Nevada Ponders Looser Curbs on Marijuana

By Rene Sanchez
Washington Post Staff Writer

LAS VEGAS -- As soon as he took over the nation's only campaign to make even recreational use of marijuana legal, Billy Rogers laid down a few firm rules.

No stoners hanging out at the headquarters here. No pot plants either. And no straying from the core message to voters: This is to free cops and courts from the burdens of petty drug busts, not just to win the right to get high.

"If we were a bunch of potheads, or all had tie-dyed T-shirts and long hair, we would be easy targets, but we're not, and our opponents can't handle it," said Rogers, a veteran political consultant from Texas. "They're stunned. We're talking about helping law enforcement. We're running even in the polls. Who would have thunk it? We've got a real shot at winning."

Nevada, land of blackjack and brothels, drive-through weddings and quickie divorces, appears tempted to go to yet another live-and-let-live extreme this fall and ease its drug laws in a way that few other states have even contemplated, much less put up for a public vote.

In a ballot measure known as Question 9, Nevadans will decide whether to allow adults 21 and older to possess and smoke as much as three ounces of marijuana, simply because they feel like it, with no threat of criminal penalty. Under current state law, anyone caught with that much marijuana -- which authorities say makes roughly 100 joints -- could face four years in prison.

The November ballot proposal forbids pot smoking in public, or while driving. It also bans marijuana advertising and import of the drug. Nevada would have to grow and distribute its own marijuana through state-licensed outlets, and could tax every sale. Some officials say such a move could be a jackpot worth millions of dollars for the state every year. To become law, voters will have to approve it twice, first in November, then again in 2004.

If the measure passes, the implications could be huge here in Las Vegas, where most anything goes already. Would Sin City be consumed by reefer madness and become an Amsterdam of the desert, teeming with drug dealers or tourists jetting in just to take a few legal tokes?

"We don't know," said Erica Brandvik, a spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has not taken a position on Question 9. "But this is a place where people come to do things they don't do at home. I can't say that the news this might happen is jaw-dropping to people here."

Nevada's step is part of a larger movement, rooted in the West but spreading nationwide, to rethink a range of drug laws. The campaigns are growing despite the fierce objections of federal officials, who are denouncing Question 9.

"This is a con," said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "This isn't going to help law enforcement -- this is going to help drug dealers. And do we really want drug tourism?"

In the past six years, voters in nine states (including Nevada) have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes. Several other states also have cut criminal punishments for simple drug possession. Measures to either reduce penalties or allow medicinal use will be on the ballot in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona this fall. Proponents of a medical marijuana initiative in the District are pressing to get it on this year's ballot.

Two years ago, California voters approved Proposition 36, which required minor drug offenders to be sent to treatment programs, not prison. Last year, Nevada lawmakers reduced the penalty for getting caught with an ounce or less of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor that carries no more than a $600 fine.

The latest campaign here, like most others around the country on the drug, has been organized and bankrolled almost entirely by the Marijuana Policy Project, a national group based in Washington D.C. It spent $375,000 just to get the issue on the Nevada ballot.

More than 100,000 voters from around the state have signed petitions in support of Question 9. And that is but one sign of the measure's apparent momentum.

Nevada's largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has expressed support for the measure, saying it could end the "needless harassment of individuals who peacefully and privately use marijuana." No group has organized yet to oppose it. Polls are deadlocked. And Nevada's governor, Republican Kenny Guinn, is vowing to remain neutral on the subject this fall.

"It's a complicated issue," said Greg Bortolin, his press secretary. "He hasn't made up his mind on it."

Bortolin noted that many Nevada voters have a libertarian streak that makes them unpredictable, especially on social issues. "You have to throw out all the rules in Nevada when it comes to politics," he said.

That's one reason the forces behind Question 9 chose Nevada as a staging ground. Another is that the medical marijuana initiative here two years ago passed with more than 65 percent of the vote. Most of Nevada's electorate also lives in metropolitan Las Vegas, making it relatively easy for a campaign to promote its message on radio and television and at community meetings.

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the country, federal officials say. According to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Use, about 34 percent of Americans ages 12 and older said they have tried the drug. And more than 600,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession in 2000.

Proponents of Question 9 say that is exactly why it is necessary. Police are wasting too much time and money busting small-time, private pot users, they argue, when they could be focusing on violent crimes, even terrorism threats.

Rogers said the ballot measure would bring other benefits: Cancer patients whose doctors want them to use marijuana in treatment would have better access. And forcing Nevada to distribute marijuana could wipe out the underground market for the drug -- because the state could sell it for a lower price. Federal officials say the street cost of marijuana varies from $400 to $1,000 per pound in the Southwest to $700 to $2,000 per pound in the Northeast.

"What we're proposing is not radical -- it would still be a felony in Nevada to have four ounces," said Rogers, whose office walls are lined with color-coded maps of Nevada counties and polling precincts. "But look, millions of Americans have tried marijuana, and they didn't go crazy, and they didn't go on to harder drugs. Yet we keep arresting thousands and thousands of people just for using it in the privacy of their homes. It's got to stop. It's time."

Federal officials, who have been cracking down on groups dispensing marijuana for medicinal purposes, adamantly reject those claims. Walters said that Question 9 would set dangerous policy. He predicted that many more Nevada teenagers and adolescents would fall prey to marijuana addiction, and he warned baby boomers who smoked marijuana in their youth, without dire consequences, to think twice about supporting the measure.

"What many people don't understand is that this is not your father's marijuana," Walters said. "What we're seeing now is much more potent."

Law enforcement officials in Nevada seem divided. Some prosecutors say they are outraged. "This wasn't even an issue in Nevada until this outside group came here promoting it," said Dick Gamick, the district attorney in Washoe County, which includes Reno. "It's ridiculous. We're telling our children drugs are bad, then we're going to do this?"

But last month, the Nevada Conference of Police and Sheriffs, the largest law enforcement group in the state, endorsed Question 9 -- briefly.

Andy Anderson, the group's president, announced that its directors had decided unanimously to support the measure because they believed it would allow police officers to "better spend our time responding to more life-threatening and serious incidents."

A few days later, the group publicly shifted its stance and said that it had not taken a formal vote on the issue. Then it ousted Anderson.

The furor over Question 9 will intensify soon. Walters said that he plans to travel to Nevada to speak against the measure. But its backers are planning television ads and say they have volunteers ready to go door to door to campaign for its passage.

Tourists in Las Vegas, meanwhile, are watching with amazement as the debate unfolds. "I can't imagine that many people would come just to smoke marijuana," said Martin Mooney, a New Yorker visiting with his wife and children. "But you never know what to expect here. This place is wild."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company