Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

SEATTLE — Last November, the former chief federal prosecutor from Washington State took the stage before a hall full of cops and tried to persuade the people who enforce the drug laws to change them — specifically, to get aboard what will most likely turn out to the nation’s first successful campaign to legalize marijuana.

The sheriffs and police chiefs listened politely to John McKay, a silver-haired, Jesuit-educated lawyer who had been appointed prosecutor by President George W. Bush. The marijuana laws — “giving us the right to come to your home and take away your personal liberty for something that much of the community thinks is not a crime” — are a travesty, a farce and a crime generator, he said.

Afterward, the cops voted not to support the ideas that became Washington’s Initiative 502, which would legalize recreational use of marijuana for adults. But many officers pulled McKay aside and quietly cheered him on.

“They came up to me and said, ‘We know you’re right — we just can’t say so,’” McKay recalled in an interview this week in Seattle.

Voters in three states — Washington, Oregon and Colorado — will decide on Election Day whether to take marijuana out of the black market shadows and put it under the daylight of state licensing and supervision. Each proposal has problems and pluses. But Washington’s is the one most likely to pass, judging from the polls.



In a twist of time that any aging baby boomer can appreciate, this measure has the full backing of what used to be called the Establishment.

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And if, on Nov. 6, a state finally says no to one of the most counterproductive prohibitions in the nation’s history, it will be because the two sides in this continuing sham of Wile E. Coyote versus Road Runner have essentially switched.

That’s right: those on the front lines of the endless drug war, the police and prosecutors, are now citing futility and common sense on behalf of legalization — at least in this state. And many of those who now profit from the unregulated medical marijuana industry, and the larger, organized crime gangs that control the illegal wholesale scene, are against legalization. The opposition to accessible pot in this state is led by a medical marijuana clinic. Go figure.

Not all cops back legalization, of course. But here in Washington, the former top F.B.I. agent for the region, Charles Mandingo, a 27-year veteran of the drug wars, has come out in favor of legal pot. He cited the racial disparity — that far more blacks are locked up for dope than whites — among many reasons for the evolution of his view.

And the two candidates for sheriff in King County, the state’s most populous, are practically tripping over themselves in their advocacy for doing away with marijuana possession crime.

By contrast, presenting a fine historic irony, the only organized opposition to legalization in this state is coming from longtime marijuana advocates — the “dispensary-quackery complex, which has turned medical marijuana into a money-grubbing sham,” as The News Tribune newspaper of South Puget Sound memorably put it.

These pot retailers, peddling weed under a tolerance policy to anyone with an easy-to-get prescription, are backing the status quo because they make so much money off it. For the same reason, violent gangsters from Mexico to Canada are afraid of what Washington is on the verge of doing.

The dispensaries would have to give up a freewheeling business for a controlled retail environment — licensed, regulated and taxed (at 25 percent) by the state. When California voters faced the same issue two years ago, it was also the drug cartels and the medical pot shops that fought it, and prevailed.

This time, the pillars of the community have the upper hand. McKay, now a law professor at Seattle University, has no love for pot. He knows, and has seen firsthand, how chronic use can have consequences.

“I don’t think smoking marijuana is a good thing,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s a healthy thing. But as the chief federal law enforcement officer in this region I became convinced that our policy on marijuana is just plain wrong.” It’s a waste of young lives, and certainly police resources, to arrest 10,000 people a year in Washington for marijuana, he says. His sentiments are backed by leading newspapers and a number of other prosecutors, ministers and cops.

Under the Washington initiative, anyone over 21 could buy up to an ounce at a time. The proposal would also have a driving-while-stoned provision, with a maximum legal limit for THC in the blood. And, for locovores, it would require that all pot would have to be grown and processed in the state of Washington.

Will it work? The hurdles include the federal government, which still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 illegal drug like heroin and cocaine. They could move against the states.

But that sort of conflict, says McKay, needs to play out for American society to finally move on. In the United States almost 30 million people have used marijuana in the last year. Most of them are not criminals by any stretch, he says. “History has taught us that social change begins with rebellion among the states,” he said. And in this case, when drug warriors switch sides.