Soft line wins in drug vote

SAN FRANCISCO - A new California plan for the "war on drugs" was among a pack of trailblazing state propositions that won voter approval at the polls.

With counts in most contests across the country completed yesterday, voters surveyed a fresh legal and social landscape, with new state policies set on questions ranging from school vouchers to assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

"Overall the voters chose to take a very moderate, or a kind of conservative, approach to these ballot measures," Dane Waters, president of the Washington, DC-based Initiative and Referendum Institute, said.

"The far reaching ones all went down soundly in defeat.

"The big winners nationally were drug policy reform and funding for public education," Waters said.

"But voters are still being cautious. I don't think any mandates are being set."

In the biggest drug policy switch, California voters approved state Proposition 36 by 60 per cent to 40 per cent, making the state the first to mandate and fund drug addiction treatment and probation instead of prison for an estimated 24,000 non-violent personal users each year.

Opponents of the measure, headed by the state's prison guard union, said the law would, in effect, decriminalise hard drugs.

But proponents say addiction treatment will be a far more effective way of handling the nation's drug problem than incarceration - and will free tens of thousands of jail cells for rapists, murderers and other violent offenders.

Drug policy was also on the ballot in Nevada and Colorado, where voters made their states the latest to join the list of those which have passed measures legalising the personal use of marijuana for medical reasons.

In Alaska, however, a far broader marijuana policy proposal was defeated.

Voters opted almost 2-to-1 to reject an initiative which would have essentially legalised the drug for all adult personal use and regulated it like alcohol.

In an angry reaction to a spate of gun violence which has racked US schools, voters in Oregon and Colorado overwhelmingly approved a measure requiring background checks on all sales at gun shows.

Supporters said the move might have prevented the sale of the guns used in last year's bloody massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School.

Colorado residents were outraged when it was discovered that the two teenage gunmen at Columbine had a friend buy three weapons for them at a show from private dealers who did not have to carry out background checks.

The votes in Colorado and Oregon were seen as a stinging defeat for the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates, who have vowed to fight the new controls.

Meanwhile, Maine voters narrowly rejected a referendum that would have legalised assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

The controversial "Death with Dignity" referendum failed by 52-to-47 with 99 per cent of the vote counted, officials said.

However, supporters from each side refused to concede.

- REUTERS

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