No on Proposition 5

Proposition 5 follows in the tradition of California ballot measures lined with good intentions and stuffed with disaster. It lures voters with a comforting mirage: a revamped and rational policy for treating drug addiction as an illness and confronting it through rehabilitation instead of punishment. But that's not what it would deliver. If it passes, Californians would soon learn that they had swept away the state's few successful diversion programs, inflicted chaos on the parole system, layered on a staggering new bureaucracy and set back the cause of modernizing drug treatment.

September 26, 2008