Halting Drug Reform

Drug reformers of varying stripes embrace different goals, from the widely supported decriminalization of medical marijuana to relieve the pain of cancer, wasting from AIDS, or the spasticity of multiple sclerosis to the legalization of recreational pot, the distribution of clean needles to addicts and the mandating of treatment rather than incarceration for low-level drug offenders.

Though there's been scattered progress on these goals around the country in recent years, overall, especially on the federal level, interdiction and incarceration remain the goal if not always the reality. Handcuffed by his foolish, glib remark about not inhaling, Bill Clinton never dared veer from the prohibitionist mindset. While George W. Bush gives lip service to treatment, on his watch Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents point rifles at Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic in California. When she was unable to rise at the agents' command, they handcuffed her to her bed while proceeding to destroy the medicine growing in a garden outside. This is repression with a decidedly uncompassionate face.

As if absorbing the Republican ascendancy -- completed with the GOP's capture of the Senate -- wasn't challenge enough, drug reformers were also staggered by the failure of several state ballot initiatives -- this after years of overwhelming electoral success. State and federal officials, including cabinet officers and governors, joined forces with a nip-'em-in-the-bud judiciary to help defeat the initiatives. Well-heeled activists tried but failed to move beyond medical marijuana to the riskier arenas of treatment rather than incarceration for low-level offenders and even (in Nevada) outright legalization of the demon weed.

As drug reformers offered each other salt for their wounds, curiously enough, a sort of halting progress has recently emerged. Each step forward was achieved only when reformers managed to capture a fickle media's intermittent attention.

The Guru Of Ganja

In the California case against 'Guru of Ganja' Ed Rosenthal, jurors raised a post-trial ruckus over the judge's rulings that prevented his defense from telling them that Rosenthal was no mere profiteer, but a cultivator of medicine deputized by the City of Oakland to supply its patients. The press piled on the half-baked verdict and, rather than the six and a half years requested by prosecutors, Rosenthal was sentenced to a single day in jail. But he remains a felon stripped of the right to vote, and the feds are appealing the non-sentence.

House Republicans tried to slip in legislation re-authorizing the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) provisions that would have allowed Drug Czar John P. Walters to use the five-year, $1.2 billion ad campaign as he wished, to defeat future ballot measures or even individual candidates the White House opposed. When a sharp-eyed lobbyist at the Drug Policy Alliance spotted the hidden provisions, reformers raised holy heck, and these particular abuses were blocked.

That doesn't change the fact that -- since by statute ONDCP buys all its ads at half-price -- there'll be something approaching $400 million in social marketing flooding the media annually over the next five years. Given that the entire beer industry spends approximately $1 billion a year on overall marketing, think of the sheer heft of nearly 40 percent of the beer effort. No wonder the Democrats on that House committee revolted at the prospect of Walters running free with that kind of money.

And the Bush administration has kept the heat on by asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that, while forbidding the writing of prescriptions, did allow doctors to recommend medical marijuana. The Clinton administration lost the case on free speech grounds, and only now is the Bush Department of Justice trying to appeal. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, doctors could still have such discussions with patients, provided they indicated pot is illegal and that "federal authorities consider it dangerous and medically useless, and that the doctor is not recommending it." A very curious discussion indeed. Should the administration prevail before the Supremes, that would throw out the practical underpinnings of current medical marijuana use in states throughout the West and Maine.