BUDDING PROSPECTS: YOUTH ACTIVISTS PUSH MARIJUANA REFORM

On November 7 a group of student activists gathered in a room on the
University of Colorado campus to discuss strategies for how to run a
marijuana legalization campaign in the 2012 elections.

Five days earlier, voters in California had defeated Proposition 19
by a margin of seven points.

Although the vote represented the largest percentage a US
legalization measure has ever garnered (46.5 percent), many in the
drug policy reform community were discouraged. Young activists who
had spent the past several months encouraging students on California
campuses to register, and who worked furiously in the final days to
get out the vote, were exhausted.

There were a lot of sullen expressions in downtown Oakland on election night.

But for the students in Boulder, and in some ways for the
legalization movement more broadly, the fight is just beginning.

After all the media attention heaped on the Prop 19 campaign, it
should come as no surprise that the vanguard of the legalization
drive in Colorado is made up of college-age activists.

Motivating young voters was a central focus of the grassroots effort
for Prop 19, and to a large extent it worked.

In a postelection follow-up, the Public Policy Institute of
California found that 62 percent of voters under 34 supported the
initiative. The campaign I helped to organize through Students for
Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) printed more than 100,000 door hangers
with bar codes that, when scanned by cellphones, directed students to
their polling place.

And we didn't stop with California. We worked with our partners in
the Just Say Now campaign to organize phone banks staffed by students
from all over the country, who made thousands of calls for the low
cost of several pizzas per night.

The training, preceded by the so-called Mile High Marijuana Summit in
Denver, was convened in this collaborative spirit, and the
participants aimed to be equally sophisticated in their approach.
They discussed concepts such as tempo, decentralization, adapting to
unforeseen challenges and exploiting success.

Students were encouraged to "plan backward," envisioning objectives
such as registering 2,000 students to vote and then stepping through
a timeline of how that could be achieved.

At one point the conversation turned to the possibility of direct
action, as students debated infiltrating the two parties' platform
committees to push for their endorsements.

Watching these young activists voraciously consuming information
about how to win an election, just days after a historic loss, was
more than invigorating. It made the hairs on the back of my neck
stand on end. Change is coming sooner than anyone believes.

And this is what it's going to look like.

In today's money-soaked politics, any campaign that seeks broad
legislative reform needs a healthy war chest.

Funding for state marijuana initiatives has been building steadily in
recent years, with Prop 19 raising the most by far. Sponsored by
Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee, who brought some $1.5
million to the campaign, the initiative got a major boost from
several large donors in the weeks leading up to election day. On
October 7 the SSDP campaign received a $75,000 donation from David
Bronner, co-owner of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, and another $25,000
from longtime DC marijuana activists Adam Eidinger and Alan
Amsterdam. But that was only the tip of the late-money iceberg.

That same week Napster creator Sean Parker donated $100,000 to Yes on
19, and his fellow Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz added another
$70,000 to support the measure.

In mid-October philanthropist Peter Lewis poured in $200,000.
Billionaire financier George Soros followed in late October with $1 million.

That funding enabled the campaign to deploy sophisticated tactics and
to mount a high-profile ad blitz-thirty-second spots on Comedy
Central, a wraparound ad on page one of the Los Angeles Times. It
also brought legitimacy in the court of public opinion.

In the early 2000s, when I began my professional involvement with the
marijuana reform movement, talking in the media about legalizing
marijuana was generally off-limits. So we picked the fights we could
win. Even though medical marijuana enjoyed 80 percent support at the
time, I often struggled to be taken seriously.

When your coffers are full, you don't have that kind of problem.

A side benefit of running a marijuana campaign with mainstream
credibility is that it brings the issue into the light.

Being a marijuana lobbyist is kind of like being a priest.

People will tell you things about their marijuana use they would
never tell anyone else. It fosters the sense that a great many more
people use it than admit it. As more people talk honestly about their
recreational use of marijuana, the barriers to honest discussion will erode.

It is misleading to claim, however, as some opponents do, that the
cannabis movement is entirely sustained by "well-funded legalizers."
Large donors are responding to, not creating, the energy that fuels
the cannabis campaign.

The money is just catching up with the momentous political
opportunity. What we need now is better preparation, with multiyear
plans focused on training activists in targeted states-the sorts of
tactics employed by top Democratic and Republican strategists. That
requires an investment in the future.

Colorado's political culture is strongly liberty-oriented, and the
state consistently ranks near the top of the list for per-capita
marijuana use. This stature was not lost on legislators, who this
year made it the first state to regulate the wholesale production and
retail distribution of medical marijuana.

The state legalized medical marijuana in 2000, but its cannabis
culture didn't blossom until last year, when the Justice Department
issued guidelines for federal prosecutors in states with medical
marijuana laws. In an October 19, 2009, memo Attorney General Eric
Holder announced that federal resources would not be spent on
"individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance
with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."

This decision did not come out of thin air; it was the result of a
long struggle by cannabis campaigners to persuade leaders to align
policy with evolving public standards on the issue.

California voters leaped into the fray fourteen years ago with
Proposition 215, the first state ballot initiative in the country to
allow medical marijuana. Over the years an increasing number of
states added their own laws providing for use with a physician's
recommendation, giving those states' residents a chance to see
firsthand that legal marijuana will not cause the sky to fall. (Today
fifteen states and the District of Columbia allow marijuana for medical use.)

By 2007 a mainstream political consensus around medical marijuana
laws had formed, at least among leading Democrats. During the
primaries, every Democratic presidential candidate supported an end
to federal raids on medical marijuana patients, further propelling
the issue into the realm of serious policy discussion. Starting in
the presidential interregnum in late 2008, Obama's staff conducted
three rounds of voting on the official transition team website,
asking users to submit ideas and vote on them. In all three
rounds-during which millions of Americans participated-questions
related to taxing and regulating marijuana were the top-voted questions.

Even before Obama's inauguration, his staff could see opportunity in
the marijuana constituency. In February 2009, during the president's
first weeks in office, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro affirmed
that Obama intended to make good on his campaign promise to restrict
federal raids.

In earlier times, we could have reasonably expected a serious backlash.

This time around, none came-but then again, neither did the
guidelines. On April 2, 2009, I testified before the House
subcommittee that handles Justice Department appropriations, urging
Congress to ask the department to issue the promised policy.

And in June, I worked with Congressman Maurice Hinchey and other
Congressional leaders to get the full House Appropriations Committee
to do the same.

Once the threat of enforcing the Controlled Substances Act was
removed, storefront dispensaries in Colorado proliferated. According
to the Denver Post, the state has collected more than $2.2 million in
sales tax from dispensaries this year. And now that medical marijuana
is practically a given in the state, legalization is up for
discussion. This is where the activists at the Colorado campaign
training come in. They aim to push that discussion to the center of
debate in 2012, and recent trends suggest that they'll have a good
shot at success.

According to a 2009 America Votes poll, 45 percent of "surge voters"
in Colorado will be more interested in voting if marijuana
legalization is on the ballot.

Also, marijuana initiatives have tended to do better in presidential
election years: five of the six most recent winning statewide voter
initiatives relaxing marijuana penalties were passed in such years.

Most Americans would be surprised to learn that the government came
close to significantly revising federal marijuana statutes in 1978.
At the time the Carter administration expressed support for
decriminalizing the possession and transfer of small amounts of
marijuana, as did Senator Ted Kennedy, then chair of the Judiciary
Committee. Kennedy even successfully pushed for the inclusion of a
marijuana decriminalization provision in the 1978 crime bill.

Decriminalization laws seemed the wisest route back then, but the
current debate should focus on legalization. Although
decriminalization laws keep possessors of marijuana from being
arrested, thus freeing police time and resources, they do nothing to
control or diminish the power of criminal organizations that move and
sell marijuana.

Legalization could be a fatal blow to drug cartels, since by some
estimates 70 percent of their profits come from marijuana sales alone.

For the first time in history, the legalization movement is poised to
make state-based marijuana regulation a mainstream position.

Because libertarian-leaning GOP voters, including Tea Partyers,
generally support allowing states to decide their own marijuana
policies, the 2012 presidential primary will be unlike any in recent
memory. Assuming that the majority of GOP presidential contenders
adopt socially conservative positions early in the race (i.e.,
against marijuana regulation), a plurality of voters with libertarian
tendencies will be up for grabs and could swing some states' primary
elections. Even Sarah Palin has called marijuana a "minimal problem."

The most telling difference between now and thirty years ago, when
the marijuana reform movement last stood at the brink of major
success, is that tens of millions of Americans live in states that
allow the use of marijuana, and they don't seem to mind it. The sky
has not fallen, and the silenced majority is speaking out.