THE DRUG CZAR WINS THE POT

John Walters had a great day at the polls on Tuesday. Voters in Nevada,
Arizona, Ohio and South Dakota heeded calls by the nation's drug czar to
reject putative drug "reform" measures that appeared on their state ballots.

Nevada's Question 9 would have legalized the sale and use of marijuana.
Walters visited the Sagebrush State twice this fall, warning voters that
pot is an "addictive gateway drug" that can lead to use of cocaine and heroin.

Arizona's Proposition 203 would have decriminalized possession of up to 2
ounces of marijuana. Penalties for getting caught with cannabis would have
been reduced to mere fines, much like like traffic tickets.

Ohio's Issue 1 would have amended the state's constitution, mandating
judges to send drug offenders to treatment instead of jail. During an
appearance last month in Ohio, Walters cautioned the Buckeye State voters,
"It will weaken the tools that the institutions have to help people get
into treatment."

South Dakota's Constitutional Amendment A would have allowed drug offenders
to argue to juries that drug laws are unfair and urge acquittals on that
basis. The Coyote State would have been the first to sanction jury
nullification, permitting juries to disregard established law.

Drug legalization advocates were chastened by the Election Day results,
after passage in recent years of more than a dozen ballot initiatives
around the country relaxing state drug laws. "We have seen tonight how hard
the drug war ideologues are willing to fight and how dirty they're willing
to fight," said Bruce Merken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project,
one of the groups coordinating the multi-state campaign. Merken protests
too much. For if there has been any dirty fighting by ideologues on either
side of the drug war, it has been by those like Merken's group, like the
National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, that favor scrapping the
nation's drug laws. Indeed, neither the Marijuana Policy Projector or NORML
or other confederate organizations come right out and tell voters that they
advocate drug legalization, that they would allow the sale and use not only
of marijuana, but also cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, LSD, ecstasy and
every other imaginable controlled substance.

Instead, they suggest to voters that they are merely interested in
"reforming" the nation's drug laws to help the sick or to relieve the
taxpayers of the unnecessary burden of incarcerating harmless drug
offenders. And it's because drug legalization advocates hide their ulterior
motive that voters in nine states so far have been duped into approving
ballot initiatives allowing the sale and use of marijuana for supposed
"medical" purposes.

Marijuana has been held out during those initiative campaigns as a
palliative for patients suffering from such diseases as cancer, AIDS and
multiple sclerosis. Despite the fact that there is no hard scientific
evidence proving the efficacy of medical marijuana.

And despite research showing that marijuana damages short-term memory,
distorts perception, impairs judgment and complex motor skills, and alters
the heart rate. And that marijuana use can lead to severe anxiety and can
cause paranoia and lethargy. But, then, the sponsors of those "medical"
marijuana propositions couldn't have cared less about the safety and
effectiveness of the drug. They just wanted to get their stealth pro-drug
measures enacted. They figured that if they could get voters to approve
marijuana use for putative therapeutic purposes, they could eventually get
those same voters to approve marijuana for non-therapeutic purposes -- as
Nevada's Question 9 would have done. And so on, until they effectively
legalized all drug use.

This insidious plan has the financial backing of three billionaires, George
Soros, a New York financier, John Sperling, founder of the University of
Phoenix nationwide chain, and Peter Lewis, former CEO of Progressive
Insurance. Sperling, who has spent $13 million to legalize drugs, is
perhaps the most strident of the troika.

"The government's drug-reform policy is driven by a fundamentalist
Christian sense of morality that sees any of these illegal substances used
as evil," he told Time magazine. But most Americans are not fundamentalist
Christians, yet the vast majority oppose drug legalization. That's because
they recognize the deadly scourge that illegal drugs represent. Now that
Sperling and his fellow billionaires have been outed, now that their
deceptive drug legalization crusade has been exposed, the public is wising
up. That's why pro-drug ballot measures in Nevada, Arizona, Ohio and South
Dakota failed on Election Day.

Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.