POT EFFORT GROWS SLOWLY

Legalization Movement Is Quiet, But Smoking

While efforts to allow marijuana use for easing serious medical symptoms
are capturing headlines from California to the nation's capital, a quieter
but persistent campaign to legalize recreational pot use is gaining
momentum here and abroad.

Canada and Britain have taken major steps recently toward revamping their
anti-marijuana laws, following the lead of most European countries. And in
the United States, proposals to ease penalties for marijuana use will be on
the ballot in November in at least three states.

"The marijuana issue has come of age," says R. Keith Stroup, who 32 years
ago founded NORML, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that has remained
dedicated to legalizing marijuana.

The most dramatic ballot initiative this fall is in Nevada, where voters
comfortable with gambling and prostitution will be asked whether they want
to let adults possess up to 3 ounces of pot in their homes. That's enough,
according to Stroup's calculations, to roll about 90 joints the thickness
of a pencil.

Arizona will consider scrapping arrests for possession and cultivation of
small amounts of marijuana. In Ohio, where possession of up to 100 grams of
pot was decriminalized in the 1970s, voters will decide whether all
non-violent drug users should get treatment instead of prison for their
first two offenses.

But as advocates herald what they say is the dawn of a new public attitude
toward marijuana, opponents - from psychiatrists to the nation's drug czar
- - are hardening their opposition to the fight for the right to fire up a
joint. They say the cost to society would be dear, most seriously in the
potential for increasing marijuana use among children.

"If marijuana is more available, more kids would be exposed to it and
that's the major concern," said Dr. Marianne Guschwan, an addiction
psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at New York University.

During the "Just Say No" 1980s and early 1990s, advocates of marijuana
legalization were all but silenced. The trend to decriminalize pot
possession that began in Oregon in 1973 stalled at 11 states by 1978.

"The mood of the country got more conservative and we lost ground for 15 or
20 years," said Stroup, 58, who trained as a lawyer and said he and many of
his contemporaries began smoking pot at anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s.

With a decline in serious crime in the 1990s and a parallel increase in the
number of arrests nationwide for marijuana possession, the pro- marijuana
forces have decided to roll out their campaigns with renewed vigor.

Armed with fresh national statistics saying that 14 million Americans smoke
marijuana, advocates say they believe the events of Sept. 11 give their
arguments an added potency. Billions of dollars that could be used in the
war on terrorism, they say, are being wasted annually on the arrest,
prosecution and incarceration of people for marijuana possession.

"We are questioning whether it's a good use of our tax dollars to arrest
and prosecute people who smoke marijuana," said Joseph H. White, a
Greenfield, Mass., businessman and father. His organization, Change the
Climate Inc., has made its name with billboard and public transit
advertisements questioning the nation's spending on pot possession penalties.

"So many of us who grew up in the late '60s and early '70s have become
happy, successful, well-adjusted business people and parents," White said.
"Whether or not we continue to smoke marijuana is irrelevant."

Though numbers are subject to debate, Stroup claims that up to $10 billion
annually is spent in the U.S. to enforce marijuana laws, and that last year
734,000 pot arrests were made each year - 88 percent for simple possession.

Guschwan, the addiction psychiatrist, points to another set of statistics
that she finds more powerful. A recent U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services survey shows that 8 percent of youngsters between the ages of 12
and 17 reported using marijuana in the 30 days prior to the survey; 17.3
percent of that same group said they'd used alcohol during the same period.

"Alcohol is more available and more kids use it. If marijuana was more
available, more kids would be exposed to it," she said. "Advocates of
legalization argue that we would save money in terms of fighting the drug
problem, but we would see an increase in morbidity, mortality and societal
costs.

"Youth would be more at risk of developing problems, and it would affect
their productivity and success in school," she said.

Will Glaspy, a spokesman with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration,
said more than 60 percent of teenagers in drug rehabilitation programs are
there because they had become addicted to marijuana.

"You have a contingent of people making unscientific claims about
marijuana," he said. "DEA's position is that marijuana is a schedule 1
controlled substance. It is a harmful drug."

While both sides throw out statistics and theories about the correlation
between criminal laws, availability and use or abuse of marijuana, much of
it is simply rhetoric, says Rosalie Pacula of the Rand Corp.

"People are getting caught up in the rhetoric when we haven't done the
analysis to get the facts. We are just now beginning to get the actual data
to know" how legalization or decriminalization of marijuana affects use and
the costs to society, said Pacula. She and her colleagues at Rand are in
the midst of a major research project on the effects of "marijuana
depenalization."

The analysis has proved tricky: Though 11 states have decriminalized
marijuana possession in various ways and to various degrees, other states
have approved statutes that may ease pot penalties more significantly. So
simply analyzing data based on whether a state has decriminalized
possession is useless.

"That's what we don't have good data on yet," Pacula said.

She added that, in states like California, which has decriminalized
possession of small amounts, arrests for marijuana possession have soared
in recent years. Researchers are testing whether suspects arrested on more
serious charges are pleading guilty to lesser possession charges, even for
large amounts of pot that may indicate they're dealing, and whether pot
possession charges are being used in "quality of life" policing that
targets young blacks disproportionately.

"Violent crime has been down and more cops have been available to do DUI
checks or to walk the streets," she said. "I suspect we'll see things
change with terrorism and violent crime on the rise."

As the debate continues in the U.S., a Canadian Senate committee has, after
a two-year study, recommended that marijuana be legalized, that a sale and
distribution system be established, and that amnesty be granted to anyone
convicted of pot possession "under current or past legislation."

The committee, in issuing the report early this month, stressed that it is
not endorsing marijuana use, but simply concluding that using it is a
personal, not criminal, choice and should be regulated, as is the use of
wine and beer. Criminalizing the behavior, the committee said, is
"ineffective and costly."

Britain is following a similar course, having recently made an
administrative decision to stop making pot-possession arrests - without
changing the law.

"The pending changes in Canada and England are going to be the most
powerful steps in moving this country toward legalization," predicted
Stroup, whose NORML organization for the first time this year formed a
political action committee. In Nevada, Billy Rogers, who came to the state
to get the pot initiative passed, predicted that it would be, although
recent polls have shown support slipping. Some say the effort is having
trouble because the initiative combines the endorsement of medical and
recreational uses of marijuana.

"Ultimately, this issue is about protecting responsible adults in the
privacy of their own home," said Rogers. In 1965, 600,000 Americans tried
pot for the first time, according to the government's annual national
household survey on drug abuse. In 2000, the most recent year for which
statistics are available, 2.4 million Americans lit up their first joint.

"Do I think legalization is coming here? All I can say is I hope not," said
Guschwan, the addiction psychiatrist.