The New Politics of the Drug War
Did Election Day mark the
beginning of the end of the War on Drugs? To some drug warriors, the reform
initiatives approved by voters in California and Arizona were the first step
toward unilateral disarmament.
"The implications of this
for the social norms that keep kids away from drugs are very serious," says
Steve Dnistrian, senior vice president of the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America. "There has been no greater fundamental challenge to the
drug-prevention field in a long time."
What is beyond dispute is
that advocates of drug reform are enjoying unprecedented success in setting the
nation's drug-policy agenda, at least for the moment. The "get-tough," "just
say no" party is on the defensive.
Since the first term of
President Richard Nixon, the American political system has responded to popular
concerns about drug use by funding the steady expansion of federal and state
law-enforcement agencies. With the advent of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s,
the civic credos of "getting tough" and "just saying no" carried the weight of
common sense and enjoyed sway in schools, print, and on the airwaves.
Enter:
the marijuana problem. Between 1992 and 1996, the number of teen-agers smoking
marijuana roughly doubled, a phenomenon that received wide attention during the
recent presidential campaign. But Bob Dole's harsh attacks on Bill Clinton for
allegedly condoning this development failed to excite American voters. Given
the perception of a leadership vacuum around the time of the election, it's not
surprising that initiatives such as those in Arizona and California
emerged.
Though lumped together in articles like this, the two laws
are actually quite different. Arizona's is the more sweeping. It requires that
all nonviolent drug offenders be paroled (an estimated 1,000 persons are
eligible to go free within the next 90 days); that the money saved in
jail-related costs go toward funding of a new parents' commission on drug
education; that all violent drug offenders do 100 percent of their
sentence; and, almost as an afterthought, allows doctors to prescribe
marijuana, heroin, or LSD. The California law, by contrast, shields from
prosecution persons who use marijuana under an oral or written "recommendation"
from a medical practitioner.
"The California law is an
implicit rejection of the drug war," says Sam Vagenas, spokesman for pro-reform
forces in Arizona. "Arizona was an explicit rejection."
Is the
result a delegitimization of the drug war--a cultural surrender--an instance of
defining deviancy down, as cultural conservatives would have it? Judge for
yourself.
On the Internet, one entrepreneurial mind has
already set up a Web site offering 27 grams of mail-order medical relief for
$270 ("taxes included") and handy guidelines for how to smoke it. The legality
is virtual: "All buyers must send copy of medical report and birth
certificate." A return address in given. Is this a brazen hoax? Street dealing
on the information highway? Proceed, with a caveat emptor, to:
http://www.medical-marijuana.com/.
In the Family Therapy
Network chat room, a posting on marijuana proved to be the most popular ever,
prompting a wide-ranging adult discussion of law, professional responsibility,
mental health, addiction, mind expansion, and above all, children.
The
Berkeley Cannabis Buyers Club had to take down its Web site, which had been
overwhelmed by surfers hoping to score electronically. Tom Tuk, the designer of
the home page, angrily yanked the site with this statement: "Mail distribution
[of marijuana] is an avenue of diversion for abuse!"
In the nation's capital, the sound you hear is of paper
being shuffled. The president's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, has made it
clear he regards the two laws as the work of deceptive and mischievous drug
legalizers who have snookered a lot of otherwise right-thinking people. But
what will federal drug agencies do? McCaffrey told the Washington Post
that he would make his recommendations to Clinton by Christmas.
In the meantime, drug
warriors in Phoenix and Sacramento are on their own and not happy about it.
Richard Romley, the district attorney for Maricopa County ( which includes
metropolitan Phoenix), was perhaps the most incisive of those who testified
before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing early this month. While four other
witnesses criticized the duplicity of "pro-drug" forces and the naiveté of the
voters, Romley bluntly identified the central choices facing law enforcement:
go after doctors, federalize marijuana enforcement, go to court, and get a
strategy.
The
options are not that attractive.
It's not clear that many doctors will prescribe
marijuana, but some surely will. Professional groups such as the American
Medical Association reject the notion of medical marijuana, but caregiver
organizations like the American Public Health Association and the National
Association of People With AIDS support it. Romley and John Walters, former
staff director of the drug czar's office, want the feds to step in.
"Nothing
in the law prevents DEA from moving unilaterally against the small number of
pro-pot physicians who would likely recommend marijuana for their patients,"
Walters testified. The DEA, he added, "should prepare to do so."
That may sound like a good idea from a Washington
policy-maker point of view. From the perspective of a mayor or state legislator
it sounds like a public-relations debacle: The sight of federal agents cuffing
some beloved Marcus Welby for recommending a marijuana cigarette for kindly
Uncle Sebastian suffering from AIDS will not go over well with voters.
The
federalization of state marijuana prohibitions would also impose some real
costs on Washington. The problem today, from the point of view of cops in
California and Arizona, is that low-volume marijuana traffickers are likely to
say in court that they are handling medical marijuana. That would not be a
permissible defense in federal court, but federal prosecutors don't pursue
traffickers unless they are handling substantial quantities. For example, in
California's Central District, the feds won't take a case that involves less
than 200 kilograms (420 pounds) or 200 plants. "Dealers will be smart enough to
keep their operations under the federal threshold," observed Orange County
Sheriff Brad Gates.
Will the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Central
District of California lower its threshold policy so as to discourage marijuana
entrepreneurs posing as medical suppliers? A spokesman for the office declined
to discuss threshold policies and referred all questions to the still-silent
Justice Department in Washington.
The most forthright response
to the initiatives comes from California Attorney General Dan Lungren. He told
300 cops in Sacramento last week that "the people have spoken," and counseled
grudging cooperation with the forces supporting medical marijuana. (Lungren
made national news last August, when he authorized a police raid on a San
Francisco "buyers' club" that was openly supplying marijuana to AIDS patients
and, the police charged, to many others who just wanted to get stoned. For his
vigilance, Lungren was lampooned in Doonesbury .)
"We must
realize voters meant that marijuana should be used only as an occasional
exception for someone who is seriously suffering and under the direct
supervision of a physician," Lungren said. "The state's voters did not want to
start this state down the slippery slope toward the legalization of
marijuana."
But the "just say no" party can't seem to get traction on
that slippery slope. The public now seems unswayed by its message. Leading
prohibitionist spokesmen like McCaffrey and Lungren campaigned vigorously
against the propositions. Public opinion didn't change much.
The drug
enforcers' claim that the drug reformers are some duplicitous, self-interested
cabal is also growing less plausible. A civic cause that includes
self-described "limousine liberal" billionaire George Soros, retired Reaganite
statesman George Shultz, and Gail Zappa (widow of counterculture hero Frank) is
not exactly narrow or shady sounding.
And the conclusion that the voters are fools,
while always tempting to spurned politicians, is usually unwise. When Arizona
Sen. Jon Kyl recently said he was "embarrassed" by the voters' collective
decision, he promptly got roasted by most callers to Phoenix's two top-rated
talk radio stations and had to issue a clarification.
On the other hand, the
reformers have not shown that they can consistently win the confidence of the
public, which remains very wary of legalization of any drug--even
marijuana.
"The reality is that we have
won a very small victory that is not readily convertible to any other area of
drug policy," concedes Dave Fratello, a spokesman for Californians for Medical
Rights, the umbrella group that successfully promoted the medical-marijuana
bill. Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-reform group in
Washington, says the legislative focus will remain on medical marijuana. He
claims to have pledges from legislators in 23 states to introduce medical
marijuana bills in 1997. Meanwhile Steve Dnistrian of the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America says he and his allies will be contesting the reformers
everywhere and promises that next time, drug-prohibition forces will be "better
prepared and organized."
