans who have tried
marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine, and less than
one user of heroin."

Nevertheless, since his association with Ms. Cox began, Mr. Breault
has fully immersed himself in the fight against marijuana use and
legalization across the country.

He and his organization are in cahoots with 30 or 40 partners across
the country trying to blunt the country's appetite for any use of marijuana.

When California passed its Compassionate Use Act in 1996, allowing a
patient or his primary caregiver to possess marijuana on the advice
of a physician, the Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative quickly
organized itself to supply such patients with the marijuana they needed.

The federal government sued the cooperative, arguing that the group's
cultivation and distribution of marijuana were against federal law
because there was no medical exception to the law. The suit, with the
Main South Alliance included as a friend of the court, ended up in
the Supreme Court in 2001.

Mr. Breault sat in on the oral arguments, and saluted the court's
ruling that the federal Controlled Substances Act did not recognize a
medical necessity exception.

The court's action didn't cause the movement behind medicinal use of
marijuana to go up in smoke. According to NORML, 15 states and
Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana use, and 13 have
enacted some version of the Massachusetts decriminalization law.

This should all add up as a "buzzkill" for Mr. Breault, but he cannot
give up the fight. He is hooked.