No Bark, Strong Bite: The Drug War and Elections 2000

Opponents of the drug war regarded their issue this election season as "The Dog That Didn't Bark" -- drug policy, once a highly inflammatory campaign issue -- was almost completely avoided this campaign by both major party candidates.

Yet a set of mostly successful ballot initiatives around the country have enacted profound changes in some states' drug policies. And if only by historical accident, drug war opponents have become key swing voters on both sides of the political divide in this year's presidential election.

This dog might not have barked, but in some expected and unexpected ways, it did bite.

Drug War and Its Opponents Swing Florida Vote

As this article goes to press, Gov. George W. Bush holds a tenuous 327-vote lead over Vice President Al Gore in the final pivot state of Florida -- about 0.01 percent of the state's total vote. Three days after Election Day, "Too Close to Call" is the headline flashing across TV news networks around the dial.

327 is less than half the size of some drug reform groups' Florida memberships. Our organization, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, has about 750.

Drug reform organizations did not stake out positions in this year's elections, and their memberships are spread across at least four national political parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian and Green.

The Libertarians and Greens, however, have strong pro-reform drug policy planks, and they both received enough votes to play a significant role in the outcome of the election, even if the Republican-Democrat split had been less ludicrously close. Libertarian candidate Harry Browne received 18,856 Florida votes, almost 58 times the current 327-vote split. The LP places a strong emphasis on its opposition to drug prohibition, and many of its voters support them for that very reason. Green candidate Ralph Nader, the leading figure in this year's third-party insurgency, received 96,837 Florida votes, 296 times the current split. Nader also opposes the drug war, albeit with less emphasis and ideological clarity than Browne. Some voters chose the Green Party because of the drug issue.

Libertarian and Green voters may not have all moved the totals in the same direction. It is conventional wisdom that many Greens represented votes that would otherwise have gone Democratic. Libertarian voters, however, are drawn from both Republican and Democratic camps, but probably more from Republican. The central point still holds: Mainstream politicians ignore the views of drug reformers at their peril. The same arguments, of course, could be made for other causes as well.

Much more complex, and divisive, than whether or not drug reformers had a measurable impact on the election outcome, is the question of how best to direct future potential impact to catalyze social change. Some reformers advocate voting third party, some single issue, while others are working actively within the major parties to change things, or feel that the stakes are too high to abandon one party or the other, despite their uniform failure on drug policy. (DRCNet discussed this issue in a pre-election article, "Reformers' Dilemma: Frick, Frack, or a Prophet from the Wilderness?", online at www.drcnet.org/wol/158.html#frickandfrack.)

The drug war took a bite this election in another, more tragic way, this one affecting the Gore candidacy almost exclusively. An article by Bruce Shapiro in Salon.com pointed out that more than one third of African American men in Florida have permanently lost the right to vote because of past convictions, under the state's felony disenfranchisement law. A substantial percentage of them were caught up in the system as a result of drug laws (www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/09/nation). More than 90 percent of African Americans voted for Al Gore this election. While it is not known what the voting turnout would have been among those disenfranchised were they able to vote, only a modest percentage would have been needed to turn the vote Democratic, given the closeness of the Florida race.