John Richardson has raised the subject in a mainstream publication: the legalization of pot, and suspects that Obama might be the president to do it.
Why?
How about the $10 to $14 billion in tax revenue legalization of marijuana would provide to government coffers? How about the legalization of pot rising to the top spot for the concerns of Obama supporters in an online poll on change.gov? (Yes, online polls are easily manipulated - but still!) How about the contributions to his campaign from "friends of the legalization movement"?
While Richardson admits Obama's rhetoric on the issue and rumors that he'll appoint "anti-drug warrior" Republican Jim Ramstad as drug czar don't indicate a clear path to legalization, he does quote an interview with Rolling Stone in which he said this:
I believe in shifting the paradigm, shifting the model, so that we focus more on a public-health approach. I can say this as an ex-smoker: We've made enormous progress in making smoking socially unacceptable. You think about auto safety and the huge success we've had in getting people to fasten their seat belts.
The point is that if we're putting more money into education, into treatment, into prevention and reducing the demand side, then the ways that we operate on the criminal side can shift. I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives - it's expensive, it's counterproductive, and it doesn't make sense.
Which bodes well that the Obama administration will make an effort to curb the Drug War and focus on dealing with addiction as a disease rather than a crime.
Personally, I'm indifferent to the legalization movement. While I do favor decriminalizing pot - turning it into, say, a misdemeanor for possessing small amounts - I'm no gung-ho advocate for making the stuff legal. Of course it isn't a problem drug - not on the scale of methamphetemines, say - but...I dunno...what's wrong with making it difficult to get and still socially unacceptable? (Feel free to answer in the comments.)
But here's the thing - the War on Drugs attacks the supply of drugs. Not to mention all the crazy empowerment and money spent on questionable law enforcement practices associated with the War on Drugs. We should be attacking the demand for drugs, eliminating customers through treatment.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday by a California city that asked the justices to overturn a lower court ruling requiring police to return medical marijuana that they seize from a patient.
In the November 2007 ruling, a state appeals court said California's medical marijuana law entitles patients to recover pot wrongfully seized by police.
What's this mean?
"It's now settled that state law enforcement officers cannot arrest medical marijuana patients or seize their medicine simply because they prefer the contrary federal law," said Joseph Elford, chief counsel of the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access and lawyer for the plaintiff in the Garden Grove case.
In short, this should give incoming Attorney General Steve Bullock all the assurance he needs to ensure that police and other law enforcement officials complay with Montana's law allowing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.
I like Dominic Holden's quote from a post relating to this decision:
The very notion of a "Drug Free America" has always been, as some famous dead guy once said, about creating laws in conflict with human nature in order to punish people. Cops now have to capitulate with drug laws they disagree with.
As the campaign manager for Missoula's lowest priority marijuana initiative (and a member of the county's oversight committee for it), I have to comment.
First, I agree completely that a felony burglary and assault are far more serious than growing marijuana, and it will be interesting indeed to compare the respective sentences this man receives. But history offers a safe bet on what will happen.
The crimes that actually threatened another person's life, and that violated the privacy of another person's home, are virtually certain to be treated much more lightly than the drug offense. This relates to one of the rationales for the marijuana initiative - that offenses against people's bodies and their property deserve far more attention than drug possession issues, particularly adult marijuana. The nonsensical drug war gets everything backwards.
The drug charge will likely destroy this man's life, involving a lot of prison time at great taxpayer expense. Even if it didn't, he already has lost all eligibility for any student loans, should he ever want one, and all eligibility for veteran benefits if he's a vet. These are consequences of any drug conviction, no matter how minor the offense (having a single joint, for example), and they never happen to anyone else, not even people who attack others violently, including murderers.
Meanwhile the police also have confiscated this man's property - down to his bike and music player! - and they'll auction it off as a fundraiser for their drug war budget. This, too, never happens to people arrested for anything other than drugs.
One point is that in this day and age it makes no sense to spend taxpayer dollars investigating and arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning people merely for marijuana. People have used marijuana for more than 5,000 years, with no recorded deaths or overdoses in all that time. Meanwhile, a wealth of scientific research conducted over the last several decades confirms marijuana's extraordinary and diverse value as a powerful medicine. Research also has proven that marijuana isn't addictive and isn't a "gateway" to using other drugs. Pretty much everything we've heard from the government's prohibition campaign over several generations now is a lie. Nationally, we spend billions in the drug war, and most of it is focused on marijuana, one of the safest medicines on the planet. And none of that spending over the past 35 years has made a bit of difference in overall rates of drug use.
But it's made a huge and completely negative difference in the lives of millions of Americans and a great many Montanans, all of it at taxpayer expense.
Your post also invites some clarification of the facts about Missoula's lowest priority policy. First, the marijuana initiative is a recommendation, not a requirement. Second, as amended by county commissioners last year, even this recommendation now only applies to misdemeanor offenses, which are those involving less than two ounces. Growing plants in any quantity (even one) remains a felony offense, and even giving a single joint away remains a felony.
The main result - so far - of the lowest priority marijuana policy is that the county attorney no longer prosecutes misdemeanor offenses, and he has called on the county sheriff to stop making misdemeanor arrests. This is important, positive progress.
Those of us on the county's oversight committee hope that another accomplishment in the near future will be the adoption of a more complete and easy to use record-keeping system, so that both the county and its taxpayers can understand more completely where the money is going and what's being accomplished by law enforcement activities.
It's also important to keep in mind that the lowest priority policy doesn't apply to the city of Missoula. Not yet, anyway. Changing the situation, so that adult marijuana offenses are a lowest priority for the city as well, was one of the county oversight committee's most important recommendations a few months ago.
People can learn more at the oversight committee's website, http://www.co.missoula.mt.us/i... and at http://www.responsiblecrimepol...
