Postscript to California’s marijuana vote
From America’s mid-term elections, two noteworthy comparative results. A modestly funded ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in California drew 300,000 more votes than a billionaire businesswoman who spent well over $140 million of her own money to try to become the state’s governor. Both lost.
The hotly debated marijuana ballot measure attracted 3.4 million yes votes. Meg Whitman drew 3.1 million voters. It’s not clear whether she will run again but proponents of the marijuana measure, Proposition 19, are already planning to make another attempt in 2012. They think the California vote shows legalization is a matter of when, not if, never mind that this time they fell more than half a million votes short of success.
Proposition 19 would have allowed Californians over 21 to grow up to 25 square feet (2.3 sq metres) of marijuana and possess up to an ounce for personal consumption. It would have turned California, America’s most populous state, into the world’s first jurisdiction to formally legalize marijuana. (Not even the Netherlands, which has a system best described as schizophrenic pragmatism, has gone that far).
Legalization would have brought California state law in conflict both with federal law and the international treaty that underpins the global war on drugs, the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs. It placed marijuana alongside powerfully addictive drugs such as heroin, a wrong-headed classification which became U.S. federal law in 1970.
Backers of Proposition 19 gave little thought to the international ramifications of the measure, which was closely followed in Latin America and particularly closely in Mexico, where more than 30,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country’s drug cartels in 2006.
Calderon, a vocal critic of the proposition, sent out a Twitter message on election night saying that any changes in policies on “the production, transport and consumption of drugs should be made in an integrated and global framework.” In other words: no country (or state) should go it alone.
Calderon’s tweet echoed the ideas discussed a few days before the mid-term elections at a summit of five Latin American presidents hosted by Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos who wondered “how can I tell a farmer in my country who grows marijuana that I’ll put him in jail when in the richest state of the United States it’s legal to produce, traffic and consume the same product?”
In drug war, the beginning of the end?
Between 1971, when Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and 2008, the latest year for which official figures are available, American law enforcement officials made more than 40 million drug arrests. That number roughly equals the population of California, or of the 33 biggest U.S. cities.
Forty million arrests speak volumes about America’s longest war, which was meant to throttle drug production at home and abroad, cut supplies across the borders, and keep people from using drugs. The marathon effort has boosted the prison industry but failed so obviously to meet its objectives that there is a growing chorus of calls for the legalization of illicit drugs.
In the United States, that brings together odd bedfellows. Libertarians in the tea party movement, for example, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of former police officers, narcotics agents, judges and prosecutors who favor legalizing all drugs, not only marijuana, the world’s most widely-used illicit drug.
In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon has proposed a debate on the legalization of drugs – an implicit admission that the war he launched against his country’s drug cartels in 2006 cannot be won by force alone. (The death toll has just risen above 28,000 and keeps climbing). Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, followed up by declaring that since prohibition strategies had failed, Mexico should consider legalizing “the production, sale and distribution of drugs.”
It’s difficult to see how that could work without parallel moves in the United States, the main market for Mexican drugs, and it’s equally difficult to imagine Congress or state legislatures signing off on the regulated sale of cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine.
But there is growing acceptance that marijuana should be treated differently. Support for less rigid policies spans the political spectrum and has come from unexpected quarters. Sarah Palin, the darling of the American right, recently stepped into the debate on marijuana by describing its use as a “minimal problem” which should not be a priority for law enforcement. That’s a view widely shared. Last year, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by three former Latin American presidents (Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil) published a report that rated the drug war a failure and urged governments to look into “decriminalizing” the possession of marijuana for personal use.
CORRECTION
There can be no doubt that the war against drugs was lost long ago. That point came when the risk to society of making drugs illegal was outweighed by the benefits society would gain by making them legal. Certainly, the risk to society of making drugs illegal in terms of violence, supporting organized crime, costing billions to imprison users and dealers, making criminals out of many ordinary Americans, who did nothing but attempt to enjoy the freedom of using the substance of their choice in situations that presented no risk of harm to others, and the cost of lost productivity from Americans, who cannot find jobs they’re very capable of doing because of a drug conviction is far outweighed by the benefits of legalization, i.e., the tax revenue to be gained by taxing the sales of drugs, the billions saved in freeing up most prison space that could then be used to imprison criminals who commit crimes against the person and/or property of others (these crimes cost Americans a huge sum of money and more with the loss of life, etc.), the production that could be gained from Americans, who lose control of their ability to use drugs reasonably, through rehabilitation and treatment, and regaining the freedom we’ve always claimed to have but hypocritically take away (the legalization of alcohol and tobacco being a good example of this hypocrisy). For me, that should be the end of the discussion based on good, common sense. The conclusion – legalize all drugs.
Drugs, elephants and American prisons
–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–
Are the 305 million people living in the United States the most evil in the world? Is this the reason why the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and an incarceration rate five times as high as the rest of the world?
Or is it a matter of a criminal justice system that has gone dramatically wrong, swamping the prison system with drug offenders?
That rhetorical question, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, fits into what looks like an accelerating shift in public sentiment on the way that a long parade of administrations has been dealing with illegal drugs.
Advocates of drug reform sensed a change in the public mood even before Webb, a Democrat who served as secretary of the Navy under Republican Ronald Reagan, introduced a bill last month to set up a blue-ribbon commission of “the greatest minds” in the country to review the criminal justice system and recommend reforms within 18 months.
No aspect of the system, according to Webb, should escape scrutiny, least of all “the elephant in the bedroom in many discussions … the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200 percent.”
The elephant has ambled out of the bedroom and has become the object of a lively debate on the pros and cons of legalising drugs, particularly marijuana, among pundits on both sides of the political spectrum, on television panels and in mainstream publications from the Wall Street Journal to TIME magazine.
I have several reasons why Marijuana should be legalized, and I will list them along with nay sayers, you decide who’s logic is better.
First and foremost, I want you all to know why Marijuana was criminalized, and how it became public enemy number 1. In 1937 there was a tax act that was introduced and passed which taxed the growers of Marijuana to pay an outlandish tax per gram to grow the crop. This in turn developed into the tax stamp known today. Those whom couldn’t provide a stamp for their marijuana, they were encarcerated. Now think about this for a second. This was the thirties, who smoked pot back then? Minorities, and the U.S. government knew that, and they knew no one could pay a tax on a crop they didn’t grow, thus made them a criminal. Now fast forward, 1972 Richard Nixon declared WAR on DRUGS in America. Is it me, or didn’t he resign from office from accusations of abuse of power? And, we as Americans still placed ourselves behind him in support for it, which leads me to believe we didn’t know what we were supporting at the time.
Now lets take some nay sayers comments toward legalization.
“Marijuana legalization will lead to an increase in pot-smoking among teens and young adults.”
This in fact is a scare tactic, and I almost want to punch whomever says this because it is a backwards point. See what no one wants to see is that it is already prevalent amonge teens, and young adults. They can’t get alcohol without ID, but a drug dealer doesn’t care, he just wants his money. Remove the dealer from the picture, and place the drug in the hands of liquor stores, then you will at least reduce the amount of teens whom have ready access to it at anytime.
“Legalization will send the wrong signal to our children.”
Well this leaves no room for error doesn’t it? What signal does it send to our children? Well first off if parents were more involved with their childrens lives, then whether the drug is illegal or legal wouldn’t make a difference. In fact, if it was legal they would know that the have to be a grown-up to do those things, and if you taught your children right they wouldn’t mess around with it in the first place, even if they did it isn’t going to kill them.
“Pot smoking leads to mental illness”
This has been proven to be false. Pot doesn’t in anyway cause any form of mental illness. If you smoked pot and later found out you were mentally unstable, that is because you were already unstable or had some a preexisting condition you were unaware of. Anyone whom says different either made it up, an idiot splurring lies, or both.
“pot is a risk to public safety.”
Well that is a legitament concern, but one that is clouded in lies. Liquor is dangerous, but the choice to consume it is one that we hold proud in America, but the choice isn’t ours if we want to consume something that wont kill us eventually? Making a drug illegal makes it dangerous. Moreover, it takes the authority away from the police, and places it into the hands of outlaws. Legalizing Marijuana will project some other health concerns, but they are far from the same risks as alcolhol. To me, it’s completely illogical, and unAmerican to keep the prohibition for pot.
So in closing, we are a nation that was founded under priciples of basic freedoms. The choice to smoke pot is a basic priciple of freedom, and one that doesn’t need to be trampled on by people who can’t stay out of other people’s business. If someone wants to responsibly consume it in the privacy of their own home, then we as their neighbors shouldn’t care as long as their right to do so doesn’t infringe on your right to breath clean air.
Lets keep this debate a logical, and reasonable one. I can’t stand it when someone’s only arguement is “drugs are bad mkay.”
Legalize it, tax it, and free it.
Before we can even talk about legalizing marijuana in California and the consequences it may cause, we must first examine the legalization for medical use. We must not forget that California has fought to allow this medicine for medical purposes.
One must realize that the one who needed this drug first is ill patients.
As a Medical Marijuana patient, I believe that we must work together with the Government to control and tax medical marijuana first.