Pubdate: Mon, 30 Jun 2014
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2014 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Aaron C. Davis

ODDS GOOD FOR D.C. VOTE ON LEGALIZING POT

Efforts to Get the Measure on the November Ballot Progress, but
Congress Is a Wild Card

Sixteen years ago, D.C. activists gathered signatures to let voters
decide if the District should be among the first in the nation to
legalize medical marijuana. Then Congress stepped in, and city
officials were not even allowed to count the ballots that voters had
cast.

Inside a rented house in Northwest Washington, behind a shaggy bear
skin rug strung up as a makeshift curtain and amid rollaway beds set
up for signature gatherers who have come from as far away as
California and Colorado, there's growing anxiety that history is about
to repeat itself.

Organizers for Initiative 71, a measure that would fully legalize
possession of marijuana in the District, plan to announce this week
that they are closing in on 60,000 signatures - a comfortable buffer
over the 22,600 needed to ensure the measure qualifies for the
November ballot. Having voters decide if the city should follow
Colorado and Washington state in legalizing marijuana seemed - at
least until last week - like a logical progression in the District.

District voters support legalization by a ration of 2 to 1, polls
show. The city has medical marijuana dispensaries and is taking steps
to soon loosen restraints and let doctors recommend the drug for any
ailment. The D.C. Council even voted in March to decriminalize
possession, making it a fine of $25, instead of a year-long jail term.

But just weeks before those more lenient provisions were to take
effect, House Republicans last week resurrected the kind of budget
language that for more than a decade blocked the District from
launching the medical marijuana program that voters had overwhelmingly
endorsed.

"It's violating our rights as District residents, and I'm just afraid
it's going to happen all over again," said Adam Eidinger, one of the
chief organizers of the D.C. Cannabis Campaign. "If we can just get
this on the ballot . . . then we'll have a vote. That's my immediate
concern."

Whether the budget measure passed last week by House Republicans,
which bans the District from spending any money to loosen penalties
for pot, could become law remains unclear. But supporters now see it
as a race against Congress to get the measure certified.

Should federal lawmakers pass a spending plan with the restriction
before Nov. 4, there is precedent for D.C. elections officials to
decide that they are prohibited from counting votes on the issue.

If Congress hasn't passed a budget by then, however, there is a strong
chance that on Nov. 4, the District will legalize pot.

Popular support for legalization in the nation's capital would hasten
the arrival on Capitol Hill of a debate that has largely simmered in
Western states. It would also present the District's next mayor and
council with a mandate to turn the initiative into a workable law,
probably by regulating and taxing the sale of cannabis.

On Friday, one of the city's candidates for mayor, council member
David A. Catania (I-At large), staged a campaign event on the issue,
demanding a meeting with Rep. Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who
led the charge to upend the District decriminalization.

Harris was gone, back to his Eastern Shore district, but he prepared a
press statement in advance criticizing Catania and his stated focus of
his mayoral campaign: schoolchildren.

"Really? Was he serious?" read Harris's statement. "Passing marijuana
decriminalization bills for teenagers is not the way to lower D.C.'s
shamefully high rate of drug abuse among teenagers."

Marijuana advocates note that drug treatment for minors had to be
stripped from the ballot measure in part to comply with a requirement
that D.C. initiatives proposed by voters may not commit the city to
spending money.

As circulated, the measure would allow people 21 and older to possess
as much as two ounces of marijuana for personal use and to grow up to
three marijuana plants at home. To steer clear of a direct
contradiction of federal law, the measure does not allow for the sale
of marijuana.

Legalizing marijuana is uniquely complicated in the District - where
anonymous polling shows that a vast majority of city residents support
legalization, but where many fewer residents are willing to sign a
petition saying so publicly.

Outside Metro stops and courthouses, petitioners said they were
routinely brushed aside by buttoned-up bureaucrats and lawyers who
said they feared for their day jobs, security clearances or standing
in federal agencies.

"I can't tell you how many times I heard 'I'm gonna vote for it, but I
will not sign it.' 'No, I can't vote for it, I'm a teacher, I'm a
federal worker, I'm a government contractor, 'I' ll lose my job.' "
Eidinger said.

Nikolas Schiller, another top campaign organizer, said he came to see
it as a "Snowden factor." He said, "People don't want to be put on
some government list."

In the campaign house, which radiates the scent of old resin across
from the Zambian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, volunteers developed
their own code names for volunteers on their side who felt equally
constrained. One who spent evenings gathering signatures occasionally
works at the White House, another at the Justice Department, a third
still has a security clearance as a former Pentagon employee.

Without disclosing identities, the campaign contacted the federal
office of personnel to see if the employees could be compromised.
Signature gatherers boned up on the Hatch Act to have a comeback at
Metro stations for bureaucrats' concerns that signing the petition
would run afoul of federal election rules.

The signatures also got tougher to come by, and like so many other
D.C. political ventures, the campaign began depending more heavily on
professionals. Some collect $2.75 per signature, pulling in as much as
$1,100 a week.

The effort also became infused with social justice arguments pressed
by unions and civil liberties groups.

"Oh my God. We have so many people collecting who are not users. It's
the non-users who are the most motivated," Eidinger said. "It's
generally the jail thing; they really believe in social justice."

Inadvertently, the campaign found that black residents were more
effective at collecting signatures in predominantly white areas of the
city than the other way around. When it was cast as preventing blacks
from needlessly going to jail, more people signed on. But "if it was
whites asking whites, they'd get blown off," Eidinger said.

Still, Eidinger said the largest number of signatures for the ballot
measure have come from the city's majority African American wards east
of the Anacostia River.

"If we're going to get serious about ending mass incarcerations, this
is serious policy," said G. Malik Burnett, a national affairs manager
with the Drug Policy Alliance, who was in the campaign headquarters
last week discussing fundraising for November.

Eidinger put it another way: "Maybe D.C. is not about this, like,
strict law and order, and instead, it's more about, like, geez, can we
all live together and stop throwing people in jail for stupid things?"
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MAP posted-by: Matt