INITIATIVES TAKE A HIT: WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHAT COMES NEXT?

The post-mortems have begun in the wake of the November 5 elections,
which saw heavily financed drug reform initiatives fail in Nevada
(marijuana legalization), Ohio (treatment not jail) and Arizona (a
little bit of everything). A treatment not jail initiative in Michigan
never even made it onto the ballot, while court inaction in Florida
kept yet another off the ballot until 2004. While the election wasn't
a total wash for drug reformers -- initiatives that won included San
Francisco (ordering the city to explore growing its own medical
marijuana supply), Washington, DC (treatment not jail), and
Massachusetts (local marijuana decrim advisories) -- there is much
wailing and gnashing of teeth, among both cash-starved grassroots
activists and the movement cognoscenti.

Bill Downing of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition
(http://www.masscann.org), which helped lead a low-budget but
successful ballot advisory campaign on marijuana decrim in the Bay
State, voiced a widely heard critique of the deep-pocketed initiative
efforts and, by extension, the trio of rich guys who fund them:
financier George Soros, Progressive Insurance magnate Peter Lewis, and
Apollo Group head John Sperling.

"These guys have wasted big money with overreaching, failing to
consult with people on the ground, and choosing to work in places that
are not as friendly as a state like Massachusetts," he said. "These
guys came in here two years with a treatment initiative that failed.
If they had put their money behind decrim, I bet they would have
succeeded, and it would have been a tremendous victory."

[Editor's Note: Campaign staff have commented in the past that the
Massachusetts initiative failed because it attempted to break new ground by
extending eligibility to low-level drug dealers, and that limiting it to
drug possessors would not have helped a sufficiently large number of people.]

"I continue to be amazed that the big money is so naive and
shortsighted," Downing continued. "They should spread that money
around. They think the medical marijuana battle is won and it's not.
They need to get back to the basics and start winning again."

That's a tough indictment, but Allen St. Pierre of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (http://www.norml.org)
had an even harsher bill of particulars against this year's failed
initiatives. "Nevada never had a chance," he told DRCNet. "It is hard
to look at that as anything other than an effort that was unsound from
the beginning. The rule is you don't go in unless you're starting with
60% support, and they never had that in Nevada," he said. "I don't
understand why this was funded at such high levels."

Initiative organizers in Arizona made similar mistakes, said St.
Pierre. "It's hard to offer a cogent analysis of Arizona," he
admitted. "It's been a long, complicated game where Sam Vagenas
organizes these weakly-worded initiatives so as to not upset the
status quo, then the state turns around and screws them anyway. This
time I think they bit off more than they can chew," argued St. Pierre.
"They wanted to have the state police distribute marijuana, but they
never polled to see whether citizens approved of that, and they never
tried to line up support from law enforcement. I'll give Billy Rogers
and the Marijuana Policy Project credit on that score -- at least they
tried to line up police support in Nevada."

St. Pierre also touched on what may be a key factor in both states.
"The fundamental problem was that both initiatives asked the state
government to do something -- in this case, to get involved with
marijuana distribution. In all of the previous successful initiatives,
citizens were asking the state not to do something but to stop doing
something -- stop arresting us, stop putting us in prison instead of
treatment," he said. "People seem to be uncomfortable asking the
government to take action against the war on drugs. Asking the state
to do something, especially when it is totally resistant, as in
Arizona and Nevada, doesn't seem like a very good model."

But wait -- there's more. "These initiatives were attacked on issues
the organizers should have seen coming," added St. Pierre. "They could
have been dealt with preemptively, for example, with position papers
explaining the issues to groups like law enforcement and the public
health sector. You have to be ready for questions about driving while
stoned, what about the children, addiction rates, all that. If there
is a plank of your initiative that doesn't draw strong support, you
should probably not have it in your initiative."

Wording is critical, said St. Pierre. "A certain amount of blame has
to be levied on the authors of these initiatives. They seem to be
written in a way that is designed to fail. Are these guys using focus
groups and surveys? We would have red flagged all these things I've
mentioned if anybody asked us," said St. Pierre, "but nobody did."

Well, yes, we looked at the numbers, said Marijuana Policy Project
(http://www.mpp.org) executive director Rob Kampia. "We did polling,
we were running neck and neck for months," he told DRCNet.
"Independent polls showed a tight race, and our own internal polling
showed the same. Our numbers began to slip during the early voting
period, just when it really counted," he explained. "Our opponents
started their TV ad campaign then and it had enough time to bite, but
there were a couple of other things that were different from previous
elections that worked against us. We had state and federal officials
illegally using taxpayer money to campaign against these ballot
measures, and we a Republican landslide that took the whole country by
surprise. We weren't the only ones surprised," he added. "Ask Tom
Daschle and Dick Gephardt."

In politics, you take your lumps, he said. "You can't win them all.
You don't hear the Democrats saying 'Oh my God, we just lost the
Senate, we should give up,'" said Kampia. "You have to expect that
you're going to lose sometimes."

Kampia also agreed with some of St. Pierre's remarks, but wondered
what else could be done. "It is true that it's preferable to not
require the state government to do anything. That adds a potential
stumbling block should the initiative pass," he explained. "But in the
case of Nevada, if you want to regulate marijuana, you're going to
have to involve the state government in some role. You could just
remove all penalties, but that wouldn't have passed. In Nevada, voters
view adults growing their own with greater skepticism than bringing
marijuana into a regulated marketplace," he said. (According to St.
Pierre, that is true nationwide. Focus group support for cultivation
is consistently even lower than support for the dreaded L-word, he
said.) The Nevada effort also suffered from several highly publicized
traffic deaths linked to marijuana, including the August death of a
Las Vegas Sun editor killed when an allegedly stoned driver plowed
into her car at a traffic light. "The opposition shamelessly exploited
these tragedies, and that hurt us," said Kampia.

Standing back a bit from internecine squabbles, Eric Sterling of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation (http://www.cjpf.org) counseled
some perspective. "Don't read too much negativity into these votes
now," he told DRCNet. "Their importance must be considered in the long
term. Look at how the issue made the cover of Time magazine because of
the Nevada initiative. I was very impressed with Nevada effort,"
Sterling added. "When you look at the race in its totality, marijuana
ran something like 17 points ahead of the Democratic candidate for
governor. In the overall context of an overwhelming Republican sweep,
it actually did pretty well," he said.

"MPP wanted to get 200,000 votes in Nevada, where 375,000 people
typically go to the polls. They got 196,000 votes, but with the
Republican tide that wasn't enough," said Sterling. "One of the things
that struck me is they did what they planned to do, but they could not
control the outcome."

And then there's Ohio, where a $2 million dollar treatment not jail
initiative got trounced at the polls. NORML's St. Pierre had something
to say about that, too, although it should be recognized that the
critique he articulated has been heard on many lips. "A serious
post-mortem on Ohio is needed, but it seems this is a case where the
organizers went for too much," he said. "Ohio isn't California. There
was no political or editorial support, quite the opposite. I
understand that the initiative's backers wanted to win a victory in
the heartland, but they didn't."

Maybe the movement is in too much of a hurry, St. Pierre suggested.
"There is a tendency toward impatience," he said. "If groups are
asking people to send money or provide financing, they feel they need
to do something now. NORML has a longer perspective. As much as we are
prepared to run a sprint, this is a marathon, and we have to pace
ourselves. If somebody is giving you money, you need to take a deep
breath and not just haphazardly jump into things. Otherwise, you get
setbacks like this."

"We have to be able to win in places like Ohio or Michigan to create
the perception that drug reform has support all across the nation,"
countered Dave Fratello of the Campaign for New Drug Policies
(http://www.drugreform.org), the group behind this year's efforts in
Florida, Michigan and Ohio. "Drug reform is still too much of a
Western phenomenon." And the campaign isn't going away, he added.

"We'll start having discussions with the funders over the next few
months," he said, looking forward. "We have good reason to continue
what we began in Florida," he added. "We've already invested some
money, and we will need to invest more. We have the Florida initiative
about halfway qualified and the ballot language is pretty good -- we
wrote it. There are a lot of factors that helped defeat us in Ohio
that won't be present in Florida," he argued. "It's a good place to
keep up the national debate."

Fratello also addressed the issue of the big money boys and where they put
their dollars. "I don't pretend to have any authority over how these guys
spend their money," he said. "They have different motivations. We believe
that what we're doing will be beneficial for the movement, and we've
convinced funders of that. There is no reason to believe that if we were
not here, they would necessarily be putting more money in other places.
That's up to them." [Editor's Note: And of course, they are putting money
in other places as well, though not as much.]

And the big funders want results, said Fratello. "They're campaign
oriented; they want results in every two-year election cycle. That's
their prerogative, but it isn't necessarily the best way to build a
movement," he said.

While the post-mortems continue, the drug reformers are already
looking ahead. Fratello mentioned Florida, but the Campaign may also
look again at Michigan, where its initiative was thrown off the ballot
because of a technical error in the wording.

And Kampia told DRCNet that MPP will have chosen new projects "by next
week. We have a whole list of potential projects," he added.

NORML, for its part, is also looking ahead. "We're looking at
Wisconsin, Vermont and maybe Massachusetts," said St. Pierre. "We've
seen from polling and focus groups, as well as from demographic
information coming from the University of Wisconsin Research Center,
that the state as a whole is amenable to changing the marijuana laws.
We're very strong in urban areas, and medical marijuana is getting 80%
support. We'll start polling on decrim once we raise some money --
probably in a month or so."

While all are looking forward, Kampia pointed out what he saw as a
significant unexpected result in Nevada. "When we went in, we assumed
that almost everyone in the country had already made up their minds
about marijuana, that the electorate was split, and that opinions
wouldn't change," he said. "That wasn't the case. Instead we found
that 20% of the Nevada electorate was swinging back and forth on the
issue. That tells me that people's minds can be changed; it's not as
calcified as we thought. That's an important lesson."

Eric Sterling is looking forward, too, and he has an idea. "What about
marijuana tax issues on the ballot next time?" he suggested. "State
budgets are awash in red ink. Marijuana taxes could be a potential
component of a comprehensive plan to balance state budgets. I've even
got some slogans," he offered. "Governors -- Time to Put Marijuana
Money in the Bank," he suggested. "Tax Marijuana -- Do You Have a
Better Idea?" was another.

Initiative supporters and critics alike will find grist for debate on
this issue for years to come, and that is healthy. But both sides
should keep in mind the limits of their knowledge and the difficulty
of plotting political strategy or predicting future outcomes. Let's
hope the powers-that-be are listening and thinking.

Pubdate: Fri, 15 Nov 2002
Source: The Week Online with DRCNet (US Web)
Contact: psmith@drcnet.org
Website: http://www.drcnet.org/