LAWMAKERS PART WAYS IN STATE'S WAR ON POT

THE war against marijuana took two interesting, and very divergent, turns
last month. In Ukiah, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors placed a
measure on the November ballot to decriminalize the personal cultivation and
use of marijuana. In Sacramento, the Assembly Public Safety Committee voted
to reimpose California's ``smoke a joint, lose your license'' law.

Mendocino County is where the state's war on marijuana began 21 years ago.
In a headline-grabbing event that helped fuel his gubernatorial ambitions,
then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, accompanied by automatic
rifle-toting, flak-jacketed agents, descended by helicopter on a northern
Mendocino County garden. Huge amounts of money have been spent on all
aspects of the marijuana war. Two decades later, the weed is more prevalent
than ever.

The message from this state of affairs is so plain and simple that only a
politician could miss it -- prohibition doesn't work. But the war on
marijuana has never been about stopping marijuana use so much as it has been
about pandering to a public that is legitimately concerned about health and
safety, especially the health and safety of children. Pandering is where
Gov. Gray Davis and the Assembly Public Safety Committee come in.

The ``smoke a joint, lose your license'' mandate was devised by the Bush
administration as an attack on California's marijuana decriminalization law
under which possession of less than an ounce is deemed an infraction rather
than a misdemeanor. To this day, the feds withhold transportation funds from
states that refuse to take driver's licenses from drug offenders, regardless
of whether the drug offense has any relationship to operating a vehicle.
States that don't wish to abide by the mandate can ``opt out'' with the
signature of the governor. Thirty-two states, including every state west of
Texas, have taken advantage of the ``opt out'' option. Despite polls showing
that two-thirds of Californians disagreed with him, former Gov. Pete Wilson
chose to support the Bush mandate. That Wilson law is due to expire in July
2000.

Now, to the shock of many of those who supported his bid for high office,
Gov. Davis has made it clear that he wants the Wilson policy extended. This
is despite the fact that California will be forced to continue spending
millions processing minor pot offenders, whose charges would otherwise be
dismissed with a ticket, to come back to court in order to defend their
licenses. It is despite the fact that the law Davis supports, AB 2295, would
make it a worse offense to have a joint in your pocket or purse at home than
to be caught speeding, driving recklessly, or with an open liquor container
in your car.

In the halls of the state Capitol, our leaders, eager to prove how much they
care about kids and despise crime, sip their martinis and condemn pot
smokers. Many of them have no doubt ``experimented'' themselves.

The governor and our misinformed state legislators need to pay heed to the
discussion now going on in Mendocino County. Sheriff Tony Craver signed the
initiative to legalize the personal cultivation and use of marijuana. He did
this not because he supports marijuana use but because as a longtime law
enforcement official he has seen that prohibition is a bust. If the
initiative passes, he believes it will ``send a message to policy makers in
Sacramento and Washington that despite decades of efforts to suppress
marijuana, the number of users and amount of plants seized continues to
increase.''

Mendocino County Counsel Peter Klein said that the initiative was
unenforceable because it pre-empts state and federal laws prohibiting the
possession and use of marijuana. However, as Supervisor Richard Shoemaker
pointed out, Proposition 215, the 1996 ``medical marijuana'' initiative,
purportedly had similar problems and is now being successfully implemented.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it is in the county where the pot
war got started that it's now winding down. Mendocino County has experienced
many of the negative effects of illegal pot. Millions of dollars spent by
law enforcement, skewing priorities and clogging the courts. Thousands of
casual users arrested, sometimes imprisoned and left with indelible marks on
their records. The hypocrisy of preaching against pot while pushing more
dangerous drugs. A culture of greed and occasional violence brought about
directly by astronomical prices. The unseemliness of an economy whose
largest cash crop is an illegal weed.

Mendocino County has learned the hard way and is finally on the right track.
Threats and bullying don't work. Lose your home. Lose your freedom. And now
lose your license. Too bad the politicos in Sacramento seem once again to
have lost their minds.