Drugs and the Nation

By Steven Wishnia, AlterNet. Posted November 4, 2004.

In an election whose outcome was determined by militaristic, theocratic culture warriors, medical marijuana in Montana was one of the few bright spots.

Even as 59 percent of the state's voters were going for George W. Bush and two-thirds opting to ban gay marriage, Montanans were approving Initiative 148, which would allow medical marijuana use by patients with a doctor's recommendation, by a 62-38 percent margin.

Two further-reaching state drug initiatives lost. Alaskans rejected a proposal to legalize marijuana under regulations similar to alcohol, by a 57-43 percent margin, and Oregon defeated a measure to expand the state's medical marijuana law by 58-42. The number of people voting against the Oregon initiative – which would have set up state-licensed medical-herb dispensaries, so patients could obtain a legal supply – almost exactly matched the number who voted to ban gay marriage.

Three local initiatives won. Oakland, Calif. voted to make adult cannabis offenses the lowest priority for the city's police. In Ann Arbor, Mich., where pot possession already carries only a $25 fine, voters approved an initiative to legalize medical use and reduce the penalty for third-offense possession or sale to a $100 fine. (Detroit voters passed a medical marijuana measure in August.)

Another college town, Columbia, Miss., enacted two pot proposals, one to legalize medical use and one to decriminalize possession of up to 35 grams. The decrim measure will reduce the penalty to a $250 fine and require police and prosecutors to take pot-possession cases to municipal courts, where it will be a minor violation, instead of to state courts, where it remains a criminal offense.

The moral: There is still substantial support for liberalizing the nation's drug laws, but proposals that push drug law reform too far or too fast are risky, and support is strongest in urban and countercultural enclaves.

Paul Befumo of the Montana Medical Marijuana Policy Project says the initiative there succeeded because it was a libertarian, common sense issue.

"The idea that medical decisions should be between a person and their doctor really resonated with Montanans," he explains. "We made our case." People who have had relatives with serious illnesses, he adds, "really get it."

The main arguments opponents raised were that it would send a bad message to children about drugs and that separating medical and recreational marijuana would be a law enforcement nightmare.

The Oregon initiative's biggest problem was it was underfunded, says John Sajo of Voter Power in Portland: They had a budget of $600,000 to reach about 1.7 million voters. "I think that if we had three or four million we would have won."

The initiative, intended to help Oregon's 15,000 registered medical marijuana users get a legitimate supply, was also far-reaching. It would have let users growing outdoors have one 6-pound crop a year, given free cannabis to indigent patients and allowed naturopaths and nurse practitioners to recommend medical marijuana.

That, says Sajo, opened the initiative up to "lying and distorting" by opponents, who called it "legalization in disguise" and said it would make the state a haven for drug dealers. Bill O'Reilly on Fox News claimed the measure would let shamans from the Amazon set up shop in Oregon. Some legalization supporters also opposed the initiative on the grounds that it would get the state too involved with marijuana patients.

If cannabis legalization advocates have to portray responsible drug use in order to succeed, prohibitionist propaganda remains extremely potent when it collides, even marginally, with reality. In the 1930s, Harry Anslinger made Victor Licata, a Florida pothead who killed his family with an axe, his poster boy for marijuana prohibition – and the Alaska initiative campaign, which emphasized alcohol-style regulation, was damaged by an eerily similar murder case.

On Oct. 21, 16-year-old Colin Cotting of Anchorage was arrested and charged with beating his stepmother to death and stuffing her body in a freezer after she confronted him about being high. Police said Cotting told them he was "too stoned" to remember much about what happened. Nevada's 2002 legalization initiative failed under similar circumstances; two months before the election, the managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun was killed when a stoned driver rear-ended her car at a red light.

The Alaska initiative still got a respectable 43 percent of the vote, and marijuana possession remains legal there under state Supreme Court decisions from 1975 and last August. Gov. Frank Murkowski and Alaska's attorney general will now probably try to enact a cannabis ban that doesn't violate the state's constitutional right to privacy, says David Finkelstein, a former state legislator who headed the initiative campaign. To do this, he says, they will have to prove that marijuana is more of a danger than the court said it was.

Steven Wishnia is the author of “The Cannabis Companion” (The Running Press), and a contributor to “Under the Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs.”