Without federal leadership, you can count on marijuana legalization to keep spreading one state at a time.
By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins / OtherWords
How much longer will it take before the United States declares a truce in the Drug War?
This latter-day prohibition is taking an immense toll. And the stakes ought to be low, given that most Americans don’t want anyone jailed for being caught with small amounts of pot.
But it does require some courage to pipe up. So thank you, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, for joining the swelling chorus that wants to see marijuana legalized.
“The distinction between marijuana and alcoholic beverages is really not much of a distinction,” Stevens said during an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon in April.
The retired judge’s words came a few months after President Barack Obama spoke candidly on this matter.
“I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Obama told The New Yorker‘s David Remnick. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
Just as the booze Prohibition failed to bring about the United States of Teetotalers, the War on Drugs hasn’t extinguished demand for marijuana.
The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the drug czar’s digs, is slowly moving from a chronically tough-on-crime approach to a deeper focus on the public health side of the illegal drug challenge. That’s nice, but it’s only taking what StoptheDrugWar.org calls “baby steps in the right direction.”
The good news: The drug czar’s office recently set a five-year goal for reducing deaths from drug overdoses. Its report to Congress called for measures to meet that objective, such as encouraging state laws that grant people who try to prevent those deaths immunity from prosecution.
The bad news: no progress on marijuana legalization.
How is that possible for an administration led by a president who openly admits to having inhaled deeply and repeatedly? Well, many careers are vested in the status quo. Take Corrections Corporation of America, a giant private prison outfit. Can it make a profit on imprisoning just heroin and cocaine dealers, without jailing the pot purveyors too?
Maybe, but the company isn’t eager to find out. And what on Earth would happen to the men and women in the Drug Enforcement Administration if the bud beat were to dry up?
That and congressional deadlock explains why most of our national experiment with withdrawal from prohibition is taking place at the state and local level. A total of 23 states allow the sale and use of medical marijuana.
Colorado and Washington took the next logical step and now let people buy pot for recreational use. Oregon could be next if its voters approve a marijuana ballot initiative on Election Day. The District of Columbia’s government passed a similar measure that House Republicans are trying to block. Obama is threatening to veto the related legislation.
Without federal leadership, you can count on legalization to keep spreading one state at a time and posing daunting logistical challenges. Like how to handle the money.
Federal regulations prohibit banks from trafficking in drug dollars, legal or not. So for now, marijuana dealers must operate on an all-cash basis. All those Benjamins make legal marijuana businesses both crime targets and a growth market for the armored car industry.
Legal pot’s many benefits include a new tax revenue stream. If the government were to stop locking up 750,000 people a year for no good reason it would save money and all those non-violent “offenders” wouldn’t have their lives wrecked. Plus, growers would stop squandering electricity on growing one of America’s top cash crops indoors.
It’s high time this country ended its addiction to the Drug War.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut.
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The war on drugs is surely a war without end, a tactical element of America’s larger policy of perpetual war for perpetual prosperity. National pot legalization may not end that war at all & may just transfer it to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. Meanwhile, as legalized pot becomes more commodified & corporatized, it morphs from simple self-indulgence to organized vice. Organized vice always creates new members of the 1 percent while relentlessly debasing its customer base. Be careful what you wish for.
“The distinction between marijuana and alcoholic beverages is really not much of a distinction,”
I know he was making a different point but that’s hardly the truth. Pot doesnt make you crash your car or want to start a fight with strangers over nothing. Pot is not directly related to the deaths of over 100,000 Americans per year.
But anyway the real reason I’m posting is to point out an unintentional and unfortunate consequence that will result from full-especially on a federal level- legalegalization. The growing and distribution industry, long a way for the common man on the low level of the economic totem pole to make ends meet, will disappear and be replaced by mega corporations like Phillip Morris and partnered with by the tax hungry federal gov’t.
Fact is there’s always been plenty of pot around and the gov’t has never gone after users, except in a few red states. Now for the sake of a few NORML losers who think it’s a great idea to gather in a park and burn one every 20th of April you’ve just handed over billions of dollars to evil corporations, corrupt politicians, and taken it away from yourselves. Good job!
This is the problem with democracy. Most of the electorate does not think these things through with any sense of realism.
Ditto John. As counter intuitive as it may sound, some commodities are best served in a black/grey market, where choice is accessed but not urged.
“and the gov’t has never gone after users”?
You have got to be joking. There are 700,000 arrests each year; and most of those are for simple possession.
New York is a blue state.
Data released in May 2014 from the New York state Division of Criminal Justice Services shows that from January to March, more than 7,000 individuals were arrested in New York City for possessing small amounts of marijuana, and 86 percent of them were black or Latino. That number of arrests puts New York City on track to have just as many low-level marijuana arrests in 2014 as it did in 2013, when nearly 29,000 New Yorkers were busted for low-level marijuana possession.
This argument would have substance if you differentiated between people who were solely investigated and arrested for possession and those who committed other crimes and while arrested for them were found to be in possession. The fact is the vast majority fall into the latter catagory. They’d have to. How do police know you’re a marijuana smoker unless you smoke it in public in front of them? There just is not a big payoff for them locking up anyone for just smoking pot. I know that, they know that, perhaps you need to get up to speed with the rest of us- or stop manipulating statistics to form an argument that is hollow.
You ought to recognize, John, that your own certainty doesn’t help
persuade anyone. You ought to recognizes that your own self has
said, above, that… “the vast majority of (smokers)” are arrested
because they (committed other crimes and while arrested for them
were found to be in possession.” How do you know that? You’re
not offering any stats for that absolute truth of yours and then,
because another poster writes something that offers the numbers
you tell him to “stop manipulating statistics” and that his argument
is hollow?
Lots of hand-waving and blowing hard here, John.
I do believe that to be true and if you’re going to come along and say it’s not true it’s up to you to provide documentation.
It’s freakin common sense Bob! How else did the police know they were in possession of marijuana? Was it pinned to their clothing? Were they carrying it in see through backpacks like children at school? No! It was found on their person when they were arrested for something else.
If you’re just looking for an argument you should choose them more wisely. This is common knowledge.
I apologize for the tone of my previous reply, it seems the situation in NYC is unique and they are arresting people searched under stop and frisk policy for possession. However I maintain that in the remainder of the country in areas with decriminalization and no stop and frisk policy historically the majority of people charged with simple possession had this happen incidental to the investigation or arrest over another matter.
Okay so I looked up that NY arrest issue and its not a drug issue at all its a race issue. NYC has a unique “stop and frisk” policy which sees its officers targeting blacks who are then subsequently and illegally placed under arrest for marijuana possession because they have it on them. Indeed, Brooklyn’s DA refuses to prosecute low level marijuana cases and NY decriminalized marijuana in the 70s.
So its a mystery to me how you could claim the police were going after someone by arresting them for something the DA isnt prosecuting people for. I believe the numbers I saw showed that of all the arrests like a dozen were white people? It’s racist cops. That’s a more important issue anyway.