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The Medical Cannabis Victory: A Textbook Case of Organizing and Resistance
October 20, 2009
By Al Giordano
Mondayıs memorandum by the Obama administration that the federal
government will cease wasting law enforcement, prosecutorial (and
correspondingly court) budgets on arresting and raiding medical
marijuana dispensaries and patients came as the next logical step in
what has primarily been a textbook organizing campaign from below.
The history is instructive on how small steps lead to big change, and is
worth study by all who clamor for progress on many fronts: from bringing
about national health care to ending the US embargo of Cuba to
immigration reform to overhauling an entire economic system, to each and
every ³issue² one might advocate.
Much of my work as a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s was in the realm
of reporting on US drug policy and the movements that sought to repeal
or reform it. In that I had a front row seat to the debates and
discussions always passionate, often rancorous between advocates and
organizations that worked to change those laws. There were natural
tensions between, for example, those who saw drug prohibition itself as
the cause of so much harm, violence and injustice and concluded (as I
do) that repeal of prohibitionist laws against all drugs including
those which are addictive or cause clear risks to their users - is a
necessary step for any society that yearns to breathe authentically
free. Others, representative of tens of millions of Americans who use
marijuana recreationally or medically, simply wanted to establish their
own right to do so in peace, without much regard to the related societal
harms on people that were not demographically like them.
Conferences would be held and those matters of philosophy and strategy
would be argued strenuously but meanwhile the drug war marched on as a
literal war with its own armaments, POWs and death toll by the US
government against its own people and against many in other lands.
In the mid-1990s, some forward-thinking advocates of drug policy reform
concluded that the big, central matter whether recreational drugs
should be legalized or not was simply too big and confusing a matter
for so much of the public to tackle all at once. Even the matter of
legalizing relatively harmless marijuana was overwhelming in terms of
public opinion. As the Gallup poll graph above recounts, in 1996 only 25
percent of Americans favored legalizing marijuana, with 73 percent
opposed. Any organizing strategy under such overwhelming negative
numbers that chose polarization over organizing was doomed to fail.
And so some pioneering voices and organizers set about on a path of
incremental change. They chose to hit hard upon a brittle crack in the
drug war artifice: that even if three-quarters of Americans did not then
want cannabis legalized for everyone, a critical mass had grave
misgivings about policies that persecuted people who were ill with
glaucoma, cancer, AIDS, MS and other ailments - and needed the plant as
medicine.
The debates today over health care and other matters seamlessly echo
those that took place among drug policy reform advocates in the mid-90s.
Those who embarked on a strategy of incremental change were often
vilified by natural allies who said that such a step-by-step path did
not move fast or far enough. In some cases, entire organizations were
shattered and splinter groups formed in their place, competing for the
same supporters and funding. We all know how that story goes.
Friendships in that milieu of drug policy reform, too, were lost in the
divisions, egos and hard feelings. There have always been, and perhaps
always will be, those who argue that by urging incremental change a
movement abandons its core principles. But in the end, history moves one
step at a time, and more often than not it is those who walk rather than
sprint that emerge triumphant.
Thirteen years later, those who enacted the incremental strategy have
proved correct, indeed, prophetic. In 1996 over the objections of some
pot legalization groups and individuals citizens in California and
Arizona placed medical marijuana referenda on their state ballots. The
California measure legalizing the possession of up to eight ounces or
18 plants of grass - passed with 56 percent support. In Arizona
thought to be a more ³conservative² state a measure allowing
physicians to prescribe medical marijuana won 65 percent of all votes
(there, the state legislature quickly repealed the new law, so citizens
put it on the ballot again two years later and repeated their victory).
Shifting from mere activism and advocacy to a referendum strategy also
forced significant swathes of drug policy reform movements to enter a
new phase: that of community organizing. Referenda in most states
require the collection of signatures, which means advocates had to get
out of the circle jerk cycle of endless meetings and internal debate and
go out there, door to door, to recruit from the general public. Once
they got the proposed laws on the ballot that meant campaigning for
votes. This marked a paradigm shift in what had been a self-marginalized
reform movement: a wake up call
In 1998, again by pursuing this strategy of community organizing, the
states of Oregon, Washington and Alaska followed suit with similar
measures. Maine followed in 1999. In 2000, Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada
voters did the same. Since then, Montana, New Mexico, Michigan, Rhode
Island and Vermont became medical marijuana states, and Maryland allowed
medical use as a defense in court. Four of those states California,
Colorado, New Mexico and Rhode Island have legalized clinics and
dispensaries where cannabis can be distributed legally to the patients
who need it.
During these years and the battle has been particularly focused in
California the federal administrations of George W. Bush and William
Jefferson Clinton before him disrespected those expressions of
democratic will and sent the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
and federal prosecutors to raid medical marijuana clinics, arrest, fine
and imprison providers and patients alike. And looking up again at that
Gallup graph you can see how during those years public opinion on the
larger question of legalizing marijuana for everybody that wants it has
taken a fast turn toward outright repeal of prohibition.
The community organizing phase that of referenda on the state level
quickly gave birth to a bona fide civil resistance movement: one in
which tens of thousands of Americans openly committed nonviolent civil
disobedience against federal law to implement the new state laws
allowing distribution of medical marijuana to patients. The federal
raids against cannabis dispensaries and patients provoked the public
conscience and demonstrated the fundamental immorality and
ineffectiveness not just of US enforcement against medical marijuana but
also of pot prohibition overall. And public opinion on the wider
question moved markedly toward legalizing marijuana.
In the Western states, according to Gallup, an outright majority of 53
percent of citizens now favor marijuana legalization compared to 46
percent against. Well, that makes perfect sense: that is precisely the
cluster states that led the charge on the smaller matter of medical
marijuana and where community organizing and civil resistance have
garnered the most support and attention: thus, there is a causal effect
of such organizing and resistance on public opinion.
With that shift in public opinion came a leading presidential candidate
in 2007 and 2008 who pledged to end the raids of medical cannabis
dispensaries in states that make them legal, and just ten months after
his inauguration, President Obama has now made good on that promise, one
that wasn't his idea but, rather, of his organizer's ear being able to
hear the din that had been caused by the organizers from below. And with
that paradigm shift in federal policy, expect to see public opinion
continue to break steeply in favor of repealing the prohibition altogether.
The history textbooks will note forevermore, when looking back at how
the United States repealed pot prohibition (something that will likely
now come in most of our lifetimes) that it was the strategy of
incremental change that opened the floodgates to fundamental change. The
same will be said of how the US embargo of Cuba was ended (granting
Cuban-Americans the right to travel there inexorably will extend that
freedom to all US citizens). The same will be written of immigration
policy. And if you can weed through the griping about whether this
yearıs health care reform goes far enough or not I think a similar
path of incremental steps to change will provoke a very similar dynamic
toward wholesale change. Short of revolutions which happen when
incremental change is made impossible by the authoritarian nature of
regimes - that is how change usually happens.
There have been many, many unsung heroes and heroines of these
organizing and resistance battles that in thirteen short years have
changed public opinion on marijuana prohibition often at considerable
risk and sacrifice to their own freedom and safety but a very special
place in history will be reserved for Ethan Nadelmann, today the
director of the Drug Policy Alliance. It is fitting that he is profiled
favorably in the current issue of Newsweek. Back in the early 1990s, it
was Nadelmann who coalesced and gave narrative to the disparate voices
and advocates who sought to launch a strategy of incremental change, and
not only on marijuana policy, but also with ³harm reduction² measures
regarding the problems prohibition has brought to users and to society
when it comes to other drugs.
He and the tens of thousands of Americans that went door to door to put
those referenda on the ballot, and who subsequently risked so much in
their civil resistance to the federal clinic raids, have just stepped
through the threshold of history, and from the momentum of this most
recent triumph will live to struggle and usher in more sweeping changes
to US drug policy as a result. This week's victory now provides a
roadmap for organizers in each of the 50 states to further change policy
by doing so at the state level. (No victory is ever final: It opens the
door to the next.)
But there is also a lesson here for the cynics who, in lieu of
participating in community organizing and civil resistance campaigns,
preferred to talk trash against step-by-step movements for change on any
policy front and pose as somehow more ³radical² or ³pure.² This latest
paradigm shift in US policy did not come about because some marijuana
legalization advocates complained that medical marijuana reform wasnıt
somehow ³enough.² Of course it never was the final policy goal for so
many that did the heavy lifting to make it so. But baby steps have now
made an evolutionary leap forward toward the bigger change. Thus, this
is a good moment to point out that the whining and Chicken Little
tantrums of some others on that front had zero impact on making progress
happen. Their method of complain and bark orders from the sidelines
proved, once again, completely inconsequential and only served as
annoying distraction from those doing the real work and organizing.
It is by winning those step-by-step incremental victories through
proven methods of community organizing and civil resistance - that more
fundamental change is made possible, indeed, likely to come faster than
many dreamed just thirteen years ago. And whether your priorities are in
the realm of drug policy, or health care, or foreign policy or anything
else, there is something vital to be learned from this particular lesson
in civics.
