Flyer on Decriminalizing Marijuana Stirs Race

With a mini-blizzard of phone calls and faxed press releases, the issue of decriminalizing marijuana was injected Monday into the race between Republican Assemblywoman Cathie Wright of Simi Valley and her GOP challenger, Hunt Braly.

And when the smoke had cleared, Braly was denying that he supports decriminalization, Wright’s camp was denying that she planted the allegation and a conservative GOP activist was carefully adding up all the media outlets he’d alerted to the whole imbroglio.

The brouhaha started after a local chapter of the conservative California Republican Assembly held a weekend endorsement meeting, choosing Wright over Braly by a 9 to 0 vote. Wright, seeking her sixth term, faces Braly, chief aide to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), for the GOP nomination on June 5.

During the endorsement meeting, one chapter member, Steve Frank, displayed documents that he maintained showed that Braly, as president of a GOP college-student association, had “distributed literature advocating the legalization of drugs.” That’s a position guaranteed to boil the blood of the average CRA member.

The documents included a flyer purportedly printed by California College Republicans that said the group supported decriminalizing “small quantities of pot by private individuals.” The flyer carried a phone number that Frank said was Braly’s home number when he headed the group in 1980.

Frank, who acknowledged that he is a Wright supporter and “biased” against Braly, said he’d received the documents in the mail from an unknown sender. The marijuana flyer, Frank said, was a “key factor” in the chapter’s endorsement of Wright rather than Braly, who is already regarded by CRA as something less than a true conservative believer.

Frank also said he’d mailed and faxed press releases expressing the CRA chapter’s “shock” at Braly to no fewer than 47 newspapers and radio and television stations in Wright’s far-flung 37th Assembly District.

Braly said he “didn’t recall” the pro-pot flyer or whether his college group ever took a position backing decriminalization. He said the group’s local chapters often printed their own literature, listing his home phone number because the association had no real office.

But he stressed that he personally never supported decriminalization and has never used marijuana or any other illegal drug.

Braly characterized Frank, a Simi Valley public-affairs consultant and former statewide CRA president, as a “fringe, right-wing Republican who sends faxes to people on Sunday afternoons.” Braly added that Frank has written numerous letters praising Wright to local newspapers.

Asked if Wright’s campaign had anything to do with slipping the marijuana flyer to Frank, Wright campaign manager Mark Thompson said, “No. I don’t have any knowledge of that.”

But Thompson hastened to add that Braly “created a lot of enemies in his Republican Party activism.”

“I’ve had countless people offer to bring me information about Hunt activities . . . which I may use later,” he said.

Braly charged that the marijuana flyer was “done to support Cathie and paint aspersions on me.” He also said another Wright supporter recently filed a complaint against him with the state’s political watchdog agency, which the agency has since dismissed.

While Frank stressed the flyer’s importance in his CRA chapter’s endorsement of Wright, chapter Chairwoman Sara Hardman said the main reason was Wright’s “pretty consistent conservative voting record.”