The State Of Drug Reform

The Drug Czar is not a man given to particularly inspiring speeches, but on the topic of marijuana, John Walters gets downright fired up. On a nationwide tour to promote the Office of National Drug Control Policy's new 25-Cities Initiative, Director Walters says he's on a mission to combat the national disease of addiction.

That disease, as he believes fervently, is bred by non-addictive use of drugs. And the carriers of the disease are those peers who spread what Walters calls "The Lie": "That drug use is fun, that you can handle it, and everybody does it. The friend of those people don't realize what The Lie is until is until it's too late."

In Seattle recently to promote the latest effort in the War on Drugs, Walters was able to lock onto his target during his September 10th press conference. In the multipurpose room of a neighborhood detox center, the Drug Czar placed particular emphasis on Seattle City Initiative 75. The citizen initiative demands that local police and prosecutors lay off pot smokers by making marijuana possession the lowest law enforcement priority. Walters alternately called the initiative "a con" and "phony."

"I think Seattle is as responsible and sensible place as any other city, and I believe the voters will make the right decision [on I-75] if they have the right information."

The Sensible Seattle Coalition -- an ad-hoc group of drug reform advocates backed by the ACLU of Washington, the League of Women Voters of Seattle and the King County Bar Association -- had thought the exact same thing. In this case, it seems the voters had a bit more faith in their homegrown initiative than in Walters' dire warnings: With nearly all of the votes counted, I-75 passed handily with a 59 to 41 percent majority in the Sept. 16 elections.

"[This was] a grassroots statement from the people to their employees -- the police -- that they're no longer buying the Nixon-era rhetoric that marijuana poses an overwhelming threat to public health and safety," explained attorney and I-75 supporter Alison Chinn Holcomb, whose clients have included many college students facing denial of financial aid for marijuana use.

When viewed in context, the success of this carefully worded initiative -- which only applies to possession, and not to selling or trafficking -- extends far beyond Seattle City limits, and helps to explain why Director Walters would spend as much time as he did lambasting this "silly and irresponsible" effort.

According to a "State of the States" report released this week by the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the vast majority of state legislatures passed significant drug policy reforms between 1996-2002.

The report details more than 150 changes in 46 states on a wide range of drug-related issues, including medical marijuana, needle exchange and possession, alternatives to incarceration, bans on racial profiling, and the restoration of benefits and voting rights to ex-offenders. As the authors of the report found, reforms were initiated, sponsored and supported by progressive to ultraconservative Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens and Independents.

Seattle's passage of I-75, said DPA Director of State Affairs Katherine Huffman, is a "continuation of a national trend."

"More and more people want to look at drug issues in terms of health and human rights rather than in the [realm] of the criminal justice system," said Huffman.

Statewide drug policy reforms have been gaining momentum since Arizona voters passed Proposition 200 in 1996, which mandated treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time offenders. California's Proposition 36, passed by 61 percent of voters, followed along similar lines. Stark fiscal realities for cash-strapped states seem to have contributed to the wave of policy reforms. With costs of incarceration reaching an average of $30,000 per year (and more for seriously ill and elderly inmates), taxpayers in states ranging from Hawaii to Indiana have concluded that spending as little as $4,000 annually on treatment per person simply made more sense.