A new study released today shows conclusively that in California’s largest cities African-Americans are arrested for marijuana possession at much higher rates that whites. In the 25 cities profiled, African-Americans were arrested at four to 12 times the rate of whites, despite much higher use rates among whites.
This horrifying disparity is one reason Proposition 19 has earned the support of civil rights groups, including the California NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens of California.…
Has it really come to this?
According to today’s Baltimore Sun, a new business in Maryland is offering parents the services of trained, drug-sniffing dogs. Parents who are concerned about their children hiding drugs at home – and apparently unable to have simple, honest and well, healthy conversations with their kids about drugs – can, for “about $200 an hour,” rent specially trained canines to come into their homes and “within seconds, detect even the tiniest whiff of narcotics.”
Gimme a frickin’…
Two days ago, Mexican authorities seized 134 tons of marijuana in Tijuana, just across the border from California. The value of the seizure was estimated at $340 million.
According to the logic of prohibitionist economics, such a huge bust should have quite a damaging effect on the marijuana market in the United States, right?
Wrong. Mexico confiscated more than 1,300 tons of marijuana in 2009 alone, and before that the average was more than 2,000 tons per year. Yet each year, production goes up…
Mothers who support Proposition 19 held a press conference in California yesterday to make the case for regulating marijuana and removing it from an illicit market that makes it readily available to young people. (Video below)
“When I think of what kind of world I’d like my children to grow up in, [I’d like] that they grow up in a world with marijuana being legal and controlled, and not this out of control system that we have today,” said Hannah Liebman Dershowitz, an attorney and mother of two kids,…
Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly bet guest John Stossel $10,000 (to a charity of the winner’s choice) that Proposition 19, the California ballot measure that would make marijuana legal for all adults, will fail. Stossel, who supports Prop 19, said that it’s time to end marijuana prohibition because “it’s a war on our own people.”
“A war on our own people?” asked a bewildered and defiant O’Reilly. “What does that mean? They’re breaking people’s doors down?”
Yes, Mr. O’Reilly,…
About one-third of “unlikely” voters in Oregon said they were more enthusiastic and more likely to vote after learning that a medical marijuana initiative was on their state’s ballot this year, according to a new survey released today by the measure’s campaign. Measure 74 – which has been endorsed by the Oregon state Democratic Party – would add state-licensed dispensaries to Oregon’s existing medical marijuana law.
According to the survey, which polled a random sampling of under-40, Democratic and…
Former U.S. Surgeon General -- and MPP VIP Advisory Board member -- Joycelyn Elders appeared on CNN yesterday to argue against the criminalization of marijuana users. "Marijuana has never caused anybody directly to die," she said. "It's not a toxic substance ... We can use our resources so much better. I think we need to legalize marijuana for adults, and tax it so we can use the money for much better things."
Elders is just one of the countless other esteemed medical, legal, civil rights, law enforcement,…
According to the Associated Press, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter earlier this week to former heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration in which he promised that the Justice Department would continue to enforce federal marijuana laws in California even if the state’s voters approve Proposition 19, which would make marijuana legal for all adults 21 and older and allow localities to tax and regulate marijuana’s sale. In response, Steve Fox, director of government relations for the…
If you believe most headline writers, yesterday the RAND Corporation released a study that said ending marijuana prohibition in California would do little to take away profits from Mexican drug cartels. But if you take the time to actually read the study, you’ll learn that Mexican cartels make billions of dollars from exporting marijuana to the United States (not including profits from the marijuana they grow within our borders), that a statistic originally put forward by the U.S. drug czar’s office…