Though Florida is one of the nation's largest suppliers of marijuana, McDonough seems to think his own state is the place to experiment -- that if he sprays a bit of Fusarium oxysporum around, and Florida might have drug-free kids.

Is this what we can expect from drug policy in the next millennium? Or is the idea so ludicrous -- it doesn't take into account the failures of past efforts, it doesn't recognize that pot is also known as weed for good reason -- that it reflects the death rattle of the drug war?

Some minor problems with the scheme do suggest drug warrior desperation and this local story reflects the type of carelessness typically involved in dealing with this national problem. Most Florida pot is grown indoors, out of reach of fungal spraying, for one.

Florida also has a long history of disaster resulting from the introduction of foreign species, which prompted its Department of Environmental Protection director to decry even experimenting outdoors with the fungus.

Among past fiascos: pet pythons which got loose and now grow to be ten feet long and the introduction of water-hungry trees to drain swamps which are now overgrown and have spoiled the ecology of the Everglades.

Not to mention the fact that Florida is a state whose economy is heavily dependent on agriculture, so playing with ecology is particularly worrying.

If the marijuana-eating fungus -- which is a member of a species that can live for up to 40 years and is prone to mutation -- decides to start chowing on citrus or in any way begins to change the interdependent ecosystem which supports Florida's many crops, serious trouble could result.

And of course, even if the fungus did kill only pot plants, past eradication attempts hold little hope that cannabis supplies would dry up. In fact, the entire history of supply side drug control efforts has been riddled with unintended consequences.

To take just one example, which coincidentally also involved Florida: when the feds stepped up interdiction efforts over the state's seas and air in the early 1980s, pot smugglers switched to the more profitable, less detectable and more addictive cocaine.

South American pot growing was indeed nearly eliminated, but coca production was stepped up, cocaine use increased dramatically and crack was created. American pot growers took over supplying the domestic marijuana market.

In light of continuing supply side debacles, the fact that a Florida fungal fix could even be considered at this late date reflects the unsettled state of the war on drugs. Perhaps in the 1980's it would have been a sure winner.

But now as the 2000 presidential elections near and politicians prepare to deal with the inevitable drug questions, they can no longer shout "drug" and have the public swallow anything. Newspapers around the country have been highly critical of the fungus solution.

It's been noted that McDonough's boss, Florida's governor, is Jeb Bush, brother of Presidential candidate George W., who is desperately trying to avoid seeming "soft on drugs," because many believe he used not only marijuana but cocaine during his party years at college.

As the election year approaches, drug war hawks and reformist doves are struggling to set the terms for the ongoing drug policy debate. And marijuana policy is ground zero, since pot is the country's most popular illicit drug.

OVER THE PAST DECADE, reformers have been securing an advantage, mostly because of one major tactical error on the part of the warriors: staunch opposition to medical marijuana.

Six states passed initiatives permitting the medical use of marijuana in the last three years -- many by 2/3 margins. Peter Reuter, a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland who founded the Rand Institute's Drug Policy Research Center said,

"Opposing medical marijuana was a rhetorical mistake. They were on weak scientific grounds. They gave the sense of being bullies, picking on people with cancer and AIDS."

"Imagine a rational actor in the drug war had asked me for advice about medical marijuana," said Mark Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA whose centrist positions tend to offend both prohibitionists and legalizers."

I would have said that it's really not a drug issue, it's a medical issue. Run it through the research and let the doctors decide whether it works or not. By opposing it, they opened up an opportunity for their opponents. They gave them the one symbol that is more frightening to Americans than drugs: cancer.

Denying dying people access to something that could potentially help made the drug warriors look heartless. And it got people in the habit of supporting marijuana." Even worse, it opened up cherished anti-pot propaganda to public and scientific scrutiny.

Federal Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey asked the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences to report on the risks and benefits of marijuana. Like other scientific bodies before them, they found that marijuana is within the acceptable risk range of drugs currently in use (in fact, it is the least harmful known intoxicant), that it does have potential medical uses and that marijuana use is not an inevitable "gateway" to cocaine or heroin.

"The drug warriors' legitimacy is waning," said Sam Vagenas, an organizer of the successful Arizona medical marijuana initiative. "And they lost more by opposing medical marijuana. It made them look out of touch and Americans do see that drug policy is out of touch with reality." Vagenas points out that drug warriors have already adopted some of the reformers' rhetoric.

"How do you explain that we went from the first drug czar Bill Bennett, who said that incarceration was the only way to fight drugs, to our current drug czar who says that we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem?"

While Reuter and Kleiman see less reason to believe that change is in the air, Vagenas points to his own work in Arizona. The 1996 Arizona initiative proposed not only allowing the medical use of marijuana, but also a sentence of treatment rather than prison for all non-violent drug users.

After it passed, the Arizona legislature voided it. Placed back on the ballot in 1998, along with a measure to prevent future legislative interference, the law passed again. A recent report found Arizona's "treatment, not punishment" approach to be more cost-effective than prison.

Vagenas also sees evidence for his position in a 1998 ballot initiative in Oregon in which voters supported keeping marijuana possession for personal, recreational use decriminalized, rather than increasing penalties from fines to prison terms. It passed by a 2/3 margin. And in the 2000 elections, he says 4-5 other states will vote on ballot initiatives based on the Arizona model.

All three policy experts note that the media have lately become more skeptical about the drug war. Geraldo Rivera, Bill Moyers, and Walter Cronkite have each produced recent documentaries critical of current policy.

That's a far cry from 1990 -- when the majority of a group of major media figures meeting about the drug war agreed that they had to take a strong stand against drugs and in favor of harsh policies because "this is not a normal story," as one editor put it.

"It's basically a much more balanced approach," said Vagenas, of present coverage, "It's not just the drug warriors that the media speaks with, it's portrayed as a much more complex issue. The cornerstones of the drug war -- 'Do drugs, Do time,' and 'Demonize marijuana,' -- are falling.

No, marijuana is not demonic, it can be medicine and treatment is better than incarceration -- the pillars are tumbling." When the study of Arizona's approach showed that it worked, the New York Times and other major papers editorialized in favor of treatment rather than prison for drug users.

BUT DESPITE EVIDENCE of falling public support, marijuana arrests are at an all-time high. Since President Clinton took office there has been a 60% increase in pot possession arrests and in 1995, the latest year for which figures are available, 600,000 people were charged with marijuana offenses. 84% of these charges were for possession for personal use.

Total drug arrests in 1995 were 1.5 million. NORML estimates that $7-10 billion of the total $31 plus billion spent by federal and state governments to fight drugs is spent on marijuana.

While much of the increase in arrests may be a side effect of policing plans like that of New York's Mayor Giuliani, which target petty crimes as a way of improving neighborhood life and catching larger criminals, rather than a deliberate effort to target marijuana users, there are certainly targeted attacks as well.

One example: the recent Congressional decision to bar student loans from even those with minor pot possession offenses (but, oddly, not rapists or murderers!). Which raises some key questions: Why, when even committed drug warriors will admit that pot is less harmful in itself than alcohol, heroin, or cocaine, do politicians who have themselves usually "inhaled" continue to support this crackdown?

More college-age kids smoked pot than voted in the last Presidential election and nearly half of the adult population has at least tried marijuana. American civilization has not collapsed and we are in fact, in a period of remarkable productivity and prosperity.

The real debate can't possibly be over the harm related to pot. If it were, the drug would be decriminalized if not entirely legal. The problem is that drugs -- particularly marijuana -- are a potent symbol of the 60's.

Politicians tend to care more about the symbolism of being seen as "soft on drugs" and possibly associated with "anti-family" leftover hippies than they do about making effective policy. It doesn't matter whether their approach helps or harms, what counts is opposing the hedonistic values of the young baby boomers.

And while public opinion seems to be changing, political leaders have yet to catch on. Kleiman believes there is a small window of time, in the next ten years or so, when change could be possible. Perhaps as the parents of the boomers die out, the "peace, love and drugs" generation will begin to recognize the hypocrisy of trying to imprison their children for the very pleasures they themselves sought.

Perhaps they will get over their amnesia and remember that their own pot-smoking wasn't deadly and didn't turn the vast majority of them into addicts, even when they smoked the high potency stuff.

One area of hope is the debate over lengthy mandatory sentences for drug crimes (including marijuana). From the conservative Center for the Study of Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University to the George Soros-funded liberal Lindesmith Center, everyone agrees that mandatory minimums are ineffective, expensive, and cruel. Unfortunately, no one so far has had the political courage to change them.

As a result of both the 60's symbolism and the associated Political cowardice, Kleiman thinks that the struggle for effective drug policy will be extremely difficult. One crucial problem, he says, is that "the debate is focused on the extremes.

If the alternatives are harsh prohibition or legal RJR Nabisco/Phillip Morris crack, nothing will change. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey and legalizer Ethan Nadelmann are each other's best friend. And both benefit from the current stalemate."

There are few voices crying out for moderate, middle-of-the-road drug policy, according to Kleiman -- and those which do exist are tiny compared to most lobbying organizations and pressure groups. Politicians won't take risky steps like cutting prison sentences for druggies without knowledge of serious public support.

And so, until moderate voices are heard, politicians will continue to believe that no one ever lost an election by being too hard on drugs. Drug policy will be set by people like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who care only about how they look in light of their pasts, not about what works and what their own experience means. And we'll continue to waste millions on "solutions" like loosing new fungi in Florida.

Maia Szalavitz is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Village Voice and other major publications.

Pubdate: August 13, 1999
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