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By Bill Piper
Money spent prosecuting and jailing low-level offenders is money not being spent on drug treatment or education.
It’s been almost four years since Atlanta narcotics officers shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston and planted evidence in a failed attempt to frame her – and her family is just now receiving justice in the form of a $4.9 million settlement. That of course won’t bring Ms. Johnston back. And despite some cosmetic changes to how drug law enforcement works, very little has changed. City officials will continue to pressure police officers to meet informal arrest quotas, police will continue to violently raid the homes of people suspected of only nonviolent offenses, and taxpayers will continue to foot the bill of a failed drug policy. Real reform is needed.
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Newshawk: Published Letters Awards www.mapinc.org/lteaward.htm
LETTER OF THE WEEK
HARPER WANTS MORE CRIMINALS
RE: “Call for prisons clashes with crime stats”, Dave Breakenridge, Aug. 9.
By now, it should be apparent that what the Harperites are doing is
trying to manufacture inmates. They want to impose a U.S.-style,
for-profit prison system onto Canada. This policy has been wildly
successful in the U.S. – what with more inmates than any country in
the history of the world and enormous debts. Meanwhile, a handful of
jailers get rich at taxpayers’ expense. The really scary part is
almost a third of the country is willing to ignore these facts and
allow Harper to blow $10 billion on jails, instead of making $10
billion off of legalized pot.Russell Barth
Federally Licensed Medical Marijuana User
Drug Reform Analyst and Consultant
Educators for Sensible Drug Policy
Pubdate: Tue, 10 Aug 2010
Source: Calgary Sun, The (CN AB)
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By Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen, 17 Virginial Journal of Law and Public Policy 45 (2009)
FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1366422
ABSTRACT: This article presents a critique of marijuana prohibition and suggests some alternative regulatory approaches that would be more productive and consonant with justice. Part I relies on a forty-year empirical record to demonstrate that (1) reliance on a law enforcement approach has aggravated rather than mitigated the risks involved with marijuana use, and (2) criminalization, which results in the arrest of more than 700,000 Americans annually for possession of any amount of marijuana, is an inhumane and destructive response to an act that almost 100 million Americans have committed. Part II assesses the relative merits of several alternative reform policies, including both decriminalization and legalization under a regulatory scheme.
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By Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen, 85 Indiana Law Journal 279 (2010)
FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1366426
ABSTRACT: Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so.
Over 700,000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the one hundred million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession crimes. We put forward two arguments, corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws that both ban marijuana use and punish its users. The first argument opposes criminalization, demonstrating that marijuana use does not constitute the kind of wrongful conduct that is a prerequisite for just punishment. The second argument demonstrates that even in the absence of criminal penalties, prohibition of marijuana use violates a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters – a corollary to Mill’s harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, or, in the non-consequentialist tradition, to the respect for personhood that was well described by the Supreme Court in its recent Lawrence v. Texas opinion. Both arguments are based on principles of justice that are uncontroversial in other contexts.
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Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010
Subject: #447 Who’s The Dope?WHO’S THE DOPE?
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #447 – Thursday, August 19th, 2010
The cities of Denver and Seattle as well as a number of smaller cities
have made use or possession of small amounts of marijuana their lowest
law enforcement priority.This November the second largest city in the heartland may make a
similar decision as the result of the efforts of the Coalition for a
Safer Detroit http://www.saferdetroit.net/Detroit’s alternative newspaper discusses the current status of that
effort below.The statement “And that federal law trumps any state law.” is not
accurate. States are not required to have or enforce laws which match
federal law. If it were otherwise Michigan would not be a medicinal
marijuana state.Since May of 1975 it has been legal for the citizens of Alaska to have
small amounts of marijuana in their own home. The feds have not and
can not do anything about it. See http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/legal/l1970/ravin.htmThe court hearing on the Detroit ballot initiative is scheduled for
August 26 at 2:30 p.m. in the Court Room of Judge Michael Sapala in
the Coleman Young Municipal Center, 2 Woodward Ave, Detroit 48226.Please bookmark this link which will display Michigan’s marijuana
press articles as they are archived by MAP http://www.mapinc.org/find?275**********************************************************************
Pubdate: Wed, 19 Aug 2010
Source: Metro Times (Detroit, MI)
Copyright: 2010 Metro Times, Inc
Contact: [email protected]
Note: By News Hits staff. News Hits is edited by Curt Guyette.
Who’s The Dope?
DETROIT ELECTION COMMISSION SPIKES VOTE ON RECREATIONAL POT REFERENDUM
Attention Detroit voters: You must be idiots.
Granted, that may be a harsh analysis. But, in the light of recent
events, it is a conclusion News Hits has been forced to arrive at.First, the Detroit City Council decides not to place a measure on the
ballot that would let the city’s voters decide whether to place
control of their public schools in the hands of the mayor.Not that we think having Mayor Bingo directing education is a
particularly good idea. He has his hands full as it is. But what we
think really isn’t all that important. What should matter is what a
majority of the city’s residents want.It’s a concept known in some circles as democracy. We hear it worked
for the Greeks back in the day.But no, the people elected by the people of this city apparently have
a fairly dim view of the judgment possessed by those who put them in
office (no small amount of irony in that, eh?) and want to keep them
from making important decisions.Such as whether the mayor should control the public school system. Or,
more recently, whether consenting adults should be able to enjoy a
little marijuana in the privacy of their own homes.In the case of the latter, though, it wasn’t the City Council, but
rather the three-member Detroit Election Commission that decided you
the people couldn’t be trusted to make the sort of informed decision
Californians will be making come November.You might not have heard, but, earlier this year, a group called the
Coalition for a Safer Detroit collected more than 6,000 signatures
from voters who supported placing a measure on the ballot that would
allow people 21 and older to possess no more than an ounce of pot,
which they could enjoy as long as they didn’t use it in public. Those
signatures were submitted to City Clerk Janice Winfrey, who determined
that more than enough of them were valid, qualifying the measure to
appear on the ballot.The final step required the approval of the Election Commission, a
relatively obscure group that includes the very high profile Charles
Pugh, president of the City Council, as one of its members.Last week, the commission voted unanimously to keep the measure off
the ballot. The reason for doing so, they said, was because the
initiative, if passed, would conflict with state law. No less than the
City of Detroit Law Department arrived at that conclusion, and
conveyed its opinion to the commission.News Hits, as you might have guessed, never even came close to getting
into law school, including some of the shadier ones operating in the
Caribbean. But we did watch a lot of Perry Mason in our youth, and,
based on that rock-solid foundation, we feel more than qualified to at
least ask what we believe to be this very pertinent question:What the hell are these people smoking?
The commission’s reasoning, if you can call it that, appears to the
laymen here at the Hits to be patently ridiculous. If you are looking
for precedent (which, as we learned at the Perry Mason School of Law,
is a bona fide legal term) you need search no further than the medical
marijuana ballot measure overwhelmingly approved by the state’s voters
in 2008.According to federal law, any use of the evil cannabis is strictly
prohibited and eminently punishable. And that federal law trumps any
state law. Even so, voters in this state, as well as 13 others, were
able to tell local and state authorities to keep their handcuffs off
people who received the requisite doctor’s authorization to use nurse
Mary Jane whenever the need arose.Of course, the feds could still bust you. (Although, in a fit of
sanity, the Obama administration ordered the DEA to lay off locking up
people in states where medical marijuana has been legalized.)So, if the state can say it is going to pass a measure that
contradicts federal law, why is it the city can’t do the same thing
and say marijuana is legal even though the state still prohibits it?The answer, according to attorney Matt Abel (who, as far as we know,
did actually graduate from a law school and didn’t have to go to the
Caribbean to do it), is that there’s no good reason.Sure, state cops could still bust dope smokers if they wanted to.
Hell, even Detroit cops could under the authority of state law.“The practical effect,” explains Abel, one of the area’s premier
attorneys when it comes to weedy issues, “is that it would be an
advisory measure.”In other words, a way for the people of Detroit to tell the city’s
cops to spend their time pursuing murderers, rapists and home invaders
instead of joint rollers.Abel and his partner in attempted legalization, Tim Beck, both tell
News Hits that they were pretty astonished by the Detroit Election
Commission’s decision.Even more surprising, they say, is the vehemence with which Council
president Pugh vilified the proposed initiative.“He went ballistic,” is the way Abel describes Pugh’s reaction. Beck
says Pugh justified his opposition by claiming the measure would be a
“bad law.”Maybe we missed that part of his resume, but, to the best of our
knowledge, Pugh, like the crew here at News Hits, never quite made it
to law school. We did try to get his side of the story, but a phone
call and e-mail seeking comment were not returned.In the end though, his opinion isn’t going to matter any more than
ours. Immediately after the commission issued its opinion, Abel and
Beck began drafting a legal challenge. As a result, the city must now
go to court and attempt to justify the commission’s actions.It would have been easier – and much less costly – to simply put the
question in front of voters and let them decide in the first place.Perhaps we’re mistaken, and the judge will decide that the commission
acted properly in voting to keep this initiative off the ballot. But
we’re willing to bet an ounce of primo purple kush that, when the
gavel drops, you the people are going to get to decide for yourselves
whether Detroiters should be able to light up without fear of getting
busted by the local cops.And that’s as it should be.
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Taking the Initiative – A Reformer’s Guide to Direct Democracy by Tim
Beck is an excellent guide http://www.drugsense.org/caip#takeFor the latest facts about marijuana please see http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/53
Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides**********************************************************************
Prepared by: Richard Lake, Focus Alert Specialist
www.mapinc.org=.
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Californians will vote this fall on whether to legalize marijuana – and the measure has a real shot at passing
By Ari Berman
In 1996, California became the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for medical use. Now, with a ballot initiative up for a vote in November, it could become the first to ratify an even more striking landmark: the legalization of pot for recreational use. Proposition 19 — the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 — treats pot much like alcohol after the repeal of Prohibition, allowing each city and county to decide whether it wants to approve and tax commercial sales of the drug. And regardless of what local jurisdictions do, any Californian over 21 could possess up to an ounce of marijuana, smoke it in private or at licensed establishments, and grow a small amount for personal consumption. “We’re not requiring anyone to do anything,” says Jim Wheaton, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who drafted the ballot initiative. “We’re just repealing the laws that prevent it.”
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Drug Policy Question of the Week – 8-17-10
As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 8-17-10. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3022
Question of the Week: Is marijuana a gateway to hard drug use?
The hypothesis that marijuana is a “pipeline” to heroin and other drugs is called the “Gateway Theory.” It asserts that marijuana use leads directly to hard drug abuse.
This concept was questioned in the 1999 Institute of Medicine Report, Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base, which stated,
“There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
In 2002, British Home Office Research Study 253 looked at the presumed progression of drug use arrived at the same conclusion,
“there is very little remaining evidence of any causal gateway effect.”
The 2006 study “Predictors of Marijuana Use in Adolescents Before and After Licit Drug Use: Examination of the Gateway Hypothesis,” was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and concluded that
“Evidence supporting ‘causal linkages between stages,’ as specified by the gateway hypothesis, was not obtained.”
Finally, consider numbers from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In 2008, more than 102 million Americans were estimated to have tried marijuana, with 15.2 million of them said to be “past-month” users. There were an estimated 1.8 million “past-month” users of cocaine and 213,000 “past-month” users of heroin. These “past month” cocaine and heroin use numbers are respectively 11.8% and 1.4% of “past month” marijuana users and 1.8% and 0.2% of lifetime marijuana users. If cannabis were a pipeline to hard drugs, wouldn’t these percentages be significantly higher?
These facts and others like them can be found in the Gateway Theory chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.
Questions concerning these or other facts concerning drug policy can be e-mailed to [email protected].
These facts and others like them can be found in the Gateway Theory and Marijuana chapters of Drug War Facts at www.drugwarfacts.org.
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Medical marijuana will be available in Germany soon, with the centre-right coalition preparing to make groundbreaking changes to drug laws, a government health spokeswoman said this week.
