Walters called I-75 the result of “living in the past and ignorance, a wink and a nod, ‘Let’s play dumb’” on marijuana. It’s not the first time Walters has traveled outside the D.C. Beltway and tried to bigfoot a local measure that would soften, however imperceptibly, marijuana laws. He did it last fall in Nevada, and earlier this year officials from his Office of National Drug Control Policy campaigned against a local measure in Missouri. In both cases, he won.

But the Emerald City is harder slogging for the czar than the Silver State.

This week, the measure was winning overwhelmingly before all absentee votes were counted. Surprisingly, Seattle’s media, even the usually pliant television news, largely declined to help Walters make his case to the public. Only KOMO-TV sent a cameraperson to the press conference, but it didn’t air any footage that evening. Other than that, there were only a few print and radio reporters, and their subsequent coverage was hardly the level of drum banging Walters’ visits have generated elsewhere.

But the Seattle media also missed a shift in the pot war. You had to listen hard, but it was there: Deep in his remarks about I-75, Walters made an admission you wouldn’t have heard from federal drug enforcement officials even during the Clinton administration.

“The real issue is should we legalize marijuana,” Walters said. “Let’s have a debate about that.”

Hello,

NORML's founder and director Keith Stroup will be on conservative talk show
host and author Laura Ingram's nationwide Westwood One radio show.

The subject matter this evening is the successful voter-led efforts in
Seattle in 2003 to decriminalize marijuana, with the first step appointing a
commission that will recommend implementation of the voters' will.

Stroup is appearing at 8:00 PM (eastern). Ms. Ingram's show is heard in most
major radio markets.

A man stood in a Seattle park this month in a kind of showdown with the police. Behind him was a crowd celebrating the opening of a new park with a haze of marijuana smoke. In front of him were about 10 cops, who seemed unsure of what they should do next, aside from politely asking the crowd not to smoke pot while the cops were standing there.

But, according to several accounts of the event, a man named Dominic Holden faced the police and spoke passionately about the drug laws in America. He said he respected the Seattle police for arresting serious criminals, but that he asked the police to respect the will of the voters, who had said they wanted marijuana to be the "lowest law enforcement priority."

When he was done, he lit a joint a passed it along.

"I was protesting the fact that marijuana consumption is illegal," Holden said, "and that adults who smoke marijuana are treated as criminals."

But in Seattle, anymore, they aren't.

When Holden lit up his joint, the police politely asked him to leave the park, and issued him a seven-day Park Exclusion Notice. This means he could not re-enter the park for seven days. Holden called it "the wettest noodle in all of SPD's arsenal."

Initiative 75, if you believed those who warned against its passage in 2003, was going to confuse kids, lead to an explosion of marijuana use, and squander taxpayer money on a citizen review board to study the effects of the new law. None of this has happened, even according to Carr, the city attorney, who had warned before the law's passage that I-75 was "wrong for our children and our community."

Marijuana-related case filings by the city attorney's office have dropped sharply since I-75 took effect, from 178 filings in 2003, the year the initiative passed, to 59 filings in 2004. That's a 67 percent reduction in arrests, prosecutions, and jail sentences connected to marijuana use—and a similarly large reduction in the angst felt by local dope smokers, the lives altered by jail time for smoking some pot, and the taxpayer money spent sending stoners through the legal system. (As of this November the number of marijuana-related filings by Carr's office was set to decline again in 2005, with only 35 filings reported in the first 11 months of this year.)

"I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water," Norm Stamper, former chief of police. In a more than 100-page document produced by the King County Bar Association earlier this year, much the same argument is made, albeit with a lot more footnotes and slightly less accessible language than Stamper uses. The dense document, however, may end up being more significant than the editorial by Stamper, or even any of the "demonstration projects" in cities that make marijuana busts a low priority. It is part of a "grass tops" effort to give opinion leaders and policymakers a way of thinking about life after the war on drugs, and the fact that it comes from a deliberative body made up of well-informed lawyers makes it all the more persuasive for the many politicians and civic leaders who already silently doubt the drug war's efficacy.

The report imagines the State of Washington controlling the distribution of currently illegal drugs, with softer drugs like cannabis perhaps being taxed and sold only to citizens who meet certain requirements (old enough, a resident of Washington, not too intoxicated at time of purchase), while harder drugs like heroin and crystal meth might only be given out under medical supervision to addicts involved in treatment. It's hardly the Bacchic free-for-all that backers of the status quo imagine when they talk worriedly about decriminalization. In fact, it could end up, in practice, being far more restrictive than the current drug-control regime. The aim would be to reduce crime by drying up the illegal markets for illicit drugs; improve public health by focusing state efforts on treating, rather than imprisoning, addicts; and protect children better by cutting down on the black-market drugs available to them while also cutting down on the incentive of drug gangs to lure children into black-market drug work.

Washington State law prohibits the possession of marijuana except for certain medical purposes. Hempfest is not one of them. Yet each summer when the event draws thousands to the Seattle waterfront to call for decriminalizing marijuana, participants light up in clear view of police officers. And they rarely get arrested.