who deserve the best American medical care?”^[1]  Six days before the election, McCaffrey arrived in Los Angeles with a letter signed by three former Presidents saying the initiatives would send “the erroneous message that dangerous and addictive drugs such as heroin, LSD, marijuana and methamphetamine are safe.” Public officials from Washington to Sacramento villified the proponents and issued dark warnings about their hidden agenda.

The electorate turned a deaf ear. They seemed more impressed by the televised images of fellow citizens in pain. In one spot, a California oncologist tells the camera, “I’ve been treating cancer patients with chemotherapy for over 25 years.  But the side effects can be very severe: nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite... There is a medicine that can help.  It’s marijuana.  I’ve seen it work.”  In another commercial, a lady you could meet in the checkout line says, “I’ve been a nurse for over 40 years.  But when my husband, J.J., was dying of cancer I felt helpless.  The nausea from his chemotherapy was so awful, it broke my heart.  So I broke the law and got him marijuana.  It worked.  He could eat.  He had an extra year of life.” Against these earthly tales, the impassioned doomsday warnings of generals and lawyers proved unequal to the occasion.  The two measures won by a wider margin than the President himself in both states: 56 percent in California, and a whopping 2-to-1 majority in Arizona, where they not only voted to unfetter the doctors, but the prisoners as well.  Proposition 200 called for releasing non-violent drug offenders.

The reverberations were tectonic.  Here was a fault-line no one could paper over, and from Washington to Sacramento, agitated congressmen and federal agents began shooting from the hip. The Senate Judiciary Committee called a hearing, the Administration promised to prosecute any doctors foolish enough to even discuss marijuana with a patient, and Dan Lungren, the California Attorney General who led the battle against Prop 215, was apoplectic. “This thing is a disaster.  What’s going to happen? We’re going to have an unprecedented mess.”^[2]