Pubdate: Thu, 23 Jan 2014
Source: Anchorage Press (AK)
Copyright: 2014 Anchorage Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.anchoragepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3078
Author: Scott Christiansen

MARIJUANA CAMPAIGN OFF TO SLUGGISH START

Like a stoner having trouble rising from his easy chair, Alaska's
campaign to legalize marijuana is off to a slow start. The
legalization campaign, which calls itself Alaska Campaign to Regulate
Marijuana, has so far reported raising less than $8,000 - nearly all
of it in the form of "in-kind" donations from the national group
Marijuana Policy Project.

The campaigners can expect competition in Alaska, where pot policy has
been voted on four times since 1990. Last week news broke in the
square media that a group called Smart Approaches to Marijuana has
been recruiting Alaskans to launch a campaign against the campaign to
legalize weed, which is on track for the August 2014 primary ballot.

Kevin Sabet, a public policy consultant who has served as a drug
policy advisor to the White House, founded the Smart Approaches group.
The group has so far not returned inquiries from the Anchorage Press
about it's Alaska campaign, but has a brief statement on its web site
that says more information will be coming soon. (! ... )

Big money can be expected on both sides of the campaign, but if the
Alaska experience parallels that of Colorado, where voters legalized
recreational pot in November 2012, most of the money will land in the
hands of the pro-pot campaigners.

About $3.7 million was spent in Colorado on both sides of the
campaign, according a Denver Post article published two weeks before
the vote. The largest of the pro-weed campaign groups in Colorado had
spent $1.6 million, but smaller groups also joined in the campaign. On
the opposition side, a group called Smart Colorado had spent just
$215,000. (Smart Colorado was apparently not affiliated with Smart
Approaches to Marijuana.) The Denver newspaper also looked for money
coming from sources beyond Colorado's borders and found that roughly
89 percent of the legalization campaign's money was from out-of-state,
versus about 51 percent out-of-state money for Smart Colorado.

Leaders of Alaska's Campaign to Regulate Marijuana said this week they
could not predict how much money they will raise and spend. "How much
we need to spend will in large part be determined by how much
opposition we have," said Tim Hinterberger, a spokesman for the
campaign. Hinterberger said he doesn't yet know much about the
competition. "I had a chance to look at their website and that's all I
know. Of course, we think we have the smart answer on marijuana: We
don't think anybody should go to jail for growing or using marijuana,"
Hinterberger said.

Alaska's most recent campaign to legalize marijuana was in 2004, and
that year Marijuana Policy Project poured about $870,0000 into the
state. If that number seems high to readers, it is because Alaska law
allows groups that campaign for ballot questions to accept unlimited
contributions from virtually any source they can find. (And, of
course, schmooze.) That's not the case for individual politicians, who
can only ask a person for $500 a year, or collect $1,000 per year from
a political group. In 2004, marijuana prohibitionists kept weed
illegal - and only spent about $37,000 on their vote no campaign.
Voters in '04 were split by a 56 to 44 percent margin, with the
anti-weed crowd garnering about 35,000 more votes.

David Finkelstein, a Democrat who represented Anchorage in the Alaska
State House in the 1990s, led the 2004 campaign, which was perhaps the
most sophisticated of Alaska's marijuana reform campaigns. "We did
canvassing and polls and TV ads. It was a very big campaign with
offices in more than one place," Finkelstein said.

Finkelstein believes the no votes were reinforced in 2004 when
Anchorage Police broke news of a murder that happened on October 17,
about two weeks before the statewide vote. Colin Roger Cotting, who
was 16 years old at the time, was arrested for the rape and murder of
his stepmother. Police told the media the teenager at first denied
knowing anything about the murder of Carol Cotting, then told
detectives he was too high on marijuana to remember any details of his
crime.

In 2007, Colin Cotting was sentenced to 99 years, after a plea
agreement that stopped his case from going to trial. According to an
Anchorage Daily News report about Cotting's sentencing hearing, the
boy had tested negative for marijuana sometime after his arrest.
Testimony during the sentencing hearing, the Daily News reported,
included experts who talked about the teenager's long history of
psychological troubles, as well as his abuse of inhalants and
marijuana. One expert suggested the boy had slim chances for
rehabilitation.

Finkelstein said news reports of the murder hurt the campaign badly in
the last two weeks, but he is not sure if the campaign to legalize in
2004 would've won. "That story really hurt us, even though his room
was full of empty bottles," Finkelstein said. "I don't think we
would've won, but we definitely would've been a lot closer." 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D