The War on Drug

The War on Drug

The War on Drug

Introduction

There are few issues on which Americans are as much out of sync with their elected leaders as they are on the so-called war on drugs: suppression of crops and traffickers abroad, interdiction at the border, criminal sanctions for users at home. If it's hard to find voters who believe U.S. drug policies are working, it's even harder to find politicians willing to recognize and confront that they're not.

For the past four years, Bill Zimmerman, with funding from billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros and a few other deep-pocket libertarians, has been making a living exploiting that gap. Since 1996 Zimmerman's Campaign for New Drug Policies has managed to pass initiatives in seven states, from Maine to California, legalizing the medical use of marijuana, and chances are good he'll add a few more this fall. So far, his record is seven wins and no losses.

Discussion

Now Zimmerman, a longtime California political consultant and liberal activist, is broadening the campaign, aiming to legalize the medical use of marijuana in two more states and running initiatives to reform asset forfeiture laws in Oregon, Utah, and Massachusetts (essentially by imposing a more stringent legal threshold before assets can be seized and by taking those seized assets from the cops and appropriating them either to drug treatment or to schools).

But the "granddaddy" of the campaign, in the words of campaign spokesman Dave Fratello, is California Proposition 36: If it passes in November, it will not only represent a substantial step toward decriminalizing the possession of all illegal drugs, from methamphetamines and PCP to heroin and cocaine; it will very likely send a message from one end of the country to the other.

The campaign's major backers, in addition to Soros, ...