One Small Victory in the Nation’s War on Drugs

Suite 202 of the Mediterranean-style office building on 6th Street in Santa Monica is furnished with stained carpeting and nicked tables. The armrests of two chairs in the small reception area are worn through to their stuffing. The splashing of the building’s courtyard fountain, however, dances on the ear, and the atmosphere is one of well-digested triumph.

The office suite is home to the Campaign for New Drug Policies and, more to the point, to the political consulting firm of Zimmerman & Markman. It is where rich men’s money and the cunning of political operatives came together to achieve (for once) a victory over folly. I mean the passage six weeks ago of California’s Proposition 36.

Proposition 36 is a stick-in-the-eye to the country’s war on drugs, a losing game if ever there was one. The ballot initiative will divert an estimated 36,000 nonviolent drug users a year away from state prisons and into treatment programs.

It sets aside $120 million annually in state funds for that purpose, and it is expected to save as much as $150 million a year in prison operation costs and perhaps $500 million in one-time prison construction costs. Counties, it is predicted, will save an additional $40 million a year by not having to house so many inmates in their jails.

This, to say nothing of what it will save in anguish among unnecessarily incarcerated drug users and their families. (How many of our family histories would include imprisoned forebears if they’d locked up drinkers during Prohibition?)

The Proposition 36 campaign, which cost $3.8 million over two years, was financed by wealthy businessmen George Soros, Peter Lewis and John Sperling, who have been underwriting attempts to reform drug laws across the country. It was managed by Bill Zimmerman, an advocate of progressive causes since his days as an anti-Vietnam War activist.

Voters clearly are ready to embrace sensible proposals, even while their elected officials shy away from them for fear of being labeled “soft on drugs.� On Nov. 7 alone, while Californians were passing Proposition 36, voters in Oregon and Utah approved measures to reform the forfeiture of private property to police agencies in drug cases. And voters in Nevada and Colorado made their states the 8th and 9th to legalize marijuana for medical use.

In Colorado, 54% of voters voted yes; elsewhere voters approved the measures by almost 2 to 1 (61% voted yes on Proposition 36).

Clearly, as with the body bags coming home from Vietnam a generation ago, the war on drugs has produced so many victims and touched so many families that public support of the conflict has all but evaporated.

Now that Proposition 36 is law, the challenge faced by Zimmerman and other reformers has shifted from electoral politics to the mechanical engineering of policy implementation. Look for a lot of interest-group wrangling during the process. Formulas must be devised for allocating funds among counties. New state licensing criteria must be established for nonresidential drug-treatment centers to handle the flood of those receiving treatment, which is to commence July 1.

The reformers have other hopes for California. They want to see the $70 million that law enforcement agencies accrue every year in drug-case forfeitures directed to drug-treatment programs instead. They want to see an end to mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. They foresee more prison-based drug treatment and the eradication of drugs from prisons (curious that in our national crusade for a drug-free society we haven’t even managed to create a single drug-free prison).

These plans must be deferred for now, Zimmerman says, because a more urgent task is spreading the principles of Proposition 36 to other states. If enough states humanize their drug laws, the thinking goes, the trend will inevitably spread to the federal government. “In our view,� Zimmerman says, “political change comes from the periphery, not the center.�

Ballot initiatives are Zimmerman’s metier. He’s worked on 30 of them in California alone, having managed, among others, successful campaigns to lower car insurance rates and legalize the medicinal use of marijuana.

Such campaigns, however, are expensive and prolonged. Zimmerman hopes that state lawmakers, now clued up to the reformist sentiments of voters, will emerge from hiding and begin changing drug laws through the ordinary legislative process.

Virtually every powerful politician, from Gov. Gray Davis on down, opposed Proposition 36. “They woke up to a real surprise on Nov. 8 when they found out 61% of voters had rejected them in favor of drug reform,� Zimmerman says. “We’ve created a public mandate for drug treatment. Generally, politicians like to get out in front of parades, and we have organized quite a parade. We expect a lot of legislators who didn’t want to be in it to now want to lead it.�

Proposition 36 is a gradualist’s victory, and bravo for it. It isn’t, however, going to stop the annual national waste of $18 billion on the drug war. It isn’t going to put the planet’s murderous drug lords out of business and end the siphoning of billions of dollars from America’s legal economy.

Legalization is the only thing that will do that, but we’re a long way from being ready to countenance that sane, ultimate solution.

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is [email protected]