Pubdate: Mon, 20 Jan 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Maria L. La Ganga

COULD BE A YEAR OF GOING GREEN

California and Other States May Have Pot Legalization on Their 
Ballots This Fall.

SEATTLE - The new year is shaping up to be one of the marijuana 
movement's strongest ever.

The first legal pot storefronts in America opened to long lines in 
Colorado 20 days ago. Washington state is poised to issue licenses 
for producing, processing and selling the Schedule I drug - once 
officials sift through about 7,000 applications.

Signature gatherers have been at work in at least five states, 
including California, to put marijuana measures on the ballot in 
2014. On Wednesday, organizers announced they had gathered more than 
1 million signatures in favor of putting a medical marijuana measure 
before voters in Florida, a high-population bellwether that could 
become the first Southern state to embrace pot.

"Florida looks like the country as a whole," said Ben Pollara, 
campaign manager for the Sunshine State's effort. "If Florida does 
this, it is a big deal for medical marijuana across the country."

Just three months ago, a clear majority of Americans for the first 
time said the drug should be legalized - 58% of those surveyed, which 
represents a 10-percentage-point jump in just one year, according to 
Gallup. Such acceptance is almost five times what Gallup found when 
public opinion polling on marijuana began in 1969. And last month in 
California, where the legalization measure Proposition 19 went down 
to defeat in 2010, the Field Poll reported what it called its first 
clear majority in favor of legalizing pot - 55% of those polled, 
compared with 13% in 1969.

"What has happened now is we have reached the national tipping point 
on marijuana reform," said Stephen Gutwillig, deputy executive 
director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group. "Marijuana 
legalization has gone from an abstract concept to a mainstream issue 
to a political reality within a three-year period."

The Obama administration said last year it would not interfere in 
states that allowed commercial marijuana sales - as long as they were 
strictly regulated. But pot remains illegal under federal law, and 
messages from on high are mixed.

On Wednesday, the chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement 
Administration, James L. Capra, told a Senate panel, "Going down the 
path to legalization in this country is reckless and irresponsible."

But in a lengthy New Yorker interview published Sunday, President 
Obama said of legalization in Washington and Colorado: "It's 
important for it to go forward because it's important for society not 
to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one 
time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."

Obama said of marijuana, "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol."

The big question, of course, is why attitudes toward marijuana are 
shifting now. And the answer, according to pollsters and drug policy 
experts, is a stew of demographics, personal experience, electoral 
success and the failure of existing drug policy.

To Alison Holcomb, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who 
wrote the ballot measure that legalized recreational marijuana in 
Washington state, the "enormous jump" in approval of legalization in 
just a year does not ref lect "changes in attitudes about marijuana 
specifically. Rather, it's a change in attitudes about whether it's 
OK to support marijuana law reform."

In other words, Americans don't necessarily like pot more than they 
used to. The percentage of those who have actually tried it has 
stayed in the 30% range for three decades. Rather, Americans are 
simply fed up with criminal penalties they say are neither 
cost-effective nor just.

Those looking for evidence of marijuana's momentum need look only to Jan. 8.

That's the day recreational pot supporters delivered about 46,000 
signatures to election officials in Alaska - 50% more than required - 
putting a measure on legalization one step closer to a vote in the 
largely Republican state.

That same afternoon in deeply Democratic New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, 
a former prosecutor with a history of opposing the drug, announced a 
modest medical marijuana pilot project.

"Research suggests that medical marijuana can help manage the pain 
and treatment of cancer and other serious illnesses," an 
uncomfortable looking Cuomo said, giving the subject 27 seconds in a 
nearly 90-minute State of the State address.

As Cuomo noted, an increasing number of states have enacted medical 
marijuana laws. California was the first in 1996, followed by 20 
others and the District of Columbia.

The embrace of medical marijuana to ease ills including Alzheimer's 
disease and seizures is one reason that support for marijuana has 
continued to grow. Just listen to the Pepper family.

The drugs that Riverside lawyer Letitia Pepper, 59, took to slow the 
progression of her multiple sclerosis caused side effects worse than 
the disease itself, with its numbness, loss of dexterity and 
temporary loss of vision.

The only relief, Pepper said, came when she began using marijuana in 
2007. Today she is gathering signatures to get the California 
Cannabis Hemp Initiative 2014 on the ballot.

She had grown up, she said, as "a good girl. My homework was done. I 
knew marijuana was illegal." She tried it once when she was 25, 
didn't like it and left it behind. Until she needed it to help her function.

Pepper's improvement wasn't lost on her mother, Lorraine, 85, of 
Oceanside. Two years ago, the retired home economics teacher had 
surgery to repair a hiatal hernia; her stomach had migrated through 
the hole in her diaphragm into her chest cavity.

"Since that time, my brain hasn't worked like it used to, and my body 
hasn't either," said the elder Pepper, who opposed marijuana until 
her daughter began using it. She takes it as well, in a 
nonintoxicating liquid form. "Anything that will help, I will try. I 
don't think I sense a great improvement, but I have gradually gotten better."

Although people 65 and older are the only age group that pollsters 
say still opposes legalization, their support for the drug has also 
jumped more in recent years than that of any other age group. Between 
2011 and 2013, Gallup found that the percentage of older Americans in 
favor of legalization rose 14 percentage points - more than double 
any other group surveyed.

Graham Boyd, who has worked on marijuana legalization efforts 
nationwide, agrees that "the big movement is among older and more 
conservative voters." But Boyd said internal polling showed that new 
converts to marijuana support "don't particularly like marijuana, 
don't have much experience in using marijuana and aren't deeply 
attached to the position."

This is not, he said, "a hooray-for-marijuana vote. It's a vote that 
what we are doing now is not working."

Boyd was counsel for the late philanthropist Peter Lewis, who 
commissioned a long-term, in-depth research project after the defeat 
of California's Proposition 19 to understand the "landslide retreat 
from marijuana support."

That effort, Boyd said, revealed that "instead of talking about the 
virtues of marijuana, we need to talk about the better approach of 
control through regulation." Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, who 
spearheaded Lewis' research project, said that message connected with 
voters in Washington state and Colorado.

Once voters approved legalization in Washington and Colorado in 2012, 
public opinion began to change dramatically - enough so that 
marijuana advocates have high hopes for 2014 and 2016.

"The ice-breaking effect of Washington and Colorado allowed more 
people to say [legalization] might be an option," said the ACLU's 
Holcomb. "If Oregon and Alaska go [for legalization] it will be very 
big. ... And I'm holding out hope for California. If California goes 
in 2014, that's going to be huge."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom