Split Grows Inside Pot’s Grass Roots

AUGUSTA, Maine —  Don Christen passes out pot on the steps of the county courthouse. He holds a rock festival every year called Hempstock. He sows and smokes and sells with such open defiance that, sometimes, he goes to jail.

He is, he says, an activist who answers to a particularly high calling, a man unafraid to publicly pledge allegiance to the drag, to openly exercise an inalienable right to inhale and light.

Now, a well-heeled organization of outsiders from California has come to his icebound environs to liberate Maine’s marijuana laws a little bit. Their November ballot proposal would let people suffering from a narrow range of ailments possess small amounts of pot for therapeutic purposes.

But Christen--a Mainer who speaks in George Carlinesque cadences and sells CDs with such toe-tappers as “Mr. Greenbud” and “Turn On Your Mom”--says he won’t vote for it. In fact, he’s campaigning to kill it.

“This thing coming in here from outta state is not what I would call help. It’s botanically unworkable,” he said. “These outsiders have just come in here with their own agenda.”

Indeed they have. The people who bankrolled the successful medicinal marijuana campaign in California have targeted a half-dozen additional electorates this year. They have learned much over the last two years and are pushing sanitized, highly specific proposals aimed at winning the acceptance of Middle America--or in this case, the outer limits of America--and sending a message to the unyielding anti-drug warriors in Washington, D.C.

In the process, they not only have alienated and angered grass-roots activists such as Christen--who’s pushing his own toke-it-or-leave-it ballot proposal--but also brought a more marketable and well-financed pitch for mellower marijuana rules to provinces used to raggedy and ultimately ill-fated campaigns by uncompromising local pot reformers.

Critics of any sort of liberalization say the straighter image is calculatingly deceptive.

“There’s some common sense things they’ve adopted,” said Nelson Cooney, acting president of the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. “It makes them harder to fight. The compassion argument is very compelling. Nobody wants to look like they’re denying help to cancer patients.”

Using legislation that lets fewer people grow less pot than allowed under California law, the Santa Monica-based Americans for Medical Rights and its local allies last week turned in enough signatures to get on the Alaska ballot this November and likely will accomplish the same thing in Maine in the next two weeks, spokesman David Fratello said.

The group is awaiting final approval in Colorado of petition language aimed at changing the state constitution. It is in the process of drafting petition language in Washington state, Oregon and Nevada. And after forging an uneasy truce with AIDS activists in Washington, D.C.--who had a petition drive of their own and resented any intrusion--AMR expects to launch its effort there soon. It also is weighing whether to pump some cash into a local initiative in Florida.

White House Vows to Fight

The $2-million effort is being run by AMR and financed by currency trader George Soros, Phoenix businessman John Sperling, Ohio insurance company president Peter Lewis and others. They were principal backers of the California initiative, a successful one that followed in Arizona and the broad medicinal drug referendum defeated in Washington state last November.

The Clinton administration has vowed to fight the medicinal marijuana movement any way it can. The federal government recently filed suit against the so-called buyers’ clubs that sprang up to sell marijuana to sick people after the California initiative was approved. Despite that, the clubs are continuing to operate while they await their day in court.

But AMR’s proposals are geared toward making it tougher to do that. Under the Maine proposal, people would be allowed to grow and possess an 1 1/4 ounces of pot under a doctor’s recommendation.

The states that are being targeted this year were selected because AMR polling showed they were eminently winnable, Fratello said. The group was very interested in moving into Arkansas, but Fratello said support for legalizing pot for medicinal purposes there was 55%, a majority not high enough to withstand the inevitable erosion that would be wrought by organized opposition.

Fratello admits that the group was shooting for the symbolism of getting a marijuana law passed in President Clinton’s home state. The whole point of the state referendums is to achieve a sort of critical mass that forces the federal government to stop treating marijuana like a hard drug.

“We’ve been very open that this is part of a national strategy to reclassify marijuana as a medicine,” Fratello said. “If we can demonstrate that medical marijuana is a popular idea, then we’ve shown legislators and executive branch officials that they can do the right thing.”

After this year’s campaigns, AMR expects to come back in the 2000 election year with a new batch of states. “We’re relatively patient,” Fratello said. “We don’t think it will happen overnight.”

In the meantime, the hard-core opponents of any attempt to liberalize marijuana use claim that AMR’s efforts are insidious attempts to incrementally legalize drugs.

And people like Christen say AMR has sold out the cause with its narrow ballot initiatives.

California Law Helped Spawn Maine Proposal

Christen initially tried to lure AMR to Maine by writing a ballot proposal based on the California law, then adding such things as a distribution system run by marijuana advocates.

“We figured the people who backed the California initiative would be happier than hell and come in and back us,” he said. “Lo and behold, they decided they can’t back us, and come in with a restrictive bill that’s totally unworkable in Maine.”

Christen and his group, Maine Vocals, went ahead with their petition drive. Actually, they are promoting two petitions: One that lets people possess unlimited quantities for any affliction that a doctor believes marijuana would help alleviate, and another that simply asks: “Do you want to legalize marijuana?”

Christen said his group has about half as many signatures as it needs, but things do not look good. The deadline is Friday, and the ice storm that paralyzed much of the Northeast has put a chill in canvassing.

And he has hardly rattled the confident AMR side.

“To be attacked by Don Christen is an asset,” Fratello said.

Christen, a 44-year-old unemployed carpenter and grandfather of two, seems hurt by such darts. “The guy doesn’t even know me,” Christen said recently as he sipped coffee in an Augusta restaurant.

What Christen said bothers him is that savvy pols from somewhere else have basically bought his cause and repackaged it in such a way that most believers in marijuana decriminalization can’t benefit. The quantities it allows and the number of diseases it designates make it clear that the law is more symbolic than practical, he says.

“It’s like growing a bunch of tomato plants to get two tomatoes. It’s impossible,” he said. “Anyone who knows anything about cultivation of marijuana knows it’s botanically impossible to do what they’re saying.”

In correspondence early in the petition drive, Christen said, Fratello assured him that the AMR legislation was only a “baby step” toward broader legalization.

“The AMR people believe it should be legal too, but they’re afraid to come out and tell anybody,” Christen said.

“I think I was trying to get him to put aside his agenda,” Fratello said. “We’re trying to win the election.”

Fratello said he personally believes that pot should be legalized, and that others affiliated with AMR do too. “Our constituency is two different people: People who are for legalization and people who are for medicinal use.”

Such gradualism invariably draws fire from the anti-drug absolutists, who say that AMR’s narrowing of its target just proves that it has a broad agenda.

“It’s really interesting to see how this has trickled out of California across the rest of the country,” said Cooney, a former assistant to William J. Bennett when he was director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The decision to narrow the focus of the initiative and shut out the high-profile potheads “is a pragmatic political decision, but what does it say about their ultimate strategy that they were earlier offering these far-reaching ballot issues?”

Past and potential Republican presidential contender Steve Forbes, who has made opposition to medicinal marijuana a pet project, has aired some selected radio spots denouncing such initiatives.

“They’re [AMR] using the ruse of medical marijuana to crack the door open to legalize all drugs,” said Forbes spokesman Bill Dal Col.

Clinton’s anti-drug czar, Barry R. McCaffrey, also opposes the initiatives. His spokesman, Brian Morton, said whether marijuana has medicinal properties “is not something that needs to be decided at the ballot box.”

The initiatives, he said, are fine-tuned to fit the particular political climate of each state and “are all coming out of New York City . . . and they’re all being mostly bankrolled by one man: George Soros.”

Maine Plan Draws Establishment Support

If AMR’s goal was to lure establishment support, it’s working in Maine, where some state lawmakers have endorsed its initiative. State Rep. Elizabeth Mitchell says she supports prescription marijuana for sick people, but not laws allowing leisure-time toking.

Since coming out in favor of the initiative, she’s been a bit chagrined by the way her name has been bandied about by the proponents. “I’m being tied to it more than I expected,” she said. “This is one of my low-priority issues. . . . I just think we have more pressing problems, and this just seems like--hysteria.”

Policy analysts say both sides in the medicinal marijuana debate are guilty of ethical posturing and strategic fact-fudging as they stage noisy skirmishes in the war between the war on drugs and the war on the war on drugs.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA, said both sides are blowing smoke--the drug warriors for refusing to acknowledge evidence that marijuana might have medicinal legitimacy, and the decriminalizers for making a big deal about the medicinal properties of the one illegal drug whose largest following are recreational users.

“People are not fessing up to their real motives,” he said.

Kleiman, who said he’s given 10 interviews about medicinal marijuana in the last two weeks, is annoyed that the issue gets attention, particularly when what he called real developments in drug abuse get little.

“This is an issue of unparalleled triviality,” he said.

It matters to Christen, who wears a white sweatshirt emblazoned with images of marijuana plants over his heart.

Christen said he herniated a disk when lifting a manhole cover while working as a laborer in 1982, and hasn’t really been able to work since. Pot, he said, eases his discomfort.

In 1989, he said, his father told him to stop complaining about the fact that marijuana was illegal and do something about it. So Christen wrote a letter to the local paper advocating legalization, and he hasn’t looked back since.

He’s been busted for trafficking--authorities seized his marijuana and what he described as his gun collection--in 1993. He spent seven months in jail. He spent another three months in jail for passing out marijuana-laced brownies from the steps of the Somerset County Courthouse to whoever said they needed medical attention.

Marijuana Advocacy Takes a Toll

Christen figures that he still owes about $10,000 in back fines and a thousand hours of court-ordered community service. “I’m basically broke,” he said.

He lives in a house in the town of Madison with his nonsmoking (but extremely tolerant) wife, and said he gets by on the $10,000 he makes for staging Hempstock, a rock-and-roll-your-own festival held every summer.

Currently, he’s selling Hempstock CDs and plastic $3 ink pens decoratively filled with marijuana seeds. These pens come with a printed statement attesting to the sterility of the seeds. This is so people who spill legitimately potent marijuana seeds while rolling joints inside their cars can claim: “But officer, those seeds must have fallen from my totally legal sterilized-seed pen!”

But being a marijuana advocate has taken a toll. His sister and brother no longer want anything to do with him. And now a major marijuana movement doesn’t even want him.

“To have our own people doing what they’re doing,” he said sadly. “I’ve been working on this a long time. Where the hell was everybody else back then?”