Richard Lee sank $1.4 million of his Oaksterdam business empire's money into putting a marijuana legalization measure on November's ballot, but it wasn't until this week that he rolled out his secret weapon: His 80-year-old, conservative Republican, Texan mom.

Ann Lee arrived in the Bay Area early this week and will remain until Tuesday. At midweek, she was fielding media calls between a video shoot at the Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign headquarters in Oakland and an event at a drug and alcohol recovery center in Concord.

"Whatever I can do to help," she said. "I really don't have words to tell you about how excited I am to be doing this."

The Louisiana native said she caught the political bug with her father's mayoral campaign while she was in high school; she later went to the University of Texas in 1946 and met her future husband there, settled in Houston to raise a family and then got back into politics with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. She was a member of the Harris County Republican Party's executive committee for more than 30 years; she's still a precinct chair.

"I think this is the most exciting, the most meaningful culmination of all my years of political activity," she said Wednesday. "The drug war is so bad, it's the most racist thing we've done since Jim Crow."

That "separate but equal" racial segregation was something she didn't fully understand when growing up, she said, but she came to realize how immoral it was. Now the nation's drug laws have "made felons out of more young blacks that should not be called felons," she said, and she sees her son's ballot measure as a means of "knocking a hole in that horrible drug war" as well as the overall hypocrisy of legalized alcohol but criminalized cannabis.

The Tax Cannabis 2010 measure would let people at least 21 have, grow or transport marijuana for personal use, and would let cities and counties decide whether to regulate and tax commercial production and sale, most likely creating a system of "wet" and "dry" counties as in states with similar alcohol laws. It also would boost the criminal penalty for giving marijuana to a minor, prohibit consumption in public or while minors are present, and maintain existing laws against driving under the influence.

A coalition including the California Police Chiefs Association, the California District Attorneys Association,Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the California Bus Association and anti-drug groups opposes the measure as a threat to public safety through intoxicated driving, and as misleading because it won't solve the state's budget crisis.

But Lee, citing Abraham Lincoln's 1840 statement on alcohol, said prohibition "makes a crime out of things that are not crimes."

She believes she can help the campaign because she's not the stereotypical face of drug-legalization advocacy, given her "conservative Republican heritage of more than 40 years or so."

"There are too many conservative Republicans who have not seen it this way, and I hope to open the eyes of those people, help them think about this issue," she said. "It's not the bugaboo to Republicans that some people feel it is."

She hopes that she and her husband of 59 years — "I think my husband is just as passionate about this as I am, I'm just more apt to show it" — will return to California in August for more campaigning, and she hopes to return in October as well.

Polls show the measure has an uphill battle, but Lee said she's proud of her son's integrity and "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" mentality on pursuing it even when some advocates say the time is not yet right. "I said to him a little while ago, 'It sure is fun being your mom.' "