The last post that I, the founder of Warpath Strategies (and I currently do have the name Warpath Strategies LLC registered with the Alabama Secretary of State’s Office giving me the legal right to use that name though at this point I prefer a form of business incorporation other than LLC under the laws of Alabama because professional services businesses incorporated as LLC’s in Alabama do not protect the individual persons within from personal liability and I’d prefer a different form of corporate organization in a different state but right now I do have the right under Alabama law having registered that name to use that name) published on my LinkedIn profile was an article where I basically announced one of our projects with this firm would be to try and get an opiate legalization referendum on the ballot in California in 2016.
After looking through the ballot initiatives in California over the last 20 years, including the last marijuana referendum in 2010, well, if people reading this in Alabama want to know how I could dare make the claim that “California is not as liberal as people think it is” it’s because I’m someone who bothers to know some history of the state and in particular a number of the electoral maps and in any state in the country in our two party system in any issue where it can break down to left and right there will be that continuum within any state and right now in California generally the overall political center is Los Angeles County, of course Los Angeles County politics are permeated by voting along demographic and neighborhood lines but essentially the swing vote in California to a large extent is Los Angeles County in certain neighborhoods and then similar neighborhoods across the state
Case in point going to the 2010 marijuana initiative it failed in an election that generally was very good for Democrats in California, as Jerry Brown was elected to his third term as Governor 28 years after his last one ended (and on that note since 1942 only three Democrats have been elected Governor of California, and only one, Gray Davis, was not a member of Brown’s family and two of the three ran as centrist moderates to the right of the party base on key issues), Gavin Newsome was elected Lt. Governor, Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General, Deborah Bowen was elected Secretary of State, John Chiang was elected State Controller and impressive managed to carry San Diego County which almost always goes Republican, Bill Lockyer was elected State Treasurer, and Dave Jones was elected Insurance Commissioner.
California was generally seen as the one state that bucked the national trend toward the Republican Party in 2010 and to some extent this is true, but much of that has to do with the growing Hispanic vote in the state and how right now affiliation with the Democratic Party, especially among Latinos in Southern California, is on levels equal to those you see in South Texas and has much more to do with the racial politics and divisions especially of metro Los Angeles than with any substantive policy differences.
If you look at those marijuana referendum results you notice something.
The referendum to legalize and tax marijuana won 65% in San Francisco, won in Alameda County, but it actually lost Santa Clara County which is the base of Silicon Valley and more importantly it lost Los Angeles County and Los Angeles County was roughly on par with San Diego County in the vote but notice that, it failed in supposedly liberal (in the eyes of red America) Los Angeles County, but remember Proposition 8, which temporarily outlawed gay marriage in California, also passed in Los Angeles County, and that was during a presidential election year, those numbers for Prop 8 would have been higher had it been on the 2010 ballot, by contrast in 2008 legal marijuana might have just skated through with young voters coming out but then again maybe not.
I think Colorado and its success has moved the center, but especially out west given that it’s mainly western states doing it and when even Alaska has done so, I expect recreational marijuana to pass in the mid-50s and this time it should carry Los Angeles County but again it likely won’t make it to 60% in L.A. County.
When you think of New Democrat policies getting previous business Republicans to vote Democratic, California is basically the epicenter of that and most of the state politically behaves like suburbs in the northern and eastern sections of the country.
An initiative to eliminate the death penalty in California failed in 2012 and I think it goes without saying if there were no African-American voters in Los Angeles County it would have failed there too, but still on this issue where the nos got 70% in San Francisco County they only got 54% in Los Angeles County, and had it not been a presidential election year then it would have been down to the wire in Los Angeles County, which is of course, a third of the population of the entire state.
If you take an issue like say a waiting period for abortion, votes on such an issue were held in both the presidential election year of 2008 and 2006 the differences between metro San Francisco and then Los Angeles County become obvious, and the waiting period performed stronger in presidential 2008 than in state 2006 in an election where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was re-elected in a landslide while in many of the other down ballot races it was far closer than in 2010.
These numbers tell me that if a citizen initiative gets on the ballot to repeal the euthanasia law just passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Brown, the repeal will pass and the repeal will likely pass while carrying Los Angeles County to do so and no matter what provocateurs like to tell people out in red state America that is the political reality of it, if a waiting period can get 46% in Los Angeles County in 2008, then realistically in 2016 because euthanasia is a much trickier issue with many normally pro-choice groups opposing it there’s no question repeal passes in Los Angeles County and probably in the mid-50s and in that case so goes the state, probably statewide it could get to as high as 60%, why Brown didn’t veto this I don’t know, because this is clearly a case of legislators going beyond what the citizens wanted.
Now as for the initiative I want us to do at Warpath Strategies, though I’ll go on the record and say I support repeal of the euthanasia initiative because I believe legalized euthanasia takes us down a dangerous road especially when we live in a country where many people have this utilitarian mindset where they believe that access to health care should be dependent upon “usefulness to society” (in their own minds), and by initiative I am referring to opiate legalization, I think if you do an overall complete legalization it will fail in California, and it will fail in Los Angeles County.
Now I will still fight it to win simply because I know if every person in the country who believes it should be legal were to give us $100 then we’d probably have over a billion in the campaign fund because my educated guess is, ultimately, somewhere in the range of 20-25% of the American public supports a complete end to the drug war and legalization of all drugs and I am probably underestimating that but remember we are in a country of over 300,000,000 but if you look at polling, generally support for legalized marijuana is ahead of other drugs but there isn’t a state in the country except maybe Utah where it’s not at least 10% wanting full repeal and the end of the drug war.
Big corporate interests will not touch such a thing with a ten foot pole except maybe some big donors in areas like the Bay Area in California but from small donors we can raise lots of money and if you consider part of what we’d do at Warpath is in house commercials, I mean everything a PR firm does in house yes from a business standpoint it is in our financial interests to try and get the opiate initiative on the ballot and to be the key drivers of it even if the electoral mechanics do not look that good, and after looking at the 2010 marijuana initiative they don’t.
But on the pessimistic side at least 40% is reasonable, certainly we should carry the counties of San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Marin but what I am talking about is full legalization, essentially setting the regulations on opiates in California to where they were nationwide in the United States of America in 1900 when there were no such regulations and when companies like Bayer sold heroin as cough medicine.
I do think that proposition, being pessimistic gets certainly no less than 35% in California and can probably get into the low 40s but even if we lost the first time we have a chance to shift the debate, and remember marijuana legalization failed in California while it passed in Colorado but the fact is, had you run the referendum in 2010 it probably would have passed in Colorado and I think a lot of that has to do with it being the craft beer capital of the country, that industry and the culture of Colorado naturally attracted in people more likely to vote for such a thing.
You could have held that referendum in 2010 and it might have been down by a few points but it would have passed in Colorado and that’s because Colorado like most Mountain West states, has historically had a libertarian streak to it, almost all their Democrats until recently were of the Mountain West populist variety, statism has never sold in Colorado, and so it’s just a nature feature of the state and I think for example you could get pot legalized say in Montana too.
The same reason why gun control led to a backlash in Colorado is why they passed the marijuana law more strongly it’s the nature of what Colorado is and now that ;egal marijuana has been successful, Colorado was a backwater state for a long enough that you could see a Nevada effect especially when they have in their eyes better weather and a better natural environment and they’ll start rushing to legalize anything they think can pass in a statewide referendum.
But, and one of the things I’m looking at, it’s mainly the concept of us for example legalizing heroin that’s going to draw our no votes and I know this.
Now I, as the CEO of Warpath Strategies, I as a human being support the end of the drug war and setting all federal drug laws in the United States to where they were before the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act, if other states want to do things on their own initiative they can, but for example, the state of Mississippi has made pseudoephedrine a controlled substance where you need a doctor’s prescription.
Knowing that Mississippi has initiative and referendum, no matter what “law enforcement” hollers about meth (which itself in pill form is a prescription drug and not a Schedule I substance) I know that in a state where you can still buy small amounts of codeine legally OTC in cough preparations (certainly could into this decade) we will find enough signatures to get it on the ballot and right now the voters state of Mississippi would very handily vote to put pseudoephedrine back to OTC status if you gave the people a vote on it, probably more than 65% of the state too, it would be a true embarrassment for the drug war pushers, because the having to go to a doctor and get a prescription for it has been a real inconvenience for people.
But I will be clear I am for the end of the drug war and the end of federal laws on the subject, because 100 years of drug prohibition hasn’t stopped anyone from being addicted but it did criminalize people who didn’t need to be and has wasted a lot of taxpayer money in doing so.
Back to the opiate initiative I want us to promote at Warpath Strategies, again, the pessimist in me says we want to shoot for 40% and moving the public debate to where we can get 50% say before 2025.
But if we didn’t go out and legalize heroin but simply made all those one time OTC opiate based cough preparations over the counter again, especially since most Baby Boomers even those who became more conservative remember those times, and say lowered the scheduling on some pain pills, especially since for many chronic pain sufferers it is really a matter of they have to have those pills, there is no question that referendum, a referendum excluding heroin but legalizing your prescription opiates that would carry the day in California and in a majority of states in the country because almost anyone old who has had an injury will vote for legalization there just because drug war efforts have made it harder for them to get what they need to make it through the day.
A referendum limiting to legalizing actual pills and making OTC and then bringing back the old cough preparations, that would pass in California in the mid-50s and can certainly carry Los Angeles County.
The problem is the stigma around heroin.
I am still going for a full bore initiative because I know we can get the signatures to get it on the ballot, know we can raise the money for it, and because it is a discussion we actually need to have especially as we try to win hearts and minds of the increasing numbers of voters in the voter pool born after 1980.
And I do think there is a way, even though electoral mechanics say the best we can probably do on a full bore opiate legalization initiative might be in the high 30s-low 40s, to shift the electorate in the state over a course of a campaign.
After all the Briggs Initiative when it initially came down, even as all the state’s leaders including Ronald Reagan came down against it it began with having more than 60% of support in the state in a climate where similar initiatives were passing by 2/3s margins nationwide in areas with ideological centers similar to California, and especially suburban California.
But of course when that vote came down, because of the phenomenal campaign ran by the No side, the Briggs Initiative failed even in counties like Orange, San Diego, and Riverside.
I think if we gain national traction we will find our hands on a lot of money, and so will the opposition, because it’s an election year and California is an expensive market to run a campaign in anyway, but I do think you can shift the electorate on this issue even in 2016, especially since there is an effort to get recreational marijuana on the ballot (which is the only thing that would make me hesitate I don’t want to generate an anti-drug backlash though actually our presence probably helps the marijuana initiative as many will try and differentiate pot from say heroin) I do think an educational campaign can lead to us narrowly winning victory because again we basically turn it not into say the issue of “junkies wanting a legal high” but we steer the conversation rather to the drug war itself and what the costs have been to America and especially to California which outside of the San Francisco Bay Area still takes an authoritarian law-and-order approach to it, and so basically to win this initiative it can’t just be about the “freedom of people to get high” because honestly, that argument will not sell to voters over a certain age in Southern California, even to many who did drugs themselves as kids.
You have to make it an argument on the drug war itself, you have to make it an argument of, “you disapprove of this behavior” etc, but make it about how much it costs, you also make it a tax argument, you basically have to come up with arguments that appeal to both the political right and political left, it means nothing for us to win in Pelosi’s district (which we will), we have to instead start making roads even into Bakersfield.
The way they won the Briggs Initiative was that they didn’t just use arguments designed to attract the political left, if they had they never would have won Orange County which at that time was ground zero for the far-right of the Republican Party period in American politics.
They won because they attacked from left and right and to win the opiate initiative we will have to do the same and this is the advantage that exists with me coming in to run this campaign and not just because I’ll run multiple approaches but unlike most drug legalization advocates I know how the mind of a conservative voter works, and actually California suburban conservatives are not all that different from the kind you find in Jefferson County, Alabama and the fact that the South became Republican is due in part to how much the suburbs in the South today are like Southern California suburbs circa 1975 in terms of political attitudes.
Basically you have to have a multi-faceted approach and not entertain any delusions of this being anything other than a hard fought race where we are the underdog even if we end up with more money on hand and for us to have any chance to win we basically have to shift the debate the way they did with the Briggs Initiative in 1978, and unlike them we won’t have the advantage of many national politicians coming in to back us.
But we can probably get Ron Paul (maybe not his son as it’s an election year in Kentucky), we can probably get former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, and the argument I’m going to make will be to go into the history of why the first laws against opiates were passed out of racism against Asians to try and suppress especially Chinese-American culture (of course we’re going to have San Francisco anyway but I’m trying to reach out to suburban Southern California moderates because that is the swing vote period in the state) and basically it’s a matter of doing that, and then focusing on the taxes and how much money it costs to fight it, how a better approach to addiction is to treat people with addictions rather than denying anyone a job who fails a drug test and creating a black market for criminals to profit from, we make the correlation between alcohol prohibition, we basically hit on many fronts with different mailers depending on which zip code you are in with a variety of local activists where we have to cover all portions of the ideological spectrum, we have to fight this out in every precinct, but yes I do think it is possible to win an opiate legalization initiative in California in 2016 with the right campaign.
But to get a Yes vote, you have to win the left and then be competitive in the center and even convert some voters on the right but yes we are doing this initiative to win it because we win and it will be the shot heard round the country and the world on drug policy and that’s my ultimate goal because if we lose there will be another initiative, it won’t be the last word, as we will be working to change the national conversation on it.
But even though the electoral mechanics at this point are against us, yes it is possible for us to win the opiate legalization initiative, full bore, in 2016.
We’re simply going to have to work very hard an be on our A game to do so.
But it is a fight that I am ready for and where Warpath Strategies can make the difference.
Warpath Strategies LLC 
