AFTER I-75

Seattle's Move to De-Prioritize Marijuana Arrests Is Working

What kind of drug experts are awake at 8:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning?

Normally, one would expect to see only the most ragged tweakers on
Capitol Hill up at such an hour. But in Seattle last week a bunch of
middle-class professionals--drug experts all--were gathered bright
and early in a dim conference room at the downtown Red Lion. They
wore business attire and academic eyewear, carried laptops and
lattes, and shared one common goal: to dismantle the war on drugs.

This was decidedly not the Hempfest crowd. Instead, the people at
this conference represented the intellectual vanguard of the drug-law
reform movement: physicians, psychiatrists, attorneys, policy
experts, teachers, and social workers who feel that the current drug
war is a failed policy in need of radical revision. They had come to
Seattle from across the country because it seemed the natural place
for a gathering of those at the forefront of thought on illicit
drugs. While Americans may tend to think of San Francisco as the
likely center for any drug-related movement, and while it may seem
surprising to think that Seattle could be at the vanguard of anything
at this moment, given the prevailing feeling of stuckness on civic
issues in this city, it turns out we're ahead of the rest of the
country on this one. Largely below the radar, Seattle has moved to
the new cutting edge of American social policy on adult drug use.

The most obvious example of this is Initiative 75, passed by a strong
majority of Seattle voters in 2003. The measure mandated that arrests
of adult marijuana users would become the lowest priority for law
enforcement agencies in the city, all but decriminalizing pot smoking
in Seattle. It was opposed by drug warriors from U.S. Drug Czar John
Walters on down to Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr, but it
nevertheless succeeded in radically altering the climate for pot
smokers here, and has become the model for subsequent similar
measures in Oakland, Denver, and Columbia, Missouri. Add in Seattle's
innovative drug court, which allows people convicted of drug crimes
to choose treatment over incarceration, and the King County Bar
Association's new and groundbreaking blueprint for drug-law reform in
Washington State, and this city emerges as something of a
demonstration project on drug reform for the rest of the country.

It's all part of an intentional, coordinated effort by local
activists. The aim, says Roger Goodman, director of the bar
association's Drug Policy Project and an organizer of the conference,
is simple and exceedingly ambitious: "Change the culture."

First, here in Washington. Then, slowly, across the United States.

Initiative 75, if you believed those who warned against its passage
in 2003, was going to confuse kids, lead to an explosion of marijuana
use, and squander taxpayer money on a citizen review board to study
the effects of the new law. None of this has happened, even according
to Carr, the city attorney, who had warned before the law's passage
that I-75 was "wrong for our children and our community."

Marijuana-related case filings by the city attorney's office have
dropped sharply since I-75 took effect, from 178 filings in 2003, the
year the initiative passed, to 59 filings in 2004. That's a 67
percent reduction in arrests, prosecutions, and jail sentences
connected to marijuana use--and a similarly large reduction in the
angst felt by local dope smokers, the lives altered by jail time for
smoking some pot, and the taxpayer money spent sending stoners
through the legal system. (As of this November the number of
marijuana-related filings by Carr's office was set to decline again
in 2005, with only 35 filings reported in the first 11 months of this year.)

At the same time, the predictions of mass confusion and increased pot
smoking among Seattle's youth have not come to pass. A survey of
students in the Seattle Public Schools, conducted by researchers at
the University of Washington, found that the number of 10th and 12th
graders who reported using marijuana within the last 30 days had
actually declined slightly between 2002 and 2004. As opponents of
I-75 point out, the percentage decline is very slight (less than 2
percent in both grades). But the backers of I-75 respond that they
never promised that pot smoking among high schoolers would disappear
as a result of the initiative; they just said the concerns of an
explosion of pot smoking among Seattle's younger generations were
unfounded--and the survey appears to prove that this position was correct.

In addition, the "waste of taxpayer dollars" predicted by Carr is
nowhere to be seen. He now describes the financial cost of I-75 as "a
small marginal cost"--the cost of, for example, photocopying data on
marijuana arrests for the Marijuana Policy Review Panel, whose
members are not paid for their time.

Faced with this evident lack of I-75-induced cataclysm, Carr now
openly admits he was wrong about some of the law's predicted negative
impacts. But he is still not any closer to thinking it might have
been a good idea. "It's a silly law that was enacted for political
purposes," he says. These days he employs a strategy of minimizing
the law's positive impact, suggesting it was unnecessary in the first
place, and ineffective as a program for social change in the second.

Perhaps as part of that minimizing, Carr told the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer last month that there were only 74 marijuana cases
filed in Seattle in 2002, making it seem like the drop to 59 cases in
2004 was statistically insignificant. I-75, he told the paper, "had
little to no effect." In fact, data provided by his office to the
Marijuana Policy Review Panel shows there were actually 161 cases in
2002, making the drop to 59 cases two years later much more significant.

When I contacted Carr's office about this discrepancy, his special
assistant, Ruth Bowman, at first blamed the error on the author of
the P-I story, Mike Lewis, whom she said had misquoted Carr. Shortly
after I contacted Lewis about this claim, Carr's story changed.

Bowman recanted, and said Carr had not been misquoted by Lewis. She
told me support for the 74 figure would be coming soon. A few minutes
later, Bowman e-mailed me a dense page of data that it turned out had
nothing to do with 2002 marijuana filings. When I pointed this out,
she sent me new data, without comment. It was the correct data, and
it directly contradicted Carr's 74 figure. It showed that the number
of marijuana filings in 2002 was 160, almost exactly the same as the
161 filings claimed by the Marijuana Policy Review Panel (and more
than twice as many as Carr claimed when speaking to the P-I in
November). I asked Bowman if Carr still stood by his statement to the
P-I. The next day, Carr e-mailed to say he was sorry if he'd made a
mistake, but added defiantly: "If you want to go ahead and suggest
that the marijuana initiative made a difference, you will be
mistaken. It made no difference whatsoever."

Funny numbers aside, on a more philosophical level, Carr argues that
I-75 is bad for democracy. "In a democracy, you change the law if you
don't like it," he says. By downgrading enforcement of state and
federal law to the "lowest priority" in one particular city, I-75
actually "undermines law," he says. If activists want to
decriminalize marijuana possession, Carr believes, "the place for
marijuana reform is really at the state and federal levels."

Dominic Holden, a longtime Carr adversary on marijuana issues who
came up with the idea for I-75 and chaired the initiative campaign,
admits that on a purely philosophical level, I-75 is imperfect. But
it's not meant to be a permanent fix. Rather, it's meant as a
temporary object lesson on the benefits of drug-law reform, en route
to broader reform at the state and federal levels.

"Think of this as Seattle's interim measure for dealing with a state
and federal policy that we find ineffective," he says. "People all
over the country are looking at what's happening here. And our
positive experience with I-75 will act as armor against what the
federal government and the conservative state legislators will argue
when we move to decriminalize marijuana over a broader area than just Seattle."

Mikki Norris, a board member of the Oakland Civil Liberties Alliance,
the group that in November of last year made marijuana busts the
lowest law enforcement priority in that city, agrees with Holden. She
said Oakland's Measure Z was heavily influenced by the model of Seattle's I-75.

"It's been real helpful to us," Norris said. "It was inspirational to
the movement in general. It gave a lot of people things to think
about." Next year, she said, similar measures will be run in four
California cities, probably Santa Cruz, West Hollywood, Santa
Barbara, and Santa Monica. (San Francisco and Berkeley both passed
laws in the 1970s against allocating police resources toward
marijuana busts, but these laws differ from the newer Seattle law,
Holden says, in that they don't establish a citizen review panel.
They're also more than 30 years old, remnants of a different
historical moment in drug control, one that came to a close during
the Carter administration.)

The question, then, is not whether more American cities will follow
the recent example of Seattle. It seems clear that many more will,
establishing a chain of urban refuges from zealous enforcement of
federal and state marijuana laws, and making the case to the rest of
the country that marijuana decriminalization can work. The real
question is: What comes next?

That's where last week's conference in Seattle sought to enter the
debate. The conference, sponsored by the King County Bar Association,
aimed to imagine an "exit strategy," not just from the war on pot,
but also from the larger war on drugs, which conference participants
unanimously described as a failure. ("A fool's errand," "Like
shoveling water," "A war on poor people and vulnerable people.")

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper was at the conference, and
in an editorial that appeared the following Sunday in the Seattle
Times, he called for the legalization of drugs--"all of them."

"I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to
use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a
scotch and water," Stamper wrote. "Prohibition of alcohol fell flat
on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally
wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug
use--not an oxymoron in my dictionary--as a civil liberty will we be
able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it
is: a medical, not a criminal, matter."

In a more than 100-page document produced by the King County Bar
Association earlier this year, much the same argument is made, albeit
with a lot more footnotes and slightly less accessible language than
Stamper uses. The dense document, however, may end up being more
significant than the editorial by Stamper, or even any of the
"demonstration projects" in cities that make marijuana busts a low
priority. It is part of a "grass tops" effort to give opinion leaders
and policymakers a way of thinking about life after the war on drugs,
and the fact that it comes from a deliberative body made up of
well-informed lawyers makes it all the more persuasive for the many
politicians and civic leaders who already silently doubt the drug
war's efficacy.

The report imagines the State of Washington controlling the
distribution of currently illegal drugs, with softer drugs like
cannabis perhaps being taxed and sold only to citizens who meet
certain requirements (old enough, a resident of Washington, not too
intoxicated at time of purchase), while harder drugs like heroin and
crystal meth might only be given out under medical supervision to
addicts involved in treatment. It's hardly the Bacchic free-for-all
that backers of the status quo imagine when they talk worriedly about
decriminalization. In fact, it could end up, in practice, being far
more restrictive than the current drug-control regime. The aim would
be to reduce crime by drying up the illegal markets for illicit
drugs; improve public health by focusing state efforts on treating,
rather than imprisoning, addicts; and protect children better by
cutting down on the black-market drugs available to them while also
cutting down on the incentive of drug gangs to lure children into
black-market drug work.

Roger Goodman, the bar association Drug Policy Project director who
spoke of wanting to "change the culture" when it comes to drugs,
oversaw the creation of the document, which has the kind of prosaic
title favored by policy wonks, "State-Level Regulation as a Workable
Alternative to the 'War on Drugs.'" But rather boldly, it includes a
resolution by the bar association calling on the state legislature to
begin studying ways out of the war on drugs. The legislature declined
to do so last session, but Goodman takes the long view. "You can't
accomplish something like this in a short period of time," he says.
The bar will be back this session, asking the legislature to do the same.

In the meantime, as with I-75, bar associations in other states are
now eager to mimic the work the King County Bar Association has done
on drug reform, which differs from other earlier critiques of the
drug war offered by bar associations in that it offers both a
critique and a solution. Similar solution-oriented policy reviews are
currently being prepared by bar associations in Vermont, Oregon,
Alabama, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Georgia, New York, and Washington, D.C.

It's part of a process familiar to other long-term movements aimed at
changing entrenched cultural attitudes and counterproductive laws:
Take a small step forward, prove to doubters that the world hasn't
ended, then take another step forward, and repeat. "I-75 was a pretty
big step," Goodman says, echoing that strategy. "And the sky has not fallen."