No stoners and no pot plants; marijuana campaign is serious

Nevada vote is only one aiming to make recreational use legal

By RENE SANCHEZ Washington Post

Sunday, September 15, 2002

Las Vegas -- As soon as he took over the nation's only campaign to make even recreational use of marijuana legal, Billy Rogers laid down a few firm rules.

No stoners hanging out at headquarters here. No pot plants, either. And no straying from the core message to voters: This is to free cops and courts from the burdens of petty drug busts, not just to win the right to get high.

"If we were a bunch of potheads, or all had tie-dyed T-shirts and long hair, we would be easy targets, but we're not, and our opponents can't handle it," said Rogers, a veteran political consultant from Texas. "They're stunned. We're talking about helping law enforcement. We're running even in the polls. Who would have thunk it? We've got a real shot at winning."

Nevada, land of blackjack and brothels, drive-through weddings and quickie divorces, appears tempted to go to yet another live-and-let- live extreme this fall and ease its drug laws in a way that few other states have even contemplated, much less put up for a public vote.

In a ballot measure known as Question 9, Nevadans will decide whether to allow adults 21 and older to possess and smoke as much as 3 ounces of marijuana, simply because they feel like it, with no threat of criminal penalty. Under current state law, anyone caught with that much marijuana -- which authorities say makes roughly 100 joints -- could face four years in prison.

The November ballot proposal forbids pot smoking in public or while driving, marijuana advertising and import of the drug. Nevada would have to grow and distribute its own marijuana through state- licensed outlets and could tax every sale. Some officials say such a move could be worth millions of dollars every year. To become law, voters will have to approve it twice, first in November, then again in 2004.

If the measure passes, the implications could be huge in Las Vegas, where most anything goes already. Would Sin City be consumed by reefer madness and become an Amsterdam of the desert, teeming with drug dealers or tourists jetting in just to take a few legal tokes?

"We don't know," said Erica Brandvik, a spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has not taken a position on Question 9. "But this is a place where people come to do things they don't do at home. I can't say that the news this might happen is jaw-dropping to people here."

New look at drug laws

Nevada's step is part of a larger movement, rooted in the West but spreading nationwide, to rethink a range of drug laws. The campaigns are growing despite the fierce objections of federal officials, who are denouncing Question 9.

"This is a con," said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "This isn't going to help law enforcement -- this is going to help drug dealers. And do we really want drug tourism?"

In the past six years, voters in nine states (including Nevada) have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes. Several other states also have cut criminal punishments for simple drug possession. Measures to either reduce penalties or allow medicinal use will be on the ballot in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona this fall.

The latest campaign here, like most others around the country on the drug, is organized and bankrolled almost entirely by the Marijuana Policy Project, a national group based in Washington, D.C. It spent $375,000 just to get the issue on the Nevada ballot.

More than 100,000 voters from around the state have signed petitions in support of Question 9. Nevada's largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has said it could end the "needless harassment of individuals who peacefully and privately use marijuana." No group has organized to oppose it. Polls are deadlocked. And Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn is vowing to remain neutral on the subject this fall.

"It's a complicated issue," said Greg Bortolin, his press secretary. "He hasn't made up his mind on it."

Bortolin noted that many Nevada voters have a libertarian streak that makes them unpredictable. "You have to throw out all the rules in Nevada when it comes to politics," he said.

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the country, federal officials say. According to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Use, about 34% of Americans 12 and older said they have tried the drug. And more than 600,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession in 2000.

Proponents of Question 9 say that's exactly why it is necessary: Police waste too much time and money busting small-time, private pot users when they could be focusing on violent crimes.

Rogers said the ballot measure would bring other benefits: Cancer patients whose doctors want them to use marijuana in treatment would have better access. And forcing Nevada to distribute marijuana could wipe out the underground market for the drug because the state could sell it cheaper. Federal officials say the street cost of marijuana varies from $400 to $1,000 a pound in the Southwest to $700 to $2,000 a pound in the Northeast.

"What we're proposing is not radical. It would still be a felony in Nevada to have 4 ounces," Rogers said. "But look, millions of Americans have tried marijuana, and they didn't go crazy, and they didn't go on to harder drugs. Yet we keep arresting thousands and thousands of people just for using it in the privacy of their homes. It's got to stop."

Federal officials, who have been cracking down on groups dispensing marijuana for medicinal purposes, adamantly reject those claims. Walters said Question 9 would set dangerous policy. He predicted that many more Nevada teenagers and adolescents would fall prey to marijuana addiction, and he warned baby boomers who smoked marijuana in their youth, without dire consequences, to think twice about supporting the measure.

"What many people don't understand is that this is not your father's marijuana," Walters said. "What we're seeing now is much more potent."

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