Experts say Americans are calling for drug reform for a number of reasons, ranging from impatience over the amount of money spent locking up nonviolent offenders while not getting them off drugs, to the coming of age of baby boomers, who are more empathetic toward drug users.

"This all comes out of a cultural context where drug use has become more familiar, and where the demonizing rhetoric around it doesn't really work for us," said the Rev. Scott Richardson, who has delivered sermons about the unfairness of the war on drugs at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif.

"People can look at someone like Robert Downey Jr. and realize that this has more to do with an illness than it has to do with crime," he said. "There is compassion for him."

The reason for this compassion, said Richardson and other social observers, is that 12-step programs have become a familiar part of American life, along with therapy and psychology. "The language of therapy and 12-step programs has become part of our popular vernacular," said Jill Stein, a social psychologist who teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles. "We didn't use to talk this way about ourselves."

Drug-reform advocates, who have shown through studies that treatment programs are more effective and cheaper than prison, also have changed public attitudes.

Before any real shift in drug policy can occur, however, advocacy must increase. "We need pressure groups, community groups out there involved with drug treatment," said political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson. "We have to apply resources to this, because that is the way to curtail drug use."

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