WHY DO MANY NEVADANS FAVOR THE DRUG WAR?

I took heat from some Libertarians for coming out in favor of Question 9 on
the Nov. 5 ballot.

Not because The Remnant favors the Drug War, mind you. It's this "half
measures" thing. No authorization can be found in either the state or
federal Constitution for the government to fight any "Drug War" in the first
place. So the only acceptable course, the argument goes, is to hold out for
a simple declaration that freedom of medical commerce is now restored --
what's all this business of "legalizing" only up to 3 ounces, then requiring
that said pathetic dollops of herb be peddled out of monopoly "state
stores," and so forth?

When you vote for a slightly less onerous version of the Drug War, you're
still voting in favor of a Drug War, with all its statist evils ... right?

The objections are valid. Question 9 was far from "pure" from any
Libertarian perspective.

Had Question 9 passed, however, the headlines would likely have read, "Pot
legalized in Nevada; is Drug War on its last legs?" Instead we were treated
to chortling TV newscasters reporting that, "Legalizing pot was among a
number of bizarre initiatives shot down by voters Tuesday." Why, even in
anything-goes Nevada, the story line ran, a sensible 3-to-2 majority decided
that sending young dopers to prison to be anally raped remains the wisest
course.

Given that no one asked me to help write the ballot question -- we simply
had to vote up, down or abstain -- I favored newscast Option "A."

But the bigger mystery, it seems to me, is why the extremely modest Question
9 failed so miserably.

If about half of adult Americans have smoked pot themselves -- and thus know
from personal experience that all the "Reefer Madness" stories are so much
hogwash -- why do 61 percent of the voters in a state that allows
prostitution and quickie divorce and invites grandmas dragging oxygen tanks
behind them on little wheeled carts to chain-smoke while playing all-night
slot machines vote to continue a Drug War which nationally sends 77,000
people to prison to be raped and/or turned into hardened, career criminals
for merely possessing an ancient herb more medically and socially harmless
than Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum?

"If you're going to follow the money trail, it appears that there is a major
industry in this country that is funded by the continued growth of the Drug
War," replies Paul Armentano, publications director of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in Washington, D.C.

"Years ago we talked about the military-industrial complex. Well, people
today talk about a prison-industrial complex. I'd be hard pressed to find
another branch of government that's grown at such exponential levels --
branches of the Justice Department that deal just with the Drug War that
were funded at $1.5 billion per year in 1980 are now funded at $20 billion
per year, and the bulk of that funding is going for enforcement."

But the question was why the Drug War -- doors broken down in the middle of
the night; CIA employees vectoring Peruvian Air Force jets to shoot down a
small, unarmed plane and kill American missionary Veronica Bowers and her
7-month-old daughter Charity -- still gets a vote of confidence from the
American people.

"I didn't see anyone in Nevada voting to continue the Drug War to keep the
prison guards in work," I challenged Armentano.

"The other side has made a very smart argument, from a Machiavellian
perspective," Armentano agrees. "The federal government has to somehow
convince folks that their experience, which is the norm, does not apply. And
it has succeeded. It has convinced even people who smoked marijuana that
today it's a totally different drug. ... It's made them in some ways
dismissive of their own marijuana-using past.

"It's the only thing that makes sense to me. How else can you explain people
going to the polls and voting to keep a policy in place that says that they
should have gone to jail?"

"They totally used the fear message," agrees Assemblywoman Chris
Giunchigliani, the former schoolmarm and teachers union executive who has
carried the torch for legalization in Carson City, "the second-hand smoke
argument, and the fear of DUIs. It was disingenuous and it was a hard one to
counter; those who do not want to get into a substantive policy debate will
grab an easy sound bite ... These objections have to be reasoned with, and
we couldn't even get to those discussions."

But of course, the "Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement" TV campaign
for Question 9 didn't tell the horror stories of innocent people killed or
having their lives ruined by the Drug War. Instead, it merely stressed the
ever-so-soft slogan, "In the privacy of a home, or with a doctor's
recommendation" ... opening up proponents to accusations they were trying to
slip in full legalization for recreational use under the guise of "mere"
medical marijuana.

"We focus-grouped all of that," Giunchigliani explains. "The focus groups
told us not to even try the other arguments. It was about police officers
wasting their time writing a citation; we had some retired police in the
focus groups and those were the arguments that played well."

"One thing that the other side did was to humanize the issue better than we
did," Armentano agrees. "When they roll out victims of drug abuse, like that
editor of the Las Vegas Sun who was rear-ended at a red light and killed by
a driver who had marijuana in his system ... they put a human face on
potential victims that could arise if this law was passed. And I don't know
that the (legalization) side did a good job of showing the human victims
that are harmed by the drug laws."