Pubdate: Sun, 06 Apr 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Adam Nagourney

DESPITE SUPPORT IN PARTY, DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS RESIST LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

LOS ANGELES - California voters strongly favor legalizing marijuana.
The state Democratic Party adopted a platform last month urging
California to follow Colorado and Washington in ending marijuana
prohibition. The state's lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, has called
for legalizing the drug.

But not Gov. Jerry Brown. "I think we ought to kind of watch and see
how things go in Colorado," Mr. Brown, a Democrat, said curtly when
asked the question as he was presenting his state budget this year.

At a time of rapidly evolving attitudes toward marijuana legalization
- - a slight majority of Americans now support legalizing the drug -
Democratic governors across the country, Mr. Brown among them, find
themselves uncomfortably at odds with their own base.

Even with Democrats and younger voters leading the wave of the
pro-legalization shift, these governors are standing back, supporting
much more limited medical-marijuana proposals or invoking the kind of
law-and-order and public-health arguments more commonly heard from
Republicans. While 17 more states - most of them leaning Democratic -
have seen bills introduced this year to follow Colorado and Washington
in approving recreational marijuana, no sitting governor or member of
the Senate has offered a full-out endorsement of legalization. Only
Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat in Vermont, which is struggling with a
heroin problem, said he was open to the idea.

"Quite frankly, I don't think we are ready, or want to go down that
road," Dannel P. Malloy, the Democratic governor of Connecticut, which
has legalized medical marijuana and decriminalized possession of small
amounts of marijuana, said in an interview. "Perhaps the best way to
handle this is to watch those experiments that are underway. I don't
think it's necessary, and I don't think it's appropriate."

The hesitance expressed by these governors reflects not only governing
concerns but also, several analysts said, a historically rooted
political wariness of being portrayed as soft on crime by Republicans.
In particular, Mr. Brown, who is 75, lived through the culture wars of
the 1960s, when Democrats suffered from being seen as permissive on
issues like this.

"Either they don't care about it as passionately or they feel
embarrassed or vulnerable. They fear the judgment," said Ethan
Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization
that favors decriminalization of marijuana. "The fear of being soft on
drugs, soft on marijuana, soft on crime is woven into the DNA of
American politicians, especially Democrats."

He described that sentiment as, "Do not let yourself be outflanked by
Republicans when it comes to being tough on crime and tough on drugs.
You will lose."

In Washington and Colorado, the Democratic governors had opposed
legalization from the start, though each made clear that he would
follow voters' wishes in setting up the first legal
recreational-marijuana marketplaces in the nation. "If it was up to
me, being in the middle of it, and having read all this research and
having some concern, I'd tell people just to exercise caution," Gov.
John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado said in a recent interview.

In Colorado, where recreational marijuana went on sale Jan. 1, revenue
figures released in February suggested that taxes on drug sales could
bring in more than $100 million a year for the state, a figure that
made other states take note.

Washington has yet to let its first marijuana stores open - that is
expected to happen later this spring - but Gov. Jay Inslee has made
his position clear. "As a grandfather, I have the same concerns every
grandfather has about misuse of any drug, including alcohol and
marijuana," he said in a telephone interview, adding, "All of us want
to see our kids make smart decisions and not allow any drug to become
injurious in our life.

"I recognized the really rational decision that people made that
criminalization efforts were not a successful public policy," Mr.
Inslee continued. "But frankly, I really don't want to send a message
to our kids that this is a route that is without risk."

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has said he would oppose outright
legalization of marijuana but would support legalizing, to some
extent, medical marijuana in the state, and might be open to
decriminalizing the drug.

In New Hampshire, Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, invoked her state's
struggle with heroin abuse in arguing against weakening marijuana
laws. "Legalizing marijuana won't help us address our substance use
challenge," she said in her state of the state address this year.
"Experience and data suggests it will do just the opposite."

Even in California, the first state to legalize medical marijuana and
where marijuana advocates are moving to put a legalization initiative
on the ballot in 2016, Mr. Brown has flashed a yellow light.

"All of a sudden, if there's advertising and legitimacy, how many
people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?"
Mr. Brown said in an interview on "Meet the Press" last month. "The
world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay
alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be
able to put together."

The resistance comes as public opinion on the issue is moving more
rapidly than anyone might have anticipated. Nationally, 51 percent of
adults support legalizing the drug, according to a New York Times/CBS
News poll conducted in February, including 60 percent of Democrats, 54
percent of independents and 72 percent of young adults. Even 44
percent of Tea Party members said they wanted the drug legalized.

In California, 60 percent of likely voters said they supported
marijuana legalization in a poll conducted by the Public Policy
Institute of California last year.

In many ways, the shift in public sentiment toward the legalization of
marijuana tracks the rapid change in views on same-sex marriage, again
led by young adults and Democrats. But there is one key difference:
Many elected Democratic officials have come to support same-sex
marriage, and analysts said Democrats could pay a political cost for
opposing it.

"Very different than gay marriage," Kevin A. Sabet, an opponent of
legalization and a co-founder of Project SAM, Smart Approaches to
Marijuana, said in an email. "People have strong feelings on gay
marriage. It's a civil/human rights/religious issue for both sides.
Not so with pot."

There is no obvious political upside to supporting legalization,
analysts said, and politicians, as a rule, tend to be risk averse.
"You don't hold these positions without having a sense of your own
place in history," said former Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, who
joined Mr. Sabet in founding Project SAM, which strives to reduce
marijuana use by emphasizing health risks. "They can honestly see that
this is not a good move, that it's going to have huge consequences,
not all of which can be foretold."

That said, there is little evidence in most states that a politician
would pay a price for supporting legalization, said Anna Greenberg, a
Democratic pollster. "We've moved into a frame that's not ideological,
" she said. "It's about a system being broken, not working, and that
legalization involves strict regulation that would allow the state to
collect revenues. That makes a lot of sense to the kind of voters that
electeds are most concerned about. If that's the way it's being
discussed, it isn't a liability for a politician."

At this point, the prospects for other elected officials jumping on
the legalization bandwagon is likely to depend on what happens as the
experiments in Washington and Colorado proceed. Among the questions
are whether legalization will lead to more drug abuse by teenagers and
how much it will fatten state tax coffers.

"I don't tell other governors what to do," Mr. Hickenlooper said, "but
when they asked me, I said, 'If I was in your shoes, I would wait a
couple of years and see whether there are unintended consequences,
from what is admittedly a well-intentioned law.'"

Erica Goode contributed reporting from Denver, and Allison Kopicki
from New York.
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