I simply had to post the following which appeared in the Saturday, June 7 edition of The Orange County Register. A direct link is
HERE.
'Failed war on drugs' spurs presidential bid
O.C. judge wants to carry Libertarian Party banner and seek decriminalization.
By TERI SFORZA
The Orange County Register
The epiphany was trigged by a young thug's war whoop, a triumphant "yee-ha!" as he was led away in handcuffs for a short stint in jail. The punk was 17. Dangerous. Mixed up in drugs, with a nasty habit of robbing prostitutes and roughing them up. Judge James P. Gray was sitting on the Municipal Court bench back then, enforcing a plea bargain that was worked out up the food chain, in Superior Court. The kid would be behind bars for a few weeks. It was nothing. "He had gotten away with it, and he knew it," Gray says. "It was wrong."
Gray got angry. Day after day, the same low-level drug offenders shuffled in and out of his court room. So much money spent on processing them, warehousing them, setting them free and then arresting them again. It wasn't helping anyone, he thought. And it cost so much that there wasn't anything left to really hold the bad ones accountable.
The judge had been a lifelong Republican. A federal prosecutor who sent drug dealers to the slammer. But on a balmy April day 11 years ago, Gray stood on the courthouse steps and made a startling declaration: America has lost the war on drugs. It's time for a new plan of attack: decriminalization.
This invoked a firestorm in Orange County. The sheriff vowed to run him out of office. People wondered what he was smoking. Many of his colleagues disapproved. But Gray remained steadfast in his conviction that the war on drugs is an abysmal failure and is now taking his crusade national.
In February, the lifelong Republican quit the party, re-registered as a Libertarian and is exploring a run for president or Senate. He has spent the past three months traveling across the country - New York, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida - and has emerged as a leading contender for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in 2004.
He could be Orange County's first presidential contender since Richard Nixon.
Gray holds no illusions that he will ever sit behind a desk in the Oval Office. He just wants to legitimize debate about the drug war, focus a national audience on the issue, and force the major parties to deal with it.
"I want the Libertarian Party to make repealing drug prohibition the centerpiece of every state and federal campaign around the country," Gray said. "The bugaboo of all third parties is that so many people agree with their positions, but when it comes time to vote, people don't want to feel like they're throwing their votes away, and they go with the lesser of two evils.
"But if every vote for the Libertarian Party is seen as a vote for change, a vote against drug prohibition, we could win with 10 percent.
"If I can help my country turn away from this hopeless war on drugs, it would be the largest and most lasting gift I could give."
THE STRAIGHT DOPE
Gray has written an entire book on the subject - "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs," published by Temple University Press in 2001. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz is quoted on the back cover ("We can fight drug use and abuse and still explore viable options"). As is Walter Cronkite ("Drives a stake through the heart of the failed War on Drugs and gives us options to hope for in the battles to come").
The signs of failure abound, Gray says. One of every 32 American adults was behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of 2001, according to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice. In federal prisons, more than 60 percent of inmates are there on drug-related crimes. In state and local prisons, drug-related offenders fill up nearly a quarter of the beds, according to the state Department of Corrections.
The war on drugs has resulted in tremendous prison growth, higher taxes, increased crime, loss of civil liberties and a diversion of resources that are needed to address other problems, Gray says. Laws get tougher, punishments get stiffer, but drugs remain in plentiful supply.
His alternative would look something like this: Drugs like marijuana and heroin would be decriminalized and sold at licensed pharmacies for dramatically less than they fetch on the street. They could be taxed to pay for drug treatment and education programs.
The rug would be pulled out from under the druglords, he says. The profit motive would disappear, and with it much of the attendant violence. "This would reduce crime a minimum of 20 percent the first year," Gray says. Many things in our society are dangerous, but making them illegal is not the answer, he says. Tobacco and alcohol are dangerous, but government regulation ensures some control over their sale and use. "We have no controls at all with these illicit substances, because they are controlled by the mob," Gray says. "Have you ever heard of a drug dealer asking for I.D.?"
GRAY FOR PRESIDENT
The Libertarian Party is often the butt of jokes.
"The old one is, a Libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot, or a Democrat who's against taxes," says Mark Selzer, southern vice chairman of the Libertarian Party of California. "We're the un-authoritarian end of any political spectrum. The live-and-let-live end."
The party attracts people who are a little right of right and a little left of left. The editorial board of this newspaper, which has no control over news content, adheres to a Libertarian philosophy of smaller government and personal freedom.
In Orange County, there are 9,320 registered Libertarians - less than 1 percent of registered voters. But in the 2000 election, the Libertarian presidential ticket received 382,892 votes (of 105.4 million cast, or about 3.6 percent). Gray hopes to nearly triple that in 2004.
Even without formally declaring his candidacy- he won't decide until the end of the year - Gray has raced to the front of the presidential pack. His main competition would be Don Gorman, owner of a small chimney sweep business in New Hampshire; and Gary Nolan, a radio talk-show host from California. He's also interested in Barbara Boxer's Senate seat, which he thinks might be a more realistic goal.
"As a former drug warrior judge turned drug reformer, he speaks with an authority on the issue that few can match," writes Ron Crickenberger, political director of the national party in Washington, D.C. "Judge Gray has brought credibility, dignity, and insight to the drug reform movement, and we would heartily welcome him into the race for our nomination."
If the 2004 presidential election is as close as the 2000 presidential election was, "he could be the guy who throws George Bush out of office," Selzer says.
That wouldn't necessarily disappoint the former Republican. "I believe that John Ashcroft (Bush's U.S. Attorney General) and Osama bin Laden, each in their own way, are working together to turn our country into East Germany," Gray says. By greatly expanding surveillance and detaining people indefinitely without charges, "Ashcroft is an extremist who is creating permanent damage to the Constitution."
Libertarians love the sound of that, but some are wary. "I like the man," says Aaron Starr, chairman of the Libertarian Party of California. "But the drug war is one issue, and it's not the only issue we have. I don't want us to be thought of as a single-issue party."
THE MAN
Those who know Gray well don't think the Libertarians will be disappointed.
"I respect him very much for what he's trying to do," says Dale Dykema, a prominent Republican who sits on the board of the Lincoln Club, the local GOP's fund-raising powerhouse. "He has only the best intentions at heart. Jim is not a radical. He's just interested in creating alternative methods of solving the problem."
Gray is a man who plays piano, who breaks into song in his chamber, who wears ties with smiley-faces beneath his somber black robes. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, teaching health and physical education in a tiny Costa Rican village ("I probably set the world record for brushing my teeth in front of elementary school classes"), was a judge advocate and attorney for the Navy in Guam, has scuba-dived to the wreck of a Japanese ship in Micronesia's Truk Lagoon and sat in the seat of a Japanese Zero fighter plane more than 60 feet under water.
He goes river rafting with his two sons (one of them adopted from Vietnam), plays tennis each afternoon during his lunch hour (squaring off with other judges), and is writing a musical called "Americans All" (which celebrates diversity and will be performed at a local high school this fall). Gray brought his new wife to tears when he serenaded her with a ballad he had written especially for their wedding, "It's Been a Long, Long Way to You."
He's the son of the late U.S. District Court Judge William P. Gray, a local legal legend with a hard-nosed reputation for reform. The elder Gray held the sheriff and Board of Supervisors in contempt of court over jail overcrowding and inmates' rights, took a woman to lunch at a men-only club to protest its policies and supported attorneys accused of being communists during the 1950s.
Gray follows in his father's activist footsteps. He set up the Peer Court program in 12 schools, which refers non-violent youthful offenders to a jury of their classmates, who are often far more pointed than any adult could be. He set up one of the first programs to force drunk drivers to get counseling and blood tests as well as jail time. And it was Gray who brokered the landmark $5.2-million settlement between the Catholic Church and a local man who said he was molested by a priest as a teen, ushering in a new era of accountability.
"He was brilliant in what he did," says Kathy Freberg, the attorney who represented Ryan DiMaria against the Diocese of Orange and the Los Angeles Archdiocese. "He called us in and said, 'Before we even talk about money, we're going to talk about policy changes that L.A. and Orange can adopt to prevent molestations in the future.' He said, 'You can make some real change here.'"
In the end, both sides agreed on a new code of conduct for the church, including a toll-free phone number Web site victims can use to report abuse, educational pamphlets and a promise by priests not to abuse.
"He may just be the single most responsible person in Los Angeles and Orange counties in protecting Catholic children from molestations," Freberg says. "It was just so unusual to have a judge that really was insisting on all of us looking at the bigger picture, at the impact we could have beyond the courtroom."
Register staff writers Ronald Campbell, Peter Larsen and Larry Welborn contributed to this report.
