Gov Hopefuls Back Legal Pot —Then Stop

Legalization of recreational marijuana seems to have become a mainstream position for statewide Democratic office-seekers in Connecticut — but rethinking how we handle heroin and other street drugs still appears too radical in the Nutmeg State, even for progressives.

That shift in views on drug policy became apparent Tuesday night at a debate at Yale among four contenders for statewide office.

Before the question was even posed, two Democrats running for governor and an independent candidate quickly signaled their support for legalizing pot. A Republican gubernatorial candidate, meanwhile, who worried about getting booed off stage, warned about the societal costs of making marijuana widely available.

The debate took place at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall on Tuesday night in front of a room filled with college kids from Yale’s Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), activists from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and sign-waving supporters for the gubernatorial candidates.

The four gubernatorial candidates participating — Dan Drew, the Democratic mayor of Middletown; Jonathan Harris, the Democratic former state commissioner of consumer protection; Prasad Srinivasan, the Republican state representative for Glastonbury; and Micah Welintukonis, an unaffiliated Army veteran from Coventry — each answered five questions over two hours.

The Democrats’ and independent’s stand reflected a Sacred Heart University poll last month showing 70.6 percent of the state’s residents support legalizing recreational marijuana.

But none of the candidates, from either party, was willing to back less popular ideas promoted by drug reformers, like opening safe injection facilities for heroin users or decriminalizing possession of small amounts of cocaine or meth.

The precise reason why those issues are still off-limits became clear when the only candidate heckled at the debate was not the Republican who opposed legalizing pot use, but a Democrat who argued teens have no trouble buying weed illegally in the current system.

Pot To The People

Drew, a self-described progressive, argued that the state should treat cannabis just like alcohol, regulating and taxing its sale. He said that change would lead to a number of benefits, including up to $104 million in state revenue within two years and reduced pressure on local police departments still issuing thousands of citations, despite marijuana’s decriminalization in 2011. Legalization may even help reverse the rising number of deadly opioid overdoses, as happened in Colorado, he argued.

“That has to be changed right away,” Drew said. (A move to legalize recreational use of marijuana failed at the legislature this year.)

Harris, who oversaw the expansion of the state’s medical marijuana program until stepping down from the position this spring, agreed that he’d support a well-crafted bill.

And Welintukonis, a Purple Heart recipient for his service in Afghanistan, said bluntly, ​“If you want to smoke pot at your own home, go ahead. If you want to grow plans at your own house, grow some plants. I don’t really care.”

Amid all the talk of going green, the room sometimes felt like a scene out of a Cheech and Chong movie with a giddy contact high wafting through the audience. When his turn to speak first came around, Welintukonis simply walked off stage. Meandering through the aisles, he pointed out ties and facial hairstyles he liked and other gubernatorial candidates he recognized.

Republican Srinivasan, a doctor who serves as the ranking member on the Assembly’s Public Health Committee, was the one candidate to take a skeptical stance on legalization. ​“A lot of things have to happen before we’re ready to legalize,” he said.

He argued that Colorado’s example proves that a black market will continue to thrive, which could cut into expected revenues. And however big the windfall, legislators in Hartford aren’t ready to spend it appropriately, given the budget deficits they need to shore up, he said.

“The state is addicted to spending,” he said, ​“and here we are talking about adding to that addiction by saying let’s legalize some other thing that is going to be addictive as well.”

Srinivasan also questioned whether technology has advanced enough to test how high smokers are before they got behind the wheel of a car.

In response, Drew pointed out that people are likely driving high now, including teens — a line that earned heckles from the audience.

“All the arguments I hear against legalizing are basically predicated on the notion that because marijuana use is not legal now that nobody’s actually doing it. We hear hypothetical scenarios about all the things that will happen without acknowledging that all of those things are happening right now,” he said. ​“Wouldn’t it be better to control the process?”

But Stay Tough on Heroin

When it came to harder drugs, Srinivasan was even firmer in his opposition.

In his closing remarks, he evoked Zurich’s Platzspitz Park, an oak-filled square, dubbed ​“needle park” by The New York Times, that became a magnet for thousands of heroin users in the early 1990s. A cesspool for the spread of HIV and other diseases, and a hot spot for prostitution, theft and gang violence, Platzspitz was cleared by the city, Srinivasan noted.

Srinivasan didn’t mention what the Swiss government did next. Modifying the hands-off experiment in decriminalization that had gone awry, the country tried out a highly regulated form of legalized drug use. As part of the plan, a small group of long-term heroin users received a daily dose of cheap dope in exchange for participating in a city-sponsored job program.

The controversial policy, which the Swiss public voted to continue in 2008, has capped the number of heroin users in the country and led to robust participation in medication-assisted treatment, experts say.

“We see almost no new heroin users in Switzerland,” Thilo Beck, the chief of psychiatry at Arud Centers for Addiction Medicine, said on Public Radio International last year. ​“Almost 70 percent of heroin addicts in Switzerland are in substitution therapy,” meaning doctor-prescribed methadone or heroin, ​“the highest ratio in the world.”

Those results could be replicated with supervised injection facilities, rooms where medical personnel (armed with the overdose antidote naloxone) monitor heroin users as they shoot up on their own supply. 

Backed by the American Medical Association, the solution has led to fewer overdose deaths, a drop in transmission of infectious disease like HIV and hepatitis C and less public drug use and discarded needles in places like Vancouver. The idea’s now on the table in Seattle, San Francisco and Ithaca, N.Y.

Those ideas probably won’t be happening statewide anytime soon. While Harris said he’d support needle safety initiatives and other ​“alternative programs,” he avoided answering on supervised injection facilities. Likewise, Drew said he didn’t know enough to take a position yet, but said he’d be ​“happy” to learn more.