Every 53 minutes, someone in Washington State gets arrested for pot. That could be a thing of the past before the year is out. Initiative 502, on the November ballot, is the whole shebang: legalization, taxation, and regulation of marijuana. We're not just talking about making pot possession punishable by, say, a $100 fine, like Massachusetts did in 2008. Instead, I-502 would remove all penalties for adults 21 and older who possess up to an ounce of marijuana. It would also license pot agriculture, allow trucks to drive around distributing pot like beer, and permit stores to sell pot over the counter.
No state has ever done this. Passing I-502 would put Washington State at the forefront of the national movement to finally end pot prohibition. (The 10,000 annual pot arrests in Washington State are just a sliver of the 853,838 arrests in the United States, where there's one pot bust every 37 seconds.) And if current polling can be believed, I-502 will pass. In January, SurveyUSA found that 51 percent of likely November voters in this state support legalizing and taxing marijuana, while only 41 percent oppose it (8 percent are undecided). A poll two months earlier by the same firm found it passing with 57 percent of the voters. This is also a presidential election year in which a statewide gay-marriage referendum will appear on the ballot, drawing out more of the young, progressive voters who pollsters say are inclined to approve pot legalization.
In nearly all respects—from setting specific new penalties for driving while intoxicated to placing excise taxes at each stage of production—I-502 copies the template we use for alcohol. And unlike other failed pot initiatives that have come before, heralded by pot activists with little money, this campaign has national funding and a credible phalanx of backers. The initiative's sponsor, New Approach Washington, has raised more than $1.1 million thus far and is led by former US Attorney John McKay, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes, travel icon Rick Steves, and former health department officials and bar association presidents. The campaign is managed by ACLU of Washington's Alison Holcomb, a former marijuana defense attorney, and it has the financing of out-of-state billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis.
"This has been a reformer's wet dream from 3,000 miles away on K Street," says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), sitting in his office in Washington, DC. He says that NORML has endorsed dozens of initiatives since it was founded in 1970—most of them failed, of course—but that this initiative's combination of leaders gives it an unprecedented shot at winning. "I have never seen a better assembled public-relations effort, a better group of local community leaders," St. Pierre says.
But there's a hitch.
"Despite all those good things I just said," St. Pierre warns, "the one thing that stands out in Washington is that there wasn't sufficient buy-in from the existing and important grassroots community."
It's true: The groups that traditionally oppose legalization—conservatives and cops—are not the ones leading the campaign to kill I-502. The people leading the campaign to kill I-502 are, paradoxically, other pot activists—specifically, pot activists with ties to the medical marijuana community: dispensary owners, medical marijuana lawyers, medical marijuana patients, medical pot trade magazines, doctors who give medical marijuana authorizations, etc.
by Dominic Holden, The Stranger | Read more:
Photo: Kelly O
