James Gierach is not a household name. He’s running for governor in the Democratic primary and not even political junkies know him. One forum for gubernatorial candidates forgot to invite him. Some news stories lump him in on the fringe with the LaRouchie candidate, the kiss of death. In a January Tribune voter survey, his support was less than the poll’s 3 percent margin of error.
Gierach wants to bring Illinois’ drug strategy in line with the policies in much of Western Europe. Instead of a “war on drugs,” many governments there focus on reducing the harm from drugs, treating drug use as more of a public health and social problem than an issue of law enforcement. Profits drive the drug trade, Gierach argues, and the war on drugs makes that trade more costly and deadly. If you stop the trade, he contends, you dry up the profits.
He solemnly declares that “we’re not supposed to artificially infuse stimulants and depressants in our bodies. God didn’t make us garbage containers for drugs.” Yet he zestfully consumes caffeine, tobacco, chocolate, and alcohol, the legal drugs of our culture. When asked why some of God’s plants, like the cacao bean and fermented grape, should be acceptable but others, like the coca leaf or marijuana bud, should not, he philosophizes, “We need to learn to live in peace with all of them again. That’s all they are is God’s plants.”
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Gierach had not previously demonstrated a passion for social reform. His interest in politics did start early, by his account. As a grade school student he read somewhere that the most common professions of members of Congress were farming and law. “I said to myself, ‘It would be nice to go to Congress someday,’” he recalled. “‘I’m not going to be a farmer. So I’ll be a lawyer.’ I really decided in grade school to be a lawyer.”
During those years the student movement was erupting. On most campuses there was a growing hip, bohemian culture linked to art and politics. Gierach was not a part of it. “It was fairly early in the Vietnam war, and there were hippies out there in sandals and beards and long hair and a little subculture that was boring to me,” he said. Grateful for his student deferment, he assiduously avoided antiwar protests.
Later Gierach served as Oak Lawn’s village prosecutor for 14 years and simultaneously as prosecutor in the village of Worth for 10. He also maintained a private practice. Provoked by headlines and crime statistics, he dwelled increasingly on drug issues, and when State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley was elected mayor in 1989 Gierach wanted to succeed him and change the office’s priorities.
Yet it was the message–drug policy reform–that motivated Gierach. “It was [also] the crime, the deficits, the prisons, the AIDS, the health care crises,” he said. “It was headline after headline of little kids being shot because they’re selling drugs in the wrong neighborhood. It was guns galore. It was the ridiculous manner in which the state’s attorney’s office was conducting its business [clogging up the courts with drug cases]. It was the ineffective response of Republicans and Democrats.”
