TAKING ON POLS AT THE POLLS

A State Vote on Legalization May Not Win, but Could at Least Start an
Important Dialogue

The No. 1 story about marijuana in Michigan in 2011 was the wrath
anti-drug warrior Attorney General Bill Schuette unleashed on medical
marijuana facilities and users. Schuette used his bully pulpit and
legal resources to intimidate dispensaries, people who work at
dispensaries, people who grow marijuana and medical marijuana
patients - working with friendly county prosecutors (particularly in
Oakland County), federal authorities and state legislators to try to
put the medical marijuana genie back in the bottle.

Marijuana legalization activists are working hard to make 2012 a very
different story. In reaction to Schuette's tactics, a group calling
itself the Committee for a Safer Michigan is kicking off a campaign
this week to amend the state constitution and flat-out legalize
marijuana for adults. This is a citizens' initiative that requires
collecting 322,608 valid signatures in order to get on the fall ballot.

"The Michigan Medical Marihuana Act was passed in an effort to remove
patients from the line of fire," says CSM spokesperson Charmie
Gholson. "They are increasingly investigated in a backlash to the
MMMA. The sick and dying are in harm's way. We want law enforcement
to focus on violent crime instead of going after patients and
caregivers, which is increasingly happening."

Indeed, anybody who is involved in medical marijuana at any level is
potentially in harm's way because Schuette has declared the supremacy
of federal law on this issue (although he asserts states' rights when
it comes to, say, health care). In several prosecutions of
card-carrying patients or caregivers, judges have ruled that
defendants cannot cite the MMMA in their defense.

"We're doing this because of the failure of Michigan to enact the law
the way it was written and passed by voters," Gholson says.

CSM has already put up a website (help.repealtoday.org) where
volunteers can register to help. That grassroots aid is the only way
this petition drive will be successful, because there isn't much
money available for this campaign. It looks like there will be
initiatives in five states to legalize marijuana, and the deep
pockets of billionaires Peter Lewis, George Soros and John Sperling,
who have previously bankrolled initiatives across the country, won't
be available in Michigan.

"This year is going to be a very active year for initiatives," says
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "Every successful initiative since
about 1996 has been funded by Lewis, Soros or Sperling. Washington
state and Colorado are the funded initiatives this year. They're
probably going to make the ballot. Montana, Michigan, Missouri and
California are nonfunded. People on the ground are filing papers and
moving forward with a grassroots effort. They're probably going to
make the ballot in California too."

Lewis, who St. Pierre says is historically the largest funder of
marijuana initiatives, is funding the Washington Civil Liberties
Union and SAFER in Colorado because they have long-established
organizations on the ground. Lewis only funds initiatives he believes
will be successful and apparently believes those have the best chance.

St. Pierre isn't making a direct statement about Michigan, but it's
pretty easy to infer that he thinks it's a long-shot effort to get on
the ballot - let alone win at the polls. He's told me in the past
that in order for an initiative to be successful, support should have
been polled at about 58 percent for six months. Others say that you
need support at around 55 percent. Scientific polls in Michigan have
shown support for legalization of marijuana at 51 percent; once the
anti-marijuana forces kick in, that support will erode. But that
doesn't mean that St. Pierre thinks the petition effort is useless.

"You might not win, but you create a vehicle for public discussion,"
says St. Pierre. "It creates a fairly long vehicle over several
months for discussion. Politicians, law enforcement and mainstream
media don't want to have these discussions. In a state like Michigan
that has that vehicle, why not use it? If you don't get the big
funding, statistically you don't have a chance of prevailing, but you
create an educational vehicle. All that process is good. The more
marijuana reform is discussed, the more prohibition is exposed as a
flawed, bad policy, the more likely we see the public supporting
these reforms. In 1995, about 20 percent of Americans favored
legalization; about 50 percent want legalization now. This is a good
thing for advancing the laws in general."

There will be plenty of discussion about marijuana across the state
and the nation. On the state level, Flint's Ben Horner, publisher of
the Michigan Medical Marijuana Report, plans on having numerous
workshops around the state sponsored by the Vote Green initiative.
(Not to be confused with the Green Party.) Horner hopes to have
discussions about everything from the "recall Schuette" campaign to
municipal efforts to assign marijuana offenses the lowest law
enforcement priority to voter registration drives to efforts to bring
disparate activists across the state together.

"This is to support progressive, compassionate thinking about
cannabis in general," he says. "There are a lot of ideas out there. I
don't know what the final solution is going to be. "

Vote Green workshops are already planned for Waterford, Prudenville
(near Houghton Lake), Lapeer and Ann Arbor. Horner points out that
each of the 110 state representative seats are up for election this
fall, creating an opportunity for voters to engage their state reps
on the issue. If nothing else, state House elections could easily
engage a lot of people who believe they can make a difference on the
issue in their communities.

"Well under 1 percent of people who use cannabis are involved in the
legal reform of cannabis," says St. Pierre. "Absent that dedicated
funding from one of those known sources, this is a maypole to
organize around, to draw people out from their smoky closets."

The fact that Wayne State University is hosting a Jan. 27 symposium
on the implication of national and state marijuana reform shows that
the discussion is taking off. Former state Attorney General Mike Cox
is scheduled to give the keynote address at the Law School's Spencer
M. Partrich auditorium. Seating is limited, and the event is likely
already full, but more information is available at 313-577-8032.

Nationally it's hard to ignore that there could be five different
states calling the question on legalizing marijuana. That's an
unprecedented amount and something national pundits will have to
address. If even one of those state initiatives is successful at the
ballot, there will be celebration and caterwauling across the nation.

"California's Prop. 19 kicked off a massive discussion in the last
election cycle," St. Pierre says. "Many failed initiatives forced a
public discussion the elected body politic doesn't want to have. If
Michigan and Montana officials had not clamped down so hard on
medical marijuana, I don't think we would have seen these
initiatives. The vicious political rebound has pushed activists to
say, 'You don't like medical marijuana; you're not going to like
legalization any better, so we'll go for that.'"

It's going to be a very interesting year. By the time November rolls
around, we could be having a very, very interesting discussion.