Because it's one of the nine states which since 1995 have legalized marijuana for medical use (along with Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon and Washington); because it has a 70-year laissez-faire tradition (first state in the 20th century to re-legalize casinos and prostitution), and because its 2 million population and mere half-million active voters make it a relatively inexpensive test market, Nevada was chosen by national legalization forces in 2002 to test a voter initiative to legalize up to three ounces of marijuana for private, home use.

     No legalization of opium and cocaine, mind you. No proposal to open up hashish bars, a la Amsterdam. Just an up-or-down vote to allow adults to keep up to three ounces of smoking dope in the bedroom drawer, without fearing that deadly knock on the door.

     But while the chances for that proposed state constitutional amendment had been rated 50-50 in the spring – and though legalization forces far outspent opponents (who were reduced to staging TV "photo opportunities" in which senior citizen volunteers laughed and joked while rolling up three ounces of parsley into cigarettes to see how many "joints" they could produce) – three ounces of legal pot went down to flaming defeat in Nevada on Nov. 5, 2002, by a landslide margin of 61-to-39.

      Why? Why does the Drug War continue?

     If about half of adult Americans have smoked pot themselves, and thus know from personal experience that all the "Reefer Madness" stories are so much hogwash – never having become drug addicts or committed mass murder – why do 61 percent of the voters in a state that allows prostitution and quickie divorce and invites grandmas dragging oxygen tanks behind them to chain-smoke while playing all-night slot machines – why did Nevadans vote to continue a Drug War which nationally sends 77,000 people to prison to be turned into anal rape victims and/or hardened criminals for merely possessing an ancient herb more medically and socially harmless than Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum?

     Especially when the campaign against Nevada's Question 9 boiled down to two memorized sound bites, parroted back to Nevadans by candidate after candidate of both major parties – namely "I wouldn't want a school bus driver to be able to buy three ounces of pot and then go drive my kids" (school bus drivers who remain free to buy three gallons of vodka at Nevada's 24-hour supermarkets, of course); and "Three ounces is just too much – that's a lot of wacky" (from candidates who, on cross questioning, freely admitted they wouldn't vote to legalize two ounces of pot, or one ounce, or even a gram.)

     "If you're going to follow the money trail, it appears that there is a major industry in this country that is funded by the continued growth of the Drug War," replies Paul Armentano, publications director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in Washington, D.C.

     "Years ago we talked about the military-industrial complex. Well, people today talk about a prison-industrial complex. I'd be hard pressed to find another branch of government that's grown at such exponential levels – branches of the Justice Department that deal just with the Drug War that were funded at $1.5 billion per year in 1980 are now funded at $20 billion per year, and the bulk of that funding is going for enforcement."

     And that's before we even start discussing the lucrative opportunities for budget-building represented by asset seizures which don't even require a criminal charge or a guilty verdict, leaving leave many an undercover narcotics cop driving a new Ferrari or Lamborghini, these days.

     The United States incarcerated 400,000 people for all causes in all state, federal and local lockups in the 1970s, Armentano points out. But today "We have more people incarcerated in this country just for drug crimes than we had back then for all crimes put together. This business that there's no one in jail for simple possession is just so much nonsense ... there are quite a lot of people serving time for possession only."

     And even the statistics for those locked up for "trafficking" include simple users convicted of trafficking on the theory that "no one would have a pound just for personal use," of course. (Imagine if we started busting alcohol users for "peddling booze without a permit" on the theory that "no one would have more than three quarts of liquor in a private home if they weren't peddling the stuff.")

     And the average prison time is three years, five months, for possession only, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

     But the question was why the Drug War – with all its injustices and unintended consequences; its doors broken down in the middle of the night; its innocent people jailed on the coerced testimony of snitches; the boundless snooping on our bank accounts to make sure we're not "laundering drug profits" – the Drug War that sent "civilian" CIA employees vectoring Peruvian Air Force jets to shoot down a small, unarmed plane in the spring of 2002, murdering American missionary Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter Charity – why does this abomination still get a vote of confidence from the American people?

     "I didn't see anyone in Nevada voting to continue the Drug War to keep the prison guards in work," I challenged Mr. Armentano of NORML. "I didn't hear anyone say they were voting for the privilege of continuing to pay high taxes to keep supporting the DEA. I understand why drug prosecutors continue to build careers when they can get elected senator, like Dennis DeConcini, or governor, like Janet Napolitano. But there has to be something else going on to explain a 61-39 vote. People seem to want the Drug War."

     "The other side has made a very smart argument, from a Machiavellian perspective," Armentano agrees. "If we're to believe the government numbers on illicit drug use, from the household surveys, we've got 30 to 40 percent of adults who have had first-hand experience with marijuana. Whereas if you take the Time-CNN poll numbers that came out a few weeks ago, they put that number at 47 percent. ... I've always thought the household survey number was low; the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

     "Now, most of the drug war is about marijuana. If you take out the marijuana arrests, the numbers will seem so low that people will scratch their heads and ask 'Why are we spending all this money? The numbers don't seem to justify it, it's not that big a problem.'

     "So government has to convince people that the experience of a kid trying marijuana today will somehow be different from their experience with marijuana. I mean, they never went on to harder drugs; most of them don't use marijuana any more.

     "So the federal government has to somehow convince folks that their experience, which is the norm, does not apply. And it has succeeded. It has convinced even people who smoked marijuana that today it's a totally different drug; they've convinced these people that what happened to them is not what will happen to their own kids. It's made them in some ways dismissive of their own marijuana-using past.

     "It's the only thing that makes sense to me. How else can you explain people going to the polls and voting to keep a policy in place that says that they should have gone to jail? I just can't find any other explanation why people would do that."

     In fact, in a May, 2002 op-ed piece in the Washington Post which was widely reprinted around the country, federal Drug Czar John Walters wrote, "After years of giggling at quaintly outdated marijuana scare stories like the 1936 movie Reefer Madness we've become almost conditioned to think that any warning about the true dangers of marijuana are overblown." The nation's top prison rape enabler then proceeded with unintended irony to give an overblown warning of his own about "The Myth of 'Harmless' Marijuana," pointing out to Baby-Boomer parents that "today's marijuana is different from that of a generation ago, with potency levels 10 to 20 times stronger than the marijuana with which they were familiar."

     Nationally syndicated columnist Clarence Page decided to respond to that particular piece of twaddle, and he did so with a statistical rapier.

     "He doesn't say where he gets that whopper and that's too bad," Page replied in the May 22, 2002 edition of the Chicago Tribune, "since it conflicts with a federally funded investigation of marijuana samples confiscated by law enforcement over the past two decades."

     That study, published in the January 2000 Journal of Forensic Science, found the THC content (the active ingredient that gets you high) had only doubled to 4.2 percent from about 2 percent from 1980 to 1997, "not undesirable potency levels when you are using it to relieve illness," columnist Page noted.

     "We allow adults to buy cigarettes and alcohol, even though both are highly addictive and kill thousands every year," Page continued. Yet "both sides are hard-pressed to find anyone who has died of a marijuana overdose.

     "Doctors treat the ill with numerous prescription drugs that are more dangerous and addictive than marijuana. But physicians are not allowed to treat the ill with marijuana. Instead, thousands of Americans unnecessarily have become criminals by purchasing marijuana for their ill loved ones rather than see them suffer.

     "Yet Walters lambastes what he calls the 'cynical campaign under way' in the District of Columbia and elsewhere 'to proclaim the virtues of medical marijuana.'" Page noted. "In fact, those 'cynical' campaigners include the American Public Health Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and almost 80 other state and national health-care organizations that support legalizing patient access to marijuana for medicinal treatment. ...

     "Where referendums have been held, they have passed," columnist Page concludes. "But, alas, Walters dismisses those initiatives as 'based on pseudo-science.' Maybe he did not read the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. It confirmed the effectiveness of marijuana's active components in treating pain, nausea and the anorexic-wasting syndrome associated with AIDS."

     "The drug czar has said we have de facto legalization in this country, that no one really goes to prison any more for drug use," adds Armentano of NORML. "Think of how absurd that is – we have more people in jail for drug crimes in this country than the entire European Union has incarcerated for all charges combined. ... Anyone who can read the numbers can realize those statements are absurd."

     In fact, FBI Uniform Crime statistics show there were 200,465 arrests for marijuana possession in the United States in 1991. But far from being "phased out," arrests for marijuana possession rose steadily through the 1990s, reaching 646,042 in 2000. More than half of all federal inmates are now non-violent drug inmates.

     And according to the government-funded National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 800,000 million youths between 12 and 17 tried marijuana for the first time in 1991. But in 2000, according to the same survey, 1.6 million youths between 12 and 17 tried marijuana for the first time. "If arresting more people is supposed to stop kids from trying marijuana, it seems not to be working," snorts Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C.

     Which is what leads me to believe we may be dealing with some kind of psychiatric aberration here, like the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages, or those incidents where thousands of people testify they've seen a glowing vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe reflected in a downtown store window.

     We know people can ignore logic and the evidence of their own eyes and convince themselves of something they want to believe. But why do they want to believe that we continue to need the War on Drugs?

     You point out to them that after 14 years of Prohibition President-elect Franklin Roosevelt called on Congress to re-legalize alcohol in the winter of 1933 because he needed the tax revenues to cover the ballooning federal deficit – to re-legalize our single most dangerous and addictive and costly drug – yet no one curses the memory of Franklin Roosevelt for "sending the wrong message to the children. "You point out to them that the drive-by Tommygun shootings of the Roaring Twenties ended overnight when the Congress ended alcohol Prohibition, and ask them if today's urban crime problems might not vanish just as quickly if we legalized drugs – if the problem might be not drugs at all, but drug prohibition.

     And what do you get? You get a kind of blank-eyed stare – they start to look like trapped squirrels hunting for a way out of the cage. They disengage. They shout out some memorized sound bite about the Drug War being justified by the 13th Amendment because drug addiction is slavery (Do you know who told me that one? Federal Drug Czar John Walters told me that one, in Las Vegas Nevada, on Wednesday morning, July 24, 2002) and then they scream, "You're being ridiculous; there's nothing more to talk about, "like some psychiatric patient being asked to confront the impossibility of his own fantasies.

     "People have been conditioned to think the sky will fall if the law is changed, "Armentano agrees. "When Proposition 215 passed in California,legalizing medical marijuana, state Attorney General Dan Lundgren held a press conference and he said, "California has now legalized anarchy. "Today, people in California realize not a whole lot has changed. But it was portrayed that if voters in California approved this change, it would belike opening up the doors to Sodom and Gomorrah. So the other side has used one tactic very well, and that tactic is fear."

     "It's represented that you only have two options, either to defend the status quo, or else we'll be in a situation where children would have complete, free access to drugs. ..."

     In fact, there are multiple models for drug policy, Armentano points out, from the legal hashish bars of Amsterdam to Switzerland's "Needle Park. "Great Britain has now decriminalized marijuana, and the Canadian Senate in the fall of 2002 voted to legalize marijuana outright, based on medical and economic findings that traffic accidents can actually be expected to go down when dope is re-legalized, since some folks who currently swill booze will instead switch to marijuana, which actually tends to make users drive more cautiously. (The final decision will be made by outgoing Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who would risk the ire of Washington but who has announced he is retiring in 2004, and may be 'seeking a legacy.')

     Drug policy scholar Matthew Elrod summarizes: "Cognizant of societal fears and misconceptions about the effect of cannabis on driving, the[Canadian] Senate committee dedicated an entire chapter to the subject. In a nutshell, 'Cannabis alone, particularly in low doses, has little effect on the skills involved in automobile driving. Cannabis leads to a more cautious style of driving. ...'

     "Cannabis and alcohol are economic substitutes with cross-price elasticities, "Mr. Elrod continues. "When cannabis use goes up, alcohol use goes down, resulting in a net decrease in drug-related traffic accidents.Economists Frank Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai, for example, estimate that cannabis decriminalization would reduce youth traffic fatalities by 5.5percent, youth drinking rates by eight percent and binge drinking rates by five percent."

(See http://www.parl.gc.ca/Common/Committee_SenRecentReps.asp?Language=E&parl=37&Ses=1.)

     "In the Netherlands, when you turn 16 you have legal access to marijuana,but their adolescents use marijuana at almost half the rate of American adolescents," points out Paul Armentano of NORML. "But you're not going to hear that debate in this country."

     Which brings us back to the 2002 campaign in Nevada, of course, where billy Rogers of the euphemistically named "Nevadans for Responsible Law enforcement" and his hired local consultant, pro-legalization State assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, stuck with their focus-group polling,which showed the only winning argument was to stress cost-benefit analysis – the hundreds of thousands of tax dollars wasted arresting and imprisoning pot users.

     Doesn't that argument throw away all the most persuasive moral and constitutional arguments against the Drug War? If we were trying to convince the German people in 1942 not to send people away to the Death camps, would the most persuasive argument really be, "They cost too much in tax money?"

     "They totally used the fear message," agrees Giunchigliani, the former schoolteacher and teachers union executive who has carried the torch for legalization in the state capital of Carson City, "the second-hand smoke argument, and the fear of DUIs. It was disingenuous and it was a hard one to counter; those who do not want to get into a substantive policy debate will grab an easy sound bite ... You don't change policy like this overnight. These objections have to be reasoned with, and we couldn't even get to those discussions."

     Giunchigliani pointed out to me, in our post-election conversation, that Time magazine currently estimates marijuana is a $15 billion crop in the U.S. – one of the nation's 10 largest agricultural crops. So why not capture the tax revenue from that crop, using the model of state liquor stores in states like Utah and Virginia?

     But the NRLE TV campaign for Question 9 didn't talk about using state revenues from legal pot to help reduce other taxes – let alone horror stories of innocent people killed or having their lives ruined by the Drug war. Instead, it merely stressed the ever-so-soft slogan "In the privacy of a home, or with a doctor's recommendation" ... opening proponents up to accusations they were trying to slip in full legalization for recreational use under the guise of medical marijuana.

     "We focus-grouped all of that," Giunchigliani explains. "The focus groups told us not to even try the other arguments. It was about police officers wasting their time writing a citation; we had some retired police in the focus groups and those were the arguments that played well."

     "One thing that the other side did was to humanize the issue better than we did," Armentano agrees. "When they roll out victims of drug abuse, like that editor of the Las Vegas Sun, a wife and mom who was rear-ended at a red light and killed by a driver who had marijuana in his system" (only a few months before the vote) "they put a human face on potential victims that could arise if this law was passed. And I don't know that the (legalization) side did a good job of showing the human victims that are harmed by the drug laws.

     "So the voters ask, 'Well, why do we need to change the law; the law is not that harsh?' One of the reasons medical marijuana initiatives are so successful is that in those cases we do a better job of putting a human face on those who could benefit from medical marijuana," Armentano figures."But in these legalization arguments we don't do such a good job of putting a human face on those victimized by the Drug War.

     "It's harder in a campaign or a sound bite to educate people to that; I think that kind of groundwork has to be laid before you begin your campaign. ...

     "Which state in this country has the most lenient drug laws?" Armentano asks, rhetorically. "If the arguments they use against legalization were valid we should be able to tell that, shouldn't we? Child drug use should be up; there should be more traffic fatalities in that state due to drug use – that should be so obvious that the first thing that state's Legislature should be rushing to do come January is to go toughen up those laws. But Drug Czar John Walters couldn't even tell me which state had the most lenient drug laws when I asked him. It's Ohio.

     "In Ohio to possess up to 3 ounces of marijuana is punishable with a ticket with a maximum fine of $100. ... You can cultivate up to 10 plants in Ohio and that's also a $100 maximum fine. But the drug use in Ohio is no higher than Oklahoma, where a judge can sentence a person to life in prison for a first-offense marijuana sale. So we know the illegality isn't the reason people choose to use or not use marijuana."

     "It's the kind of thing I would encounter in a class for discipline,"muses former schoolteacher Giunchigliani. "Everyone wants tough discipline unless it's their own child, and then it's a different story."

     Paul Grant, Colorado criminal defense attorney and former Libertarian activist, agrees. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen self-righteously unreasonable D.A.s suddenly get reasonable when they or a close friend or family member gets personally involved as a suspect in a criminal case," Grant reports. "They suddenly get religion – the defense lawyer's religion.

     "It's always us – the good guys – versus them, the evildoers. ... Most people just don't get it until it hits home personally. Most people never get caught smoking a joint or snorting cocaine or driving drunk or slapping their spouse. ... They never get assaulted or mugged, so they're not worried about gun control. Denying reality makes the world more pleasant for many people. ... Pretending that passing laws and criminalizing behavior will make the world safer helps some people sleep better at night, I guess, and relieves them of the responsibility of accepting risk in a dangerous world."

     Even if it means 77,000 pot smokers have to rot in jail.

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