THE TERROR WAR ON DRUGS

The Martyrdom Of Steve Treleaven

If Steve Treleaven had a dollar for every a fellow inmate had told him that
there was no way he could have received a 20-year sentence just for growing
some pot on his land, he would be a rich man. And if he had another dollar
for every time that he had been told he would never end up doing the whole
sentence, he could be running for governor.

Instead, he is sitting alone in the visiting room of the shiny, new U.S.
penitentiary in Atwater, about 300 miles north of where he spent a carefree
childhood in Van Nuys and a few million light-years away from the life he
had now hoped to be living.

In his letters out, he describes himself as POW number 08656--023. Like
tens of thousands of others across the country, he is a prisoner in the war
on drugs, a war that has been widened over the last few months so that it
is now part of a more popular and comprehensible war on terrorism. Any
regular television watcher is now familiar with the commercials in which
contrite young people admit to having helped to kill a judge or a policeman
because, by using drugs, they contributed to the funding of international
terrorism.

The ads, produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, suggest
that any American buying drugs could end up financing terrorists, "whether
you're shooting heroin, snorting cocaine, taking Ecstasy or sharing a joint
in your friend's back yard." The government Web site, which displays the
campaign and the reasons behind it, explains the new policy thus: "As
America recovers from the loss and destruction of the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, government officials and
policymakers are focusing on the link between terror and drug trafficking."

The logic may seem a little wobbly, but this is not a story where logic
plays a leading role. Just when it seemed that judicial attitudes toward
marijuana and cases like Steve Treleaven's might be changing and when many
European countries are relaxing cannabis laws, the keys in the doors of
places like Atwater are being given another twist.

And terrorism is being used as an excuse for keeping those doors locked.

The 46-year-old Treleaven probably went to school or hung out with -- or
sold some weed to -- readers of this publication. They may remember a
handsome, easygoing young man with piercing blue eyes and thick wavy dark
hair who graduated from Polytechnic High School in 1974 and who was always
up for any good times going in the Valley. "Everyone smoked pot back then,
it was so easy and non-threatening," says Treleaven as he settles down for
what will be a three-hour conversation. Back then, it seemed only a matter
of time before marijuana would become legal, he says, and he found that
selling weed to his circle of friends was an easy way of making money.
"Then, somewhere along the line, the country decided it was a major offense."

In fact, Treleaven's first brush with the law came in 1981 when he was
busted for possession. It was a warning shot. He was sentenced to a series
of weekend detentions, and concluded that there were smarter ways to live
his life and simpler places than L.A. to do so. He loved the wild and
skiing, and was planning to move to Colorado when a side trip to see a
friend in Idaho made him realize he could achieve his own private dream
right there.

He had already done some construction work, and once there started out
doing odd jobs and eventually formed his own small company.

He met a woman, Mollie, settled down in Sandpoint with her, and had a son.
It was in many ways the perfect life. He even became that archetype of
suburban normality: the local kids' soccer coach. "It was the greatest fun
I had in my life," he says.

But Treleaven had a brother on whom the sun was not shining so brightly. A
Vietnam veteran, his brother had acquired a heavy drug habit and along with
it many attendant problems.

He had been diagnosed HIV positive and was a sick man. His buddies down in
Arizona, where he was then living, had told him that one way to deal with
the pains and the eating difficulties associated with the medicines he was
taking for his illness was to smoke marijuana.

He remembered that little brother Steve knew all about that world, and
contacted him to ask if he could help out.

As it happened, Treleaven's brother's request coincided with a friend in
Idaho suggesting that he and Treleaven grow some weed together in the woods.

As a builder, Treleaven could construct a shed which they would conceal
underground and in which they would grow the marijuana. It worked out fine.
Treleaven sent some of his share of the weed to his brother, who smoked it,
recovered his appetite and regained his health. His brother also supplied
others who had the same illness, in what was a sort of unofficial
medical-marijuana club.

Not that Treleaven is suggesting that he was just a postmodern version of
Mother Teresa administering to the sick. "I'm not trying to say that I was
doing something I didn't know was wrong," says Treleaven, dressed in his
beige prison jump suit. "But I never in a million years thought anyone
could do this time for growing pot." He knew what happened to people who
grew pot on their land in Idaho, because the local papers wrote about them
periodically; they would spend a year or so inside -- if they were unlucky.

But Steve Treleaven was very unlucky.

One of the teenagers who had done some wood-chopping work on his land told
his father, a deputy sheriff, about his boss. The sheriff looked up
Treleaven's record, spotted that conviction back in 1981, and from there it
was downhill all the way to the federal court.

Instead of the case being dealt with at a state level, Treleaven's became a
federal target as part of the expanding war on drugs, and he entered the
world of the mandatory minimum sentence.

Now the method of production that Treleaven and his two friends had chosen
was growing thousands of very small plants, each weighing about 7 grams.

But, by the federal method of calculating, each plant is assessed,
regardless of its true weight, at 1,000 grams.

Treleaven was thus charged with producing 8,000 pounds of marijuana when,
in fact, he personally could have been responsible for only just under 27
pounds. This is when the mandatory minimums really kick in. As a
"manufacturer" of the notional but nonexistent 8,000 pounds, he was jailed
for 10 years. Because of his 1981 possession conviction, the mandatory
minimum of 10 years was doubled, and he was jailed for 20 years.

His brother, deprived of his supply, speedily lost 50 pounds, became
confined to a wheelchair, and was dead within the year.

I heard about Treleaven's case from an organization called Families Against
Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), which campaigns against the laws that have
played such a role in locking up the estimated 470,000 people now behind
bars for drug offenses.

Some of the most egregious cases may sound familiar: Douglas Gray was
jailed for life in July 1992 for buying a pound of marijuana for
himself and friends from a local criminal who had been paid $100 by
the local police in Decatur, Alabama, to work as an informer.

A Vietnam vet, Gray had not been in trouble with the police for 13
years and had never committed any offenses serious enough for jail.
Because the amount of marijuana he purchased was enough to make him a
dealer, he was jailed for life without parole, signaled by that familiar
international soundtrack of incarceration, the jangling of keys.

When I previously lived in California, up north in San Anselmo back in the
early '70s, I remember hearing on KSAN-FM a song from the first album of an
up-and-coming young singer-songwriter from Chicago called John Prine. It
was called "The Illegal Smile" -- "It don't cost very much and it lasts a
long while/Will you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone/I just want to
have me some fun." I don't think any of us listening then thought that,
three decades later, people like Steve Treleaven would be sitting in cells
in California serving the kind of sentences you get for killing someone.