[420 Girl]

This fall, Massachusetts voters will have the opportunity to vote for or against Question 2, an initiative that would decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. But in Israel, reforming marijuana laws goes beyond ballot initiatives and is the foundation of the Ale Yarok (Hebrew for "green leaf") party.

Boaz Wachtel, 50, paid the required 13,000 shekels and collected 100 signatures to found the Ale Yarok party in 1999. A former assistant army attache at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., Wachtel earned his master's degree in management and marketing from Maryland University.

In his role as party chairman, Wachtel served as a pioneer in Israeli drug law reform. He helped initiate a medicinal cannabis program and served as a public representative in a Knesset study on the legal status of the herb in Israel.

"A few activists are trying to change Israeli drug laws, which are extremely similar, and identically disastrous as U.S. drug policy," Wachtel said. "We've had some successes and we've had some failures."

Wachtel stepped down as Ale Yarok's leader in 2006 and was replaced by then-27-year-old Ohad Shesm Tov, the youngest chairman of any political party since the establishment of Israel. The party continues to press for drug policy reform in the Jewish State, where penalties are lenient but marijuana is still illegal.

The implications of Ale Yarok's name are clear, though Wachtel said the media has unfairly pigeonholed the party as being strictly pro-marijuana and apathetic to other issues. At the forefront of the topics Ale Yarok concerns itself with, he said, are drug policy reform, civil rights and peace policy reform.

The party has sought representation in the Knesset since their inception. During their first two runs in 1999 and 2003, the group barely missed the 1.5 percent threshold for the Knesset by getting 1 percent of the vote in their first campaign, and 1.2 percent in the next. In 2006, they received 1.3 percent of the vote, but the threshold that year was raised to 2 percent.
With another possible hike of the threshold looming, Wachtel questioned the Knesset's reasoning for constantly raising the requirements for representation. But he remained hopeful for the party's future.

"Israelis are so tired and sick of politics and the politicians that they would vote for something completely new, such as Ale Yarok," he said.

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