Norm Stamper is to drug reform as Ariel Sharon is to the Middle East Peace Process (and let’s hope) as F.W. de Klerk is to ending Apartheid as Mikhail Gorbachev is to Democracy in the former Soviet Union.

It's always amazing when unlikely people (people in power) embrace challenges to the status quo and—at first, with a few startling statements—slowly gain momentum, get bolder and bolder, until they just go for it, and you can't believe what they're doing.

Former SPD chief Norm Stamper wants to legalize all hard drugs. Former hawk Ariel Sharon quits Likud to run on a peace ticket.

In a bid to consolidate power for the Middle East peace process, former hawk Ariel Sharon has gotten Israeli Dove Shimon Peres to join his new political party, Kadima, whose principle mission seems to be a fair peace accord with the Palestinians.

With Peres joining Sharon's new party, Israeli polls now show Kadima ahead of the traditional parties that dominate the Knesset. For example, the Hawkish Likud Party, Prime Minister Sharon's former party—which he abandoned last week—is running a distant third in the polls with about four months to go before elections.

Starting with his iconoclastic, dramatic (and now successful) move to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, Sharon has been consistently stunning critics and naysayers with his personal progression as an advocate for peace in the Middle East. (When I was in high school, Sharon was the bad guy. Now, Sharon has drawn in peaceniks like Nobel Prize Winner Peres—and seems to be on his way to Time's Man of The Year for 2006.)

Something historical is going on.

As for Norm Stamper. Jesus. Read yesterday's Seattle Times The former SPD Chief is further left on this issue than Seattle's leading drug reform activist Dominic Holden.