Pubdate: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 Source: Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA) Copyright: 2011 Worcester Telegram & Gazette Contact: http://www.telegram.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/509 Note: Rarely prints LTEs from outside circulation area - requires 'Letter to the Editor' in subject Author: Clive McFarlane Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) BREAULT'S FIGHT AGAINST POT A JOINT EFFORT William Breault, chairman of the Main South Alliance for Public Safety, is a hard-core activist, a steamroller, a man who likes to Bogart every community health and safety issue. He is homegrown - born on Bell Hill, raised in Main South, he graduated from South High Community School and worked in the maintenance department at the College of the Holy Cross for 34 years. He has stood as a vanguard to combat the decline in his neighborhood, working tirelessly and passionately to make it a decent and safe place to live, and he has had some success. Working with his dad, the late Theodore Breault, who also was a community activist, he railed against rooming houses as drug and prostitution joints until the city revoked the licenses of these establishments. The heavy lumber he wielded in wasting the proponents of needle exchange programs here and in Springfield has won him legendary status among those opposing needle exchange programs around the country. You can't help but feel, however, that he's just blowing smoke when it comes to his fight against marijuana. In 2008, he blitzed the state, working unsuccessfully against the ballot initiative that led to the Massachusetts law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Mr. Breault won't give up the chase, however. He is back with a petition requesting that the City Council raise the fine on possession of small amounts of marijuana to $300. Chances are the council, which increasingly is viewing every resident as a bagman, will get the munchies big time for this requested change. "It is decriminalized. It is not legalized," Mr. Breault said of marijuana use. "This (higher fine) is to make them think twice. I see people walking in drug houses near me smoking a joint on the way in and smoking a joint on the way out. Well, if you are going to smoke in the open, you are going to pay a high fine." But he hasn't always been a straight one. He used to drink, but doesn't anymore. He doesn't smoke, either. In the late '60s, when he was in the prime of his youth, and many of the more adventurous of his generation were drifting toward San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury to find peace and love, he stayed home to help out in his dad's television repair shop. But while he might have missed the flower child decade, he finally got buzzed on the marijuana issue about 20 years ago when Lea Palleria Cox, president of the Hanover-based Concerned Citizens for Drug Prevention, "introduced me to some people on the national level." "From everything I have read and seen it is a gateway drug," Mr. Breault said. "It leads to other drugs. If you don't use pot, you have a 70 percent chance of never going on to other drugs." Mr. Breault has been known to play fast and free with the facts when it suits his purposes, and it might well be the case here. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, for example, says, "Statistically, for every 104 Americans who have tried marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine, and less than one user of heroin." Nevertheless, since his association with Ms. Cox began, Mr. Breault has fully immersed himself in the fight against marijuana use and legalization across the country. He and his organization are in cahoots with 30 or 40 partners across the country trying to blunt the country's appetite for any use of marijuana. When California passed its Compassionate Use Act in 1996, allowing a patient or his primary caregiver to possess marijuana on the advice of a physician, the Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative quickly organized itself to supply such patients with the marijuana they needed. The federal government sued the cooperative, arguing that the group's cultivation and distribution of marijuana were against federal law because there was no medical exception to the law. The suit, with the Main South Alliance included as a friend of the court, ended up in the Supreme Court in 2001. Mr. Breault sat in on the oral arguments, and saluted the court's ruling that the federal Controlled Substances Act did not recognize a medical necessity exception. The court's action didn't cause the movement behind medicinal use of marijuana to go up in smoke. According to NORML, 15 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana use, and 13 have enacted some version of the Massachusetts decriminalization law. This should all add up as a "buzzkill" for Mr. Breault, but he cannot give up the fight. He is hooked. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom