cannabisnews.com: Who's Running This Joint!





Who's Running This Joint!
Posted by FoM on August 11, 1999 at 09:30:41 PT
A drug reform movement struggles for unity
Source: New Haven Advocate
The organized resistance to America's War on Drugs seems to have taken its political cues from Monty Python's Life of Brian: forming hundreds of groups, adopting acronyms, holding meetings, bickering over trivia and espousing conflicting political stances while the enemy runs roughshod. 
Yes, Connecticut's drug reform movement certainly has its equivalents of the Popular People's Front, People's Front of Judea and Popular People's Front of Judea: Three years ago Cliff Thornton left his $70,000-a-year middle management job at the phone company to start Efficacy, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending the War on Drugs. He and his wife, Maggie, work out of their Windsor home full-time, telling anyone who will listen that rather than enforcing antiquated and unjust prohibitions, the common sense answer is legalizing and regulating marijuana and medicalizing hard substances such as cocaine and heroin. Mike Gogulski of Hamden juggles his 9-to-5 job at a computer firm with his passion for stopping the madness of prohibition. Gogulski considered joining Efficacy, but instead in January, he and a few others formed the Connecticut Cannabis Policy Forum. Their mission is to remove all penalties for marijuana consumption by adults in Connecticut. Former state legislator and four-time mayor Bill Collins of Norwalk sparked up A Better Way in 1994 to lobby for legislative change in drug policy. In 1995, he pushed for the Connecticut Law Revision Commission's landmark study that eventually concluded the solution was harm reduction: that is, treating substance use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. Jelani Lawson, who serves on the New Haven Board of Aldermen, runs the Connecticut Drug Policy Leadership Council in his spare time. The council formed in 1997 to rally support for the Law Revision Commission report. And over at Western Connecticut State University, the Nutmeg State's oldest drug policy reform group carries the banner for NORML, the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws. War on DopesThese groups represent only a few of the leaves of the plant of protest that keeps growing in Connecticut and nationwide. Across the U.S., there are more than 400 drug policy reform organizations, including think tanks, political parties and non-profit education centers, according to Aaron Wilson of the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information. About 350 of these have formed in the last decade, responding to the government's escalating war on drugs and users. According to FBI statistics, arrests for possession of marijuana alone have soared since 1992, the year before Bill Clinton assumed the presidency. That year, 342,000 people were arrested. By 1997, the number more than doubled, to 695,000. Clinton's regime has arrested 2.8 million smokers to date, more than presidents Nixon, Reagan or Bush. Of those arrests, 87 percent were for simple possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. While the generals in the drug war would point to these figures as proof that the battle is being won, increasing numbers of people from divergent parts of society are reaching an entirely different conclusion. In recent years, federal judges, conservatives like William F. Buckley and cops such as former New Haven Police Chief Nicholas Pastore have come out in favor of some kind of legalization. Their reasons are myriad. One arrest for even a minor marijuana-related indiscretion can throw a life into turmoil. Based simply on an arrest, before trial, the government can seize houses, cars and bank accounts. Accused users are left broke, unable to afford counsel. The state Department of Children and Families can use an arrest as grounds to declare a family unfit and take children away. The burden on the criminal justice system prevents cops, courts and jails from putting their resources into ending truly violent crime. Thanks in part to a prison system filled with minor drug-related offenders, a murderer can spend less time behind bars than someone convicted of crack cocaine possession. Housing a prisoner costs at least $25,000 annually. Connecticut alone has about 16,653 men and women serving time, nearly a quarter of whom are in for non-violent drug offenses. Ancillary expenses, such as health care for prisoners with AIDS or tuberculosis, add up as well. The drug war's tentacles stretch into virtually every facet of life -- whether it is random drug testing in the workplace, the fear of being pulled over for driving while black or the ineffective Drug Abuse Resistance Education program -- usually known as D.A.R.E. -- which, increasing numbers of studies indicate, wastes classroom time and possibly goads students into experimenting. The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy figures that illegal drugs cause an estimated 9,300 deaths annually, as compared to 430,000 estimated deaths from cigarette smoking. Yet drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who runs that office, has a record $17.8 billion budget for 1999. Throw in state and local police funding, and you get an estimated $50 billion a year nationally going toward fighting drugs, according to Adam Smith of DRCNet. Stoners & SuitsIf strength in numbers were all it takes, the battle against questionable drug policy might have had more impact by now. But toppling the governmental Goliath has proved no easy feat for this band of stoners, suits and grassroots activists. Efforts could be further along if groups were more united. The more than 400 reform groups have almost just as many agendas. Missions range from legalizing pot only to legalizing cocaine and heroin, to providing clean needles, to shortening drug sentences. Some say this diversity adds strength, because everyone picks at different areas of the problem. "Never in the history of the drug policy movement have there been this many people who have stayed in this long," says Thornton, the founder of Windsor-based Efficacy. "The word is that it had to be a multi-pronged attack." That's why the Lindesmith Center, a New York City think tank, distributes money to local reform groups such as Efficacy. "Playing ball locally is what is most important in any democracy," says Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith, which itself is bankrolled by billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute. Plus, he says, small groups can confront issues immediately as they spring up. And there's been progress. In the last four years, five Western states -- California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington -- have voted to make marijuana legal for medical purposes. In Connecticut, the legislature has adopted cutting-edge treatment programs that attempt to shift the burden off the criminal justice system. Still, Nadelmann recognizes how growth paradoxically can create weaknesses. "Any one issue on drug policy reform moves forward by disassociating itself from other issues," he notes: The West Coast medical marijuana initiatives passed by distancing themselves from decriminalization. An industrial hemp law recently approved in North Dakota separated itself from recreational use. Needle exchangers won't pull for methadone, the same way people against mandatory minimum sentencing laws disavow legalization. "Sometimes I get pissed when there are more and more groups," says Denny Lane, who instituted the pro-pot Vermont Grassroots Party in 1994. "We should just stick together and strengthen what we have." It's a conundrum, Gogulski of the Connecticut Cannabis Policy Forum agrees. "Everybody is pulling in different directions at the same puzzles," he says. "We are all trying to undo the same knot, and we are all pulling at different strings." A Million Joints AlightNadelmann and others take comfort in history. Abolitionists, women's suffragists and Gandhi's Indian satyagrahi were even more divided than the pro-drug movement, but they accomplished more. "Our level of internal conflict is in all likelihood less than that in the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement," Nadelmann says. Indeed, he predicts that as the voices against prohibition grow louder, internal struggles will worsen. Vermont activist Lane doubts that more division within the movement is even possible. To date he has spent almost every penny he has working for legal herb. Running the Grassroots Party from his mountaintop cabin 45 minutes southeast of Burlington, Lane recently ended a six-year drought of living without a car or running water. He's also been under DEA surveillance since 1972. Lane dreams of writing a book titled The Nuances of Bickering and Infighting Among Freedom Fighting Hemp Activists. "Too many people want to be chiefs and there are not enough Indians." There's no money except from Soros, Lane says, and that money isn't going to the grassroots types. It's going to the suits. Lane would like Soros to pay for a central printer for the movement and a central legal counsel. Along that line, the American Civil Liberties Union just assigned New Haven attorney Graham Boyd to work on legalization issues in court, full-time. (See accompanying story.) Boyd is fighting two cases now. But it's not the pack of lawyers Lane envisions. Still, he says, "We get a lot accomplished with a little money." Indeed, his leadership elevated the Grassroots gang to major party status in Vermont, alongside the Republicans and Democrats. While Lane chose the name Grassroots Party for solidarity with the semi-successful Minnesota Grassroots Party, he figures a common name for all these drug reform groups could lend credibility. But Lane then deals with heads calling him at 3 a.m. asking, "Dude, where's the grassroots party at?" Connecting the burners and book-benders is one of the movement's biggest challenges, agrees Steve Hager, editor-in-chief of High Times. "There has to be an event that galvanizes everybody and unifies all of the separate issues," he says. "We haven't had the spark that transforms the millions of cannabis users into cannabis activists." The May 1 Million Marijuana March tried, rallying about 200,000 people in about 30 cities around the world. The biggest gatherings were in London, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Montreal and Chicago, says organizer Dana Beal. He wanted a million joints "alight" in one day, he says, and he thinks it may have happened. "It was the first time we've ever had a worldwide coordinated protest," says Beal. Even so, it wasn't the galvanizing moment that, say, the 1963 March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech were for the civil rights movement. "If it is a true coalition, then it builds on consensus. It is very hard to do that with the stoners," says Hager. "It is like trying to herd a bunch of kittens to focus and unify." NORML RelationsThe drug policy reform movement didn't start out as a mix of pot smokers and policy wonks. It started, unbelievably, as a coalition of doctors and lawyers. In 1951, a Yale-educated lawyer named Rufus King, who had been a clerk for a U.S. senator in Washington, began criticizing the Boggs Act -- the first of the federal mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws. By 1957, King had built a coalition between the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association to restore the Bill of Rights. King, now 82 and still living in Washington, says current laws prevent doctors from prescribing drugs that could be of use to patients. "Doctors should be up on their hind legs in outrage," he says. As early as 1937, the AMA testified before Congress in favor of medical marijuana. But based on the testimony of Harry Anslinger, the head of the Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the feds outlawed all usage. Anslinger, who held that post for 32 years, crushed the AMA-ABA committee by scaring away sources of funding. King continued to lobby and write books, but by the mid-1970s, he dropped out in disgust. The splintering began in the 1960s, when beat poet Allen Ginsberg and friends gave birth to Legalize Marijuana, or LeMar, in San Francisco. That faded and in 1970, NORML opened shop in Washington, D.C. In southern California, a group of heads called Amorphia formed to free the weed, and the internecine bickering had begun. NORML was the best and strongest of the litter in the early years. It had better political connections and scored a grant from the Playboy Foundation. According to NORML founder Keith Stroup, tensions rose when Amorphia -- which sold rolling papers to finance its activities -- told Playboy that NORML was full of middle-class sellouts. "We were openly fighting, trying to undermine their efforts, and they were doing it to us," says Stroup. "Fortunately, before it became public, cooler heads said we were on the same side." The leader of Amorphia became NORML's West Coast boss, and its business manager moved to D.C. to keep NORML's books. The union grew and pulled enough weight to convince President Jimmy Carter to consider decriminalizing pot. That momentum crashed in 1978 after Stroup and White House aides were caught partying together with narcotics. Stroup resigned, only to return in 1994. Now, in his second tour as the head of the organization, Stroup says he has noticed a drop in quarreling. "I don't want to suggest there's perfect harmony," he says. "There are still a limited number of funders, and we still have the problem of more than one organization approaching the same person for what is the same work." Compared to the $50 billion war chest held by the temperance folks, the opposition is poor. "The overall funding for the movement, if you had to pin me down, in 1999, I would say it is probably $6 or $7 million," says Smith of DRCNet. "The comedy is when the drug czar stands again and again to warn about the well-funded, well-organized legalization cabal. I'm not sure which is funnier, the well-funded or well-organized part." Given the combination of fiscal woes and conflicting goals, some suggest choosing a central spokesman for the cause might be the answer. "If you have a charismatic leader and that person becomes the messiah for the movement, it can help unify people," High Times' Hager says. He envisions a leader like legendary hempster Jack Herer, the author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a groundbreaking book on the "conspiracy" to keep hemp illegal; or Dennis Peron, who fronted the 1996 campaign for California's Proposition 215 on medical marijuana,. "But they are not national figures, and they are not taken seriously by the media," Hager says. "Back in the 1960s, it was easy for Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to get national attention. Now it is relatively impossible to get national attention." Attorney King wants a well-known African-American, someone like Charles Rangel, the eight-term Democratic congressman from Harlem, to step forward. Rangel chairs a House committee on substance abuse. Kevin Zeese, a 20-year veteran who once headed NORML but now runs Common Sense for Drug Policy, another D.C. think tank, thinks the best model is that of the early civil rights movement, in the 1950s. "Under a unifying force, the civil rights movement became more effective; then they really started to see changes in the laws. They really started to see national legislation passed," Zeese says. "I'm not sure it would have been achieved without coalition." That's why he started the Alliance of Reform Organizations, which uses the Internet to engage national leaders from Efficacy to the ACLU in regular e-mail strategizing sessions. Zeese acknowledges, however, that the civil rights movement had millions of supporters, while membership in the various drug reform groups is in the hundreds of thousands. "The difference makes the need for us being unified even more important," he says. Perhaps looking outside the movement for support will help. Zeese has formed an even broader cooperative called The National Coalition for Effective Drug Policies. He pens various missives to Congress and President Clinton, and has attracted dozens of signatories, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Children's Defense Fund, Family Watch, NOW and FAMM, or Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which objects to federally mandated, stiff penalties for illegal drug and gun use. The problem is that these groups are only interested in supporting their particular causes. For instance, FAMM approves of Zeese's prose only when it concerns mandatory minimums. Julie Stewart set up FAMM after her brother was sentenced to five years for growing marijuana "Our purpose is to restore judicial discretion to judges," she says. "This is not a drug issue for us; this is a justice issue." Activists' inability to find an amicable aim doesn't surprise Nora Callahan of Washington state. Callahan joined FAMM in 1994 while her brother was in the can on cocaine conspiracy charges. He's been in since 1989 and at this point, has 14 years left. But because FAMM doesn't go far enough in criticizing drug policy, she parted on good terms in 1997 and, yes, she established her own group, too -- the November Coalition. "We go a little further in criticizing drug policy," Callahan claims. It is, she admits, a little bit like Monty Python's Life of Brian. "We laugh about it all the time," Callahan says. They rehearse the skit in the offices: "'Are you the Coalition of November?' 'No, we're the November Coalition. Fuck off.'" And she knows that disunity won't free her brother. Ironically enough, when she talks to her brother in jail, he says prisoners find hope in the very fact that so many people are challenging drug reform from so many different angles. "I've thought about strategy. Should we all do the same thing? It's a huge brick wall -- should we be barreling into the same spot?" Callahan asks. "Or should it come down brick by brick?" Full-Court PressA New Haven lawyer finds a new tool for drug reform:The Constitution.By David Horowitz For years, drug reformers have lobbied, protested and published to sway policy makers. Graham Boyd recently enlisted with a simpler yet perhaps fiercer blade: the U.S. Constitution. In a movement that has historically pursued policy reform, Boyd -- a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School who lives in New Haven -- has just become the nation's first full-time litigator in the service of drug policy reform.He represents a promising new strategy for the movement. Boyd is the first attorney of the Drug Policy Litigation Project, an inchoate branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, which Boyd himself helped create last year. He has already won a preliminary ruling in a First Amendment suit against U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey involving doctor recommendation of marijuana. A voting rights suit against the District of Columbia, also a medical marijuana case, is pending in federal court. Boyd also wants to challenge universal drug testing for public school students, government employees and welfare recipients as an invasion of privacy. The ACLU's turn to the courts seems reminiscent of the early black civil rights movement. In hiring Boyd, ACLU President Ira Glasser told him "to identify the aspects of the War on Drugs that are both legally vulnerable and widely objectionable to ordinary people, and to attack those things in a way which will point out the worst injustices of the drug war" -- just as NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall did with Jim Crow laws, Boyd says. Marshall won a string of important court decisions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, culminating in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation case in 1954. "My job is to monitor and then confront the excesses of the War on Drugs. It doesn't matter if it's marijuana or heroin if the government wants to violate your rights," Boyd says. He stresses that he is not a criminal lawyer for drug offenders. But by litigating cases that penetrate the core of unjust drug policy, he may ultimately help more people. "I want to affect legal precedent for the future," Boyd says. "I want to have a broad impact." What is interesting about Boyd is that he was a civil rights lawyer first, his commitment to civil liberties later drawing him to drug reform advocacy. He spent time abroad working for environmental justice and spent several years as a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco before he found his way to drug reform in late 1996. That November, California voters approved Proposition 215, which eliminated criminal penalties for doctors recommending and patients using marijuana in treating serious diseases. Reno and McCaffrey, among other members of the Clinton administration, lashed back. They publicly announced that though patients who use marijuana may be safe from stateprosecution, the federal government would prosecute doctors -- and revoke their licenses -- on the basis of federal law. A drug reform advocacy group, the Lindesmith Center, hired Boyd to file suit. In the suit, Pearson v. McCaffrey,Boyd argued that the administration's threat infringed on the doctors' First Amendment rights and violated federalism, the balance of states' rights with the authority of the central government. "This case got me thinking about the connection between the War on Drugs and issues of racial and economic justice, which is my [main legal] interest," says Boyd. He came to view current drug policy as "the modern version of Jim Crow," denying people welfare benefits, tax credits for higher education and voting rights. "It's how our society takes away freedom, the right to vote, housing, education, jobs and children." And the penalties fall disproportionately on underprivileged minorities. Through the California case, Boyd linked up with the ACLU, which also represented the plaintiffs in that case. The civil liberties union assigned him a second case, in which the ACLU accuses U.S. Rep. Robert Barr of violating the rights of District of Columbia voters. In November 1998, D.C. ran a ballot initiative similar to California's Proposition 215. It would have passed with 70 percent of the vote, according to exit polls, had Barr not intervened. The Georgia Republican sponsored an amendment to the D.C. spending bill, outlawing federal funding for any initiative that would "legalize or otherwise reduce penalties" for marijuana users. He couldn't pass the bill early enough to cancel the vote altogether, but managed it in time to freeze the vote tallying. The U.S. District Court has yet to rule, but Glasser of the ACLU thought the trial run successful enough to hire Boyd permanently, with the possibility of adding a second attorney and paralegal in the future. Graham Boyd isn't merely a hired suit. (He doesn't even wear one to work.) Since his arrival in the drug reform movement -- and back in New Haven -- he has also become a mover at the grassroots level. In March 1998 Boyd founded the Connecticut Drug Policy Leadership Council, a body of 75 high-profile doctors, lawyers, community leaders and government officials -- including New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and former Police Chief Nick Pastore. Boyd also joined the Connecticut Harm Reduction Coalition and is "very involved" with A Better Way, both drug education and policy organizations. The Leadership Council has already successfully lobbied the state to increase funding for needle exchange programs and reduce the minimum sentence for non-violent drug offenders, previously on par with violent offenders, says New Haven Alderman Jelani Lawson, who assumed leadership of the council from Boyd last winter. Boyd stays active at the grassroots level, acknowledging that the courts are only one front in a complex war. "I think the role of a lawyer in a political movement is one of support," he says. "I don't think litigation is ever going to become the engine that drives the movement." Boyd favors a multi-pronged approach to any reform movement. He takes exception to the claim that many drug reform advocacy groups with different approaches suggests weakness. You have to chip away at the War on Drugs any way you can, he says, because "you never know which one is going to work."Pubdate: August 11, 1999By Ken Krayeskehttp://www.newhavenadvocate.com/articles/joint.htmlCopyright ©1999 New Mass. Media, Inc. 
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on August 12, 1999 at 18:12:48 PT:
Resident Leads Fight To Reform Pot Laws!
As a young teenager, Mike Gogulski began reading about the 1960s counterculture and the prevalence of marijuana use in that era. He quickly concluded that something was out of whack. "I felt the government's policies were not logical, not all there," Hamden resident Gogulski said.Click the link to read the complete article.
Resident Leads Fight To Reform Pot Laws!
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Comment #1 posted by Tom Paine on August 12, 1999 at 15:17:05 PT
Now if they would only talk to each other!
http://homepages.go.com/homepages/m/a/r/marthag1/forums.htm*Message forums with cannabis, drug-war, entheogen, drug-reform,and drug-related threads. [Friendly, neutral, and hostile messageboards worldwide. Activists, newspapers, broadcasters, cable, webmedia, etc.].|---http://homepages.go.com/homepages/m/a/r/marthag1/tompaine.htmhttp://homepages.go.com/~marthag1/tompaine.htm*TOM PAINE's Home Page. Drug War charts, tables, links. Focussedcompilations. International. Comprehensive. Just Say Know!|
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