As California voters prepare to vote on Proposition 19, which would bring a much-needed end to nearly 100 years of failed marijuana prohibition in that state, it's important to pay attention to the arguments that proponents use to persuade the electorate to vote in favor of taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol (T&R). How an issue is framed can make or break it, as seen by efforts to reduce penalties for crack cocaine and peyote.

On August 3, President Obama signed a bill into law that reduced the federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. This was done by reducing the penalty for crack cocaine, not by increasing the penalty for powder cocaine.

Years in the making, this law was signed with barely a whimper from the usual prohibitionists. How can it be that Congress and the president reduced the penalty for crack in 2010, but it's inconceivable that they'd do the same for marijuana in 2010? The answer is that the lobbying campaign to reduce the crack disparity appealed to politicians' core values.

The crack penalty wasn't reduced by analogizing important arguments in the marijuana policy debate, such as "crack is safer than alcohol" or "crack has medicinal value." Rather, because people who have been sentenced to five-year, mandatory-minimum prison sentences for crack are overwhelmingly black, the debate was framed as one of racial justice. Then, once that ball got rolling, others joined in by saying that reducing the crack penalty was about fundamental fairness, e.g., let the punishment fit the crime (which meant reducing the crack-cocaine penalty rather than increasing the powder-cocaine penalty).

Regarding peyote -- a drug that can cause hallucinations far exceeding those of the best marijuana in the world -- Congress and President Clinton enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, which included an amendment that allowed people who have at least 25% Native-American blood to use peyote legally. The peyote amendment passed with a non-controversial, unanimous voice vote on the floor of the U.S. House, and by a vote of 97-3 on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The peyote vote wasn't won by arguing that "peyote is safer than alcohol" or "peyote has medicinal value" either. Rather, the argument was framed as being about religious freedom, as protected by the First Amendment.

And with medical marijuana, we have won and will continue to win our ballot-initiative campaigns not by running TV ads featuring a budding marijuana plant, but rather by featuring patients and family members of patients. This is because the debate isn't about a plant, but about compassion -- compassion for cancer patients, AIDS patients, MS patients, and chronic-pain patients who are being forced to choose between suffering without marijuana or breaking the law with marijuana.

Because no one has succeeded in enacting a T&R law in the history of the world (including in Holland, where wholesale cultivation of marijuana is still illegal), we don't yet know what "frame" we should be using to win the T&R debate.

Because a disproportionate number of the more than 800,000 people who are arrested for marijuana offenses each year are young men of color, it could be that the T&R issue should be framed as one of racial justice. In June, the Drug Policy Alliance released a report showing that in California's 25 largest counties, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at double, triple, or even quadruple the rate of whites.

Or, looking at the success of MPP's marijuana-decriminalization initiative in Massachusetts -- which passed with a stunning 65% of the vote in November 2008 -- it could be that the T&R issue should be framed as being about public safety (letting police focus on violent crimes) or fairness (we shouldn't be saddling young people with lifelong criminal records just for marijuana). Both of these arguments resonated with Massachusetts voters, as exemplified by these two TV ads we ran.

There are also people in our movement who believe we'll win the T&R debate by emphasizing that marijuana is safer than alcohol (which it is), and therefore, adults should be able to choose the safer substance.

And while the financial argument has been gaining a lot of traction since the U.S. began its "Great Recession" two years ago, we won't win the T&R debate solely by framing the issue around saving money on enforcement costs and generating new tax dollars. I got a sense of this when I debated Asa Hutchinson, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, on national TV on March 20, 2009.

In that debate, Hutchinson made an admission that I had never heard before from a leading prohibitionist. He said, "If your motivation is to bring revenue to the government, legalize, regulate it. But if your motivation is to reduce the usage, to save teenage lives, to reduce dependence, to strengthen our culture, then the cost is worth it and the revenue should not be a motivation." In other words, he said that when you're fighting a holy war, the financial cost of the war is irrelevant.

In the months and years ahead, those of us in the marijuana policy reform movement should aim to win the T&R debate by using some combination of the aforementioned five arguments -- racial justice, public safety, fairness, marijuana's relative safety, and the potential to generate tax revenues while reducing costs for law enforcement. As to which of these arguments will prove to be the most salient, perhaps the November 2 election in California will provide guidance.

This op-ed originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

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Peter Shumlin was today declared the official winner of Vermont’s Democratic primary for governor, after state officials completed a recount that showed him beating his closest competitor by 203 votes.

A strong supporter of efforts to decriminalize marijuana possession in Vermont, Shumlin is currently the state’s Senate pro tempore. He’ll be facing Republican Brian Dubie, who opposes decriminalization, in the general election for governor. It isn’t clear yet what role marijuana policy will play in the forthcoming campaign (Dubie has said the big issues are “jobs and the economy”) but this election might prove to be an interesting one to watch for supporters of sensible marijuana policies.

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Two must-read op-eds from last week explain why ending marijuana prohibition is perhaps the only effective way to curtail the ever-increasing violence plaguing Mexico:

In The Washington Post, Hector Aguilar Camín, publisher of the Mexican magazine Nexos, and Jorge G. Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who teaches at New York University, write that California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana for adults, “may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly war on drugs.”

The debate here is not framed in terms of personal drug use but rather whether legalization would do anything to abate Mexico's nightmarish violence and crime. There are reasons to think that it would: The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has said that up to 60 percent of Mexican drug cartels' profits come from marijuana. While some say the real figure is lower, pot is without question a crucial part of their business. Legalization would make a significant chunk of that business vanish. As their immense profits shrank, the drug kingpins would be deprived of the almost unlimited money they now use to fund recruitment, arms purchases and bribes.

In addition, legalizing marijuana would free up both human and financial resources for Mexico to push back against the scourges that are often, if not always correctly, attributed to drug traffickers and that constitute Mexicans' real bane: kidnapping, extortion, vehicle theft, home assaults, highway robbery and gunfights between gangs that leave far too many innocent bystanders dead and wounded. Before Mexico's current war on drugs started, in late 2006, the country's crime rate was low and dropping. Freed from the demands of the war on drugs, Mexico could return its energies to again reducing violent crime.

And in a piece published on FireDogLake and The Huffington Post, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson says U.S. officials need to stop funding Mexico's drug war and instead “welcome the debate on marijuana prohibition,” — something our current drug czar has repeatedly spurned.

America’s policy for almost 70 years has been to keep marijuana—arguably no more harmful than alcohol and used by 15 million Americans every month—confined to the illicit market, meaning we’ve given criminals a virtual monopoly on something that U.S. researcher Jon Gettman estimates is a $36 billion a year industry, greater than corn and wheat combined. We have implemented laws that are not enforceable, which has thereby created a thriving black market. By denying reality and not regulating and taxing marijuana, we are fueling not only this massive illicit economy, but a war that we are clearly losing.

The latest Prop 19 poll shows the initiative ahead 47-43, so its likelihood of passing is still anyone’s guess. But if it does pass, Camín and Castañeda say Prop 19 will “enhance [Mexican President] Calderon’s moral authority in pressing President Obama” and allow the Mexican government “to more actively lobby the U.S. government for wider changes in drug policy.”

All the more reason for Californians to turn out and vote yes on 19 this November.

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Inhaled marijuana can provide relief to patients suffering from chronic nerve pain, and can also help them sleep, according to a Canadian study published last week in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association.

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal gave different types of marijuana to adult volunteers suffering from intractable pain that hadn’t responded to other medications. As described by the New York Times:

Each volunteer was given a titanium pipe to take home along with quarter-teaspoon capsules of cannabis that they were instructed to open, tip in to the bowl of the pipe, light and then inhale, holding the smoke in their lungs for 10 seconds before exhaling.

The cannabis with the highest concentration of THC, 9.4 percent, appeared to deliver a modest reduction in pain: 0.7 point on an 11-point scale, compared with the placebo. There were no significant differences with the lesser concentrations.

According to the findings published in JCMA, patients who used marijuana experienced “significantly reduced average pain scores” and were also able to sleep better and had less anxiety compared with patients who were given placebo.

“Our results support the claim that smoked cannabis reduces pain, improves mood, and helps sleep,” researchers concluded.

Opponents of medical marijuana often claim that medicine cannot be smoked. And while, of course, smoking is not the only (or preferred) method of delivery for medical marijuana patients, this study once again confirms not only that whole-plant marijuana has medical efficacy, but specifically that smoked marijuana does as well.

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For decades, prohibitionists have claimed that marijuana is a “gateway drug” that inevitably leads to use of harder substances like heroin and cocaine — despite the fact that every objective study ever done on the gateway theory has determined that it’s absolute crap.

Last week, researchers at the University of New Hampshire released yet another study discrediting the gateway theory. Their findings, based on survey data from more than 1,200 students in Florida public schools, showed that a person’s likelihood to use harder drugs has more to do with social and environmental factors than whether or not they’ve ever tried marijuana.

"There seems to be this idea that we can prevent later drug problems by making sure kids never smoke pot," lead researcher Dr. Karen Van Gundy, associate professor of sociology at UNH, told CBS News. "But whether marijuana smokers go on to use other illicit drugs depends more on social factors like being exposed to stress and being unemployed - not so much whether they smoked a joint in the eighth grade."

These findings echo virtually every other previous study done on the topic. In 2008, for example, the RAND Corporation found that “[t]he gateway theory has little evidence to support it, despite copious research,” and the federal government’s own Institute of Medicine, in a report commissioned by the drug czar’s office, has declared that “[t]here is no evidence that marijuana serves as a stepping stone [to other drugs] on the basis of its particular physiological effect.”

In a news release last week, the UNH researchers urged American drug policy makers to reconsider current penalties in light of their findings. “Employment in young adulthood can protect people by 'closing' the marijuana gateway, so over-criminalizing youth marijuana use might create more serious problems if it interferes with later employment opportunities,” Van Gundy said.

Of course, no one should expect these findings to have much of an impact on prohibitionists’ rhetoric, since that would require them to acknowledge, well … reality. But it was encouraging to see this study reported in such mainstream news outlets as The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and CBS News. The next time some dishonest prohibitionist tries to call marijuana a gateway drug in print or on the air, any reporter or anchor worth their salt should be able to point out that there isn't any scientific evidence to support the gateway theory. But maybe that’s wishful thinking.

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Earlier this week, Oakland County authorities raided two medical marijuana businesses and several private homes, arresting 15 people and confiscating what was allegedly $750,000 worth of marijuana and equipment. One of the facilities raided, Clinical Relief, is located in Ferndale, Michigan where the City Council voted just two days earlier to lift a moratorium on such businesses.

Now comes news that one of the individuals whose home was raided, 67-year-old Sal Agro, has died of an apparent heart attack. Agro, who recently had hip replacement surgery, and his two sons ran the Clinical Relief facility in Ferndale prior to this week’s raid. Here’s video of Agro recounting the actions of the officers who carried out the raids. According to Agro, the masked officers destroyed portions of his home, pointed a shotgun at his daughter-in-law, and confiscated 20 marijuana plants (he and his wife are each registered patients; under Michigan law, registered patients may possess up to 12 plants each for medical use). Despite all this, Agro claims he was never placed under arrest and was denied any opportunity to view the search warrant until after the raid.

It’s obviously too early to say whether the raid contributed to Agro’s death (though the stress of the raid and arrest of his wife and two children couldn't have helped), but in addition to concerns over how such raids are carried out is the question of why? Michigan voters spoke clearly when 63% – and a majority in every county – approved a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2008. Also, on election day 2008, Ferndale voters approved a local ordinance that would allow medical marijuana dispensing. And as I mentioned earlier, the Ferndale City Council had lifted its moratorium on businesses like Clinical Relief’s. Sheriff Bouchard may have hinted at his long-term goals when he opened a press conference to discuss the raids by saying he and prosecutor Jessica Cooper would use the time to “talk about what we think the legislature needs to do.”

One final wrinkle to the story is whether judges have the ability to deny patients access to physician-recommended medicine during the pendency of their trials. Of those arrested earlier this week, some were arraigned in the 51^st District where they were denied access to medical marijuana by Judge Richard Kuhn, who likened the situation to drunk driving suspects who are not allowed to drink while on bond. Others were arraigned in the nearby 43^rd district where Judge Joseph Longo took no action to deny access to medical marijuana. “They have every right to use whatever medications” their physicians prescribe, Longo told the Detroit Free Press.

I often wonder, would a judge deny access to much more dangerous medications like opioid painkillers to those with prescriptions from their doctors?

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Unofficial vote totals show that marijuana decriminalization supporter Peter Shumlin won the Vermont Democratic primary for governor yesterday by an agonizingly tight margin of fewer than 200 votes. Although votes are in from all 260 precincts, towns and cities have a couple of days to certify official results. Currently president pro tempore of the Vermont state Senate, Shumlin has been a staunch supporter of efforts to remove criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana in Vermont—something MPP has spent years lobbying for.

“Small marijuana offenses, when you’re already on probation, can send you to prison,” Shumlin told the Rutland Herland in June. “That doesn’t seem to me to be the best use of scarce taxpayer dollars.”

While a recount is likely because the final tally was so close, Shumlin’s victory in a five-person primary is yet another example of how candidates can benefit — not suffer — from supporting efforts to reform marijuana laws. Assuming Shumlin is the Democratic candidate, Vermont’s general election will also be of greatest interest to marijuana policy reformers. The Republican candidate for governor, Brian Dubie, is an opponent of decriminalization, and the race is expected to be close.

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MPP executive director Rob Kampia appeared on Fox Business News’s “Freedom Watch” with Judge Andrew Napolitano this weekend to discuss the merits of ending marijuana prohibition in the United States.

Joined by John Stossel, Rob debated pundit S.E. Cupp, who claimed that marijuana policy reformers were “confused” about how to treat marijuana.

“We’re not confused,” Rob responded. “It’s pretty clear that marijuana would actually be better if it was regulated and taxed, rather than keep it in the hands of drug dealers, where it’s untaxed and unsafe. And let’s not joke around here; marijuana is clearly safer than alcohol. So if we’re going to regulate and tax alcohol in our society, we should surely do the same with marijuana.”

You can watch the entire clip below:

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A coroner’s inquest jury ruled this weekend that the fatal shooting of Trevon Cole by a Las Vegas narcotics officer during a botched marijuana raid in June was justified, despite reports of conflicting testimony and contradictory evidence.

Cole, 21, was shot dead in front of his pregnant fiancée after officers raided their Las Vegas home on June 11. He was unarmed. It was later revealed that officers meant to target a different man with the same name, who they claimed was a major marijuana dealer. Officers were serving a search warrant on Cole after allegedly buying 1.8 ounces of marijuana from him over a five-week period.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Detective Bryan Yant, who has been involved in other questionable shootings, testified that he fired the fatal shot after Cole stood up and moved his hands toward the officer “in a shooting motion.”

“Unfortunately he made an aggressive act toward me,” Yant said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “He made me do my job.”

It took the jury only 90 minutes to clear Yant, even though the Review Journal and other sources report that his testimony and that of others were riddled with disturbing inconsistencies, including:

• Only one of the six officers present during the raid heard Yant give verbal orders to Cole. That officer testified that Yant said nothing to Cole about his hands.
• The bullet that killed 300-pound Cole traveled through his cheek and neck in a downward angle, leading the medical examiner to find it “highly unlikely” that Cole stood and stepped toward Yant, as Yant claims.
• Both the medical examiner and homicide detective who investigated the scene believe that Cole was crouched over the toilet when he turned toward Yant.
• Assistant District Attorney Chris Owens said the evidence suggests there was an “accidental discharge” when Yant kicked in the bathroom door. Other officers present heard both a door kick and a gunshot.

Read the full article in the Review Journal for more outrageous details about this weekend’s inquest, including egregious errors Yant made on the affidavit prior to the raid, and other apparent violations of department policy that officers made while executing the raid.

Cole family attorney Andre Lagomarsino called the inquest “a kangaroo court and dog and pony show” and is vowing to file a civil rights lawsuit, as well as a possible racketeering lawsuit, against the Vegas police department. "I think in this case I believe absolutely Detective Yant was held above the law," Lagomarsino told the local ABC affiliate. Phil Smith from the Drug War Chronicle has more details about the possible racketeering case.

Stay tuned for updates.

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The National Black Police Association yesterday became the latest group to endorse California’s Proposition 19, the November ballot measure that would make marijuana legal for adults 21 and older. From the Los Angeles Times:

The National Black Police Assn., which has about 15,000 members, is the second African American organization to back the measure. The California NAACP has also endorsed it, citing the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of African Americans caught with marijuana.

Ron Hampton, the police association’s executive director, said he decided the group should get behind the measure because it would eliminate laws that have a negative impact on the black community.

“It means that we will be locking up less African American men and women and children who are using drugs,” said Hampton, a retired Washington, D.C., police officer with 25 years experience. “We’ve got more people in prison. We’ve got more young people in prison. Blacks go to jail more than whites for doing the same thing.”

Hampton said that the money being spent on the war on drugs could be better spent on education, housing and creating jobs. “It just seemed like to me that we have been distracted in this whole thing,” he said. “We can take that money, and focus and concentrate on things that really make a difference in our community.”

For more, watch LEAP executive director Neill Franklin discuss the endorsement on MSNBC:

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