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We’ve all heard the rhetoric, trotted out again and again by law enforcement and paranoid city officials, that dispensaries and other marijuana facilities cause crime wherever they are. They focus on a horror story and blame the dispensary regardless of the facts at hand. They point to media coverage of similar incidents and say that all dispensaries are blights on the community.

Now, the media and the authorities are very good at using scare tactics, but what they consistently lack are statistical data to support their claims. This is because there is no such data.

Yesterday, the Denver Post reported that neither Colorado Springs or Denver police could find any data to support a correlation between dispensaries and increases in crime. In fact, such locations were the targets of crime at rates comparable to any other business. Criminal acts in the surrounding areas did not rise when the stores opened.

This is surely disappointing to many prohibitionists, most notably Kevin Sabet, a special advisor to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Over the summer, Sabet was so desperate to prove the negative effects of dispensaries that he started an intensive search for anything that could provide statistical support for the wild claims of law enforcement.

Looks like he came up short.

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Marijuana arrests accounted for more than half of all U.S. drug arrests in 2009, while its use among Americans increased by 8 percent, according to two reports released this week by government officials.

According to the FBI’s 2009 Uniform Crime Report released yesterday, U.S. law enforcement made 858,408 arrests on marijuana charges — 88 percent of which were for possession, not sale or manufacture.  Marijuana arrests peaked in 2007 at more than 872,000, and witnessed a slight dip in 2008 at 847,863.

In 2009, an American was arrested on marijuana charges every 37 seconds.

Meanwhile, an annual report released today by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that 16.7 million Americans had used marijuana in the past month.

“It’s now more obvious than ever that decades of law enforcement efforts have absolutely failed to reduce marijuana’s use or availability, and that it’s simply an exercise in futility to continue arresting hundreds of thousands of Americans for using something that’s safer than alcohol,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. “Rather than criminalize millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens and waste billions of dollars that could be better spent combating violent crime and other real threats to public safety, it’s time we embrace sensible marijuana policies that would regulate marijuana the same way we do alcohol or tobacco.”

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On September 7, a major new front opened up in the campaign for Proposition 19, the ballot measure to tax and regulate marijuana in California. On that day, the California Beer and Beverage Distributors made a $10,000 contribution to a committee opposing Proposition 19.

In response, MPP issued the following statement by Steve Fox, director of government relations for the MPP and co-author of Marijuana is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?:

“Unless the beer distributors in California have suddenly developed a philosophical opposition to the use of intoxicating substances, the motivation behind this contribution is clear,” Fox said. “Plain and simple, the alcohol industry is trying to kill the competition. They know that marijuana is less addictive, less toxic and less likely to be associated with violent behavior than alcohol. So they don’t want adults to have the option of using marijuana legally instead of alcohol. Their mission is to drive people to drink.”

The alcohol industry is now working hand-in-hand with the law enforcement community to keep marijuana illegal. For example, the California Police Chiefs Association has given at least $30,000 to the “No on Proposition 19” campaign, while the California Narcotics Officers’ Association has chipped in $20,500 of its own. This partnership underscores the hypocrisy among law enforcement officials opposed to Prop. 19.

“Members of law enforcement have argued against Proposition 19 by asserting, ‘We have enough problems with alcohol, we don’t need to add another intoxicating substance to the mix,’ implying that marijuana is just as bad as alcohol,” Fox continued. “But the truth is that a legal marijuana market would not add another dangerous intoxicant to the mix; rather it would provide adults with a less harmful legal alternative to alcohol.”

“In their campaign to defeat Proposition 19, members of law enforcement and the alcohol industry have joined together under an umbrella group calling themselves ‘Public Safety First.’ Sadly, by fighting to keep marijuana illegal and steering adults toward alcohol instead, they are putting public safety last,” said Fox.

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Over on our state overview for Missouri, I mentioned the case of Kenneth Wells, a 57 year-old St. Charles man with no criminal record who was facing 5-15 years in prison for felony marijuana cultivation charges. Mr. Wells suffers from chronic seizures and had been using marijuana to treat his symptoms. As his doctor, whose testimony was ruled inadmissible because Missouri has no medical marijuana law, would have said:

"Marijuana is safe and effective in the treatment of seizure disorder as manifest in this case. In patients who have not obtained adequate seizure control with conventional therapy, cannabis offers a rational alternative at least as safe as conventional therapy for intractable chronic epileptic seizures. Mr. Wells has been exposed to multiple medications over the past 26 years to treat his seizures with risks far higher than with cannabis."

The good news is that yesterday, the prosecutor handling the case sent Mr. Wells a letter to notify him that all charges were being dropped. So does this mean that patients in Missour no longer need to worry about being prosecuted for legitimate medical marijuana use? Not exactly.

The bad news is the charges weren’t dropped because the prosecutor suddenly grew a heart. He felt, despite the ruling preventing Wells’ physician from testifying, that it would have been difficult to keep evidence of his condition from the jury, who likely wouldn’t convict once they knew about the seizure disorder. In other words, he was worried that a non-conviction would have “muddied the waters” regarding Missouri’s approach to medical marijuana, which of course is to arrest and convict seriously ill people for using the medicine their doctor recommends.

I mention all this because a bill has been introduced in the Missouri legislature every year for the last four years that could have prevented this unfortunate situation. This year the bill had more sponsors than ever, including a Republican physician, but was once again denied a hearing. While it’s nice that Mr. Wells won’t be convicted, he and his defense attorney spent more than two years contesting these charges before they were eventually dropped. Imagine all the time, money, and hand wringing both he and the state could have saved if Missouri had a more sensible approach to medical marijuana and he hadn’t been arrested in the first place.

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In an unexpected slap in the face to local medical marijuana patients, last week the Rhode Island Health Department announced that it had rejected all 15 applicants to open the state’s first medical marijuana compassion center. Officials were originally supposed to reward the first licenses in June, but postponed after a series of delays. Rhode Island’s law calls for at least one, and up to three compassion centers to provide patients with safe access to their medicine.

So why weren’t any applications accepted? Well, because some had too many pages.

Nine applications fell short of the minimum score in the review process and the rest were disqualified for failing to comply with rules for applying.

The health department received eight formal letters of concern. Some letters questioned why an application exceeded the allowable page limit. Others raised issues about zoning requirements, site control, financing issues and residency requirements.

Locals are justifiably outraged, and organized a rally outside the Health Department yesterday to protest the decision.

“This is just horrible,” JoAnne Leppanen, executive director of the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition, told the Providence Journal. “This is such a disappointment that I cannot even tell you. I feel like the patients’ welfare is being lost in a bureaucratic haze.”

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Last week, a federal judge in Seattle sentenced prominent Canadian marijuana activist Marc Emery to five years in U.S. prison, after Emery pleaded guilty in May to one count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. For years, Emery ran a marijuana seed-selling business, the profits from which he donated almost entirely to marijuana policy reform efforts. For that reason, his prosecution by U.S. law enforcement has been viewed by many as purely political, a charge officials have since denied.

But in 2005, then DEA-head Karen Tandy touted Emery’s arrest as “a significant blow” to the movement to end marijuana prohibition, saying “hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.” Such a statement should provide some insight into why U.S. officials have spent so many resources targeting (even extraditing) Emery over the years.

But of course that's old news, and not surprising. Instead, what really raised some eyebrows was this op-ed written earlier this month by John McKay, the former U.S. attorney who first indicted Emery in 2005. Writing in the Seattle Times, McKay now says that marijuana prohibition is a failure,  is based on “false medical assumptions,” and that a new, science-based approach toward marijuana policy is desperately needed:

As Emery's prosecutor and a former federal law-enforcement official, however, I'm not afraid to say out loud what most of my former colleagues know is true: Our marijuana policy is dangerous and wrong and should be changed through the legislative process to better protect the public safety. [...] We should give serious consideration to heavy regulation and taxation of the marijuana industry.

How's that for evidence of the changing political atmosphere surrounding marijuana policy?

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Federal raids on state-legal medical marijuana entities have continued under the Obama administration, despite repeated assurances that they would end.

But there has been one noticeable difference from how the raids were carried out under the Bush administration: officials are no longer publicizing them. Mike Riggs has the story in the Daily Caller:

[T]he DOJ has demonstrated one marked change now that it’s under Democratic control: The department has stopped publicizing medical marijuana raids, both by requesting that more cases be sealed under court order and by refusing to distribute press releases.

Late last week, DEA and FBI agents raided five medical marijuana dispensaries in Nevada. In July, DEA agents raided the home of 65-year-old Mendocino County, California, grower Joy Greenfield and confiscated plants, money, and her computer. Also in July, DEA agents raided the home of a couple in Michigan who were licensed by the state to use marijuana, as well as three medical marijuana dispensaries in San Diego. In January and  February of this year, the DEA raided two medical marijuana research labs in Colorado.

In all of the above cases, the DEA and the U.S. Attorneys’ offices issued no press releases and held no press conferences. The websites for DEA and the U.S. Attorneys’ offices in Detroit, Denver, Northern California, and Los Angeles (which also handles cases in Nevada) make no mention of the above dispensary raids, but do feature news releases for raids, arrests, and investigations involving harder drugs, as well marijuana trafficking, which is illegal in all states.

[…] But even if there hasn’t been any official change, Garrison Courtney, the head of communications for the DEA from 2005-2009, confirmed that his office regularly publicized dispensary busts. “When I was chief of public affairs, if it was a good case and a good bust, we put it out. There were some of the medical marijuana shops that had a ton of cash, a ton of weed, or a ton of guns, and we put it out. There wasn’t any policy against that.”

And yet, in the case of the Michigan couple, guns were found, but no press release was ever issued by the DEA or the U.S. Attorney.

Courtney added that “if you look at the DEA website, there are a lot of [Bush-era] news releases from San Francisco and Los Angeles. We were pretty aggressive in talking about the different dispensaries and the fact that they were operating in violation of federal law.”

Is this a case of officials trying to cover up their broken promises?

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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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