alcohol, ballot initiative, CA, California, Prohibition, Prop 19, SAFER, Steve Fox
In the latest development in the quest for justice in Columbia, Missouri, Jonathan Whitworth and family are suing the officers responsible for a botched February SWAT raid that endangered their lives and resulted in the death of one of their dogs.
This story received national attention when a video was released showing the police entering the home in what they call a “dynamic entry” and immediately opening fire, killing one dog and injuring another. After enormous pressure from the media and activist community, the Columbia Police Chief agreed to revise the city’s SWAT guidelines to prevent further incidents.
Unfortunately, the officers involved were never disciplined for their dangerous behavior, and both the chief and police review board found that they had acted appropriately. While this family will have to suffer the lasting pain of losing a pet and the trauma of a violent intrusion in their lives, the paramilitary thugs that terrorized them, over a gram of marijuana and a pipe, suffered no consequences whatsoever.
Let’s hope the judge hearing this case feels differently.
Just in case you haven’t seen the video, this is what the officers are being sued for:
Associated Press, California Beer and Beverage Distributors, CNN, Media, Mike Meno, NPR, Oakland Tribune, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Steve Fox
One of the most encouraging signs of change for the movement to end marijuana prohibition has been the vastly increased level of mainstream media coverage it has received in the last year or so. Last week was no exception. When U.S. officials released new data showing the number of Americans both using and being arrested for marijuana had increased, MPP was there to put those findings in context, and mainstream media outlets all over the world helped to spread our message about the failure of prohibition and the need for a regulated marijuana market.
Here's a look at some highlights:
CNN's "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer:
Mike Meno, a spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, said the survey is more proof that the government's war on marijuana has failed in spite of decades of enforcement efforts and arrests.
"It's time we stop this charade and implement sensible laws that would tax and regulate marijuana the same way we do more harmful — but legal — drugs like alcohol and tobacco," Meno said.
(Note: This article was reprinted in literally hundreds of news outlets, and my quote was included among the AP's top quotations of the day.)
TOVIA SMITH (reporter): But advocates of legalizing marijuana insist the news that marijuana use is up only goes to show that cracking down on users doesn't work.
Mr. MIKE MENO (Marijuana Policy Project): The government's been sending the wrong message to people for decades by classifying marijuana alongside drugs like heroin and LSD. And they should just give it up.
SMITH: That's Mike Meno with the Marijuana Policy Project that supports making pot totally legal, as a ballot question in California this year would do. He says marijuana use isn't increasing because people see it as less harmful but rather because the sale of marijuana is uncontrolled and unregulated.
Mr. MENO: We need to apply the same type of sensible regulations that we do to alcohol and tobacco, two things that you need an ID to buy, that you need to be a licensed vendor to sell. Drug dealers who sell marijuana do not check IDs.
NPR: (again)
"What people are responding to is the realization that the government has been lying for decades and that marijuana is less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco," says Mike Meno, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, which favors legalization.
[...] Polls indicate the [Proposition 19] has roughly a 50-50 chance of passing. Both marijuana advocates and opponents agree that passage would have an enormous impact, with other states likely to follow suit and the drug becoming more readily available to young people.
"If California were to pass Proposition 19, it would be revolutionary," says Meno, the Marijuana Policy Project spokesman. "People would see that the sky doesn't fall, the police will have more resources to fight crimes and there will be more revenues for local budgets."
The other big story last week was how the California Beer and Beverage Distributors were helping to fund the campaign against Prop. 19, which would end marijuana prohibition in California. Steve Fox, MPP's resident alcohol vs. marijuana guru, said the motivation behind the donation was clear -- "the alcohol industry is trying to kill the competition" -- and his comments were picked up by the Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Oakland Tribune, among others.
As more and more mainstream media outlets help to shine a light on the failure of (and motivation behind) marijuana prohibition, it's going to be increasingly difficult for our opposition to continue denying reality and maintain the failed status quo.
Find out how you can help MPP keep up the pressure in the media by visiting here.
I've just returned to my home in Washington, D.C. from a trip to the "other Washington" -- specifically, Seattle. My two visits to Seattle in the past month have convinced me that Washington state will probably be one of the first two states to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol.
In mid-August, I attended Seattle's Hempfest for the sixth time in seven years. For those who don't know, Hempfest isn't your run-of-the-mill marijuana rally. In fact, if it were, I wouldn't attend. This year's Hempfest, which was the 19th in 20 years, was the largest yet, with an estimated 300,000 people visiting Myrtle Edwards Park on the waterfront over two days. Each year, Seattle Hempfest is literally the largest marijuana-related event in the world.
And bigger is better; there's safety in numbers. For two days each August, using, possessing, and transferring marijuana for no remuneration (passing a joint) is legal in the park. For a few years, this policy was an informal understanding between the Seattle police and the 100,000+ people they were serving and protecting. But, in recent years, the higher-ups in the police department have actually directed their rank-and-file not to arrest people at Hempfest for marijuana (unless someone is selling it or pushing it on children).
What events preceded this normalization of marijuana?
In 1998, 59% of Washington state voters passed a medical marijuana initiative; then, in 2007, the Washington legislature instructed the state Department of Health to define a 60-day supply of medical marijuana. In 2008, the Department of Health defined a 60-day supply as up to 24 ounces of usable marijuana and 15 plants at any stage of growth.
On a separate track, in 2003, 59% of Seattle voters passed a local initiative to make marijuana possession the lowest arrest priority for local police. After that, the number of arrests within city limits plummeted, and, in January of this year, the city attorney for Seattle announced that his office would no longer prosecute people for marijuana possession.
Seattle Hempfest both led to -- and benefited from -- the local 2003 initiative victory, for which my organization, the Marijuana Policy Project, provided substantial funding. For two days each year, Hempfest attendees see what it's like for the public use of marijuana to be legal: There's no violence (alcohol is prohibited during the event), and there's good company and music and speeches. And the police see the same thing -- especially the no-violence part.
The police and non-police leave with these observations and tell their friends and colleagues. Over the course of the last two decades, perhaps 1.5 million people -- most of whom live in Washington -- have witnessed this phenomenon. Quite simply, Hempfest has changed the local culture around marijuana. So it's no wonder that the 2003 initiative passed, which then led to a more formal policy change with respect to marijuana arrests at Hempfest ... and then the whole city year-round.
And now, support for making marijuana legal has broken the 50% threshold in the state. The three most recent statewide polls show that 56% of adults support "making marijuana possession legal" (January 2010), 54% of adults support "allow[ing] state-run liquor stores to sell and tax marijuana" (January 2010), and 52% of registered voters support "removing state civil and criminal penalties for possession or use of marijuana" (May 2010).
The 52% figure is probably the most accurate, because it's important to survey registered voters -- as opposed to all adults -- when you're thinking about supporting a statewide initiative, as MPP is considering doing in Washington state for the November 2012 ballot.
Because there are many supportive young people and independent voters who vote only in presidential elections, it's vitally important to place difficult-to-pass marijuana initiatives on presidential-election ballots. Indeed, MPP's initiatives have passed by surprisingly large margins in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Montana during presidential elections, while both of our initiatives in Nevada lost during midterm elections.
If we can agree on an initiative that's drafted to appeal to swing voters (meaning it can't be too radical) and it's placed on the November 2012 ballot, I predict that marijuana will be made legal in Washington state in just 26 months.
And this would be a particularly sweet victory, since Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, is the former police chief of ... Seattle.
Colorado, crime, dispensaries, Kevin Sabet, Medical Marijuana, ONDCP, police
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.
FBI, marijuana arrests, National Survey on Drug Use and Health, NSDUH, Uniform Crime Report
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.”
alcohol, California Beer and Beverage Distributors, Marijuana is Safer, Proposition 19, SAFER, Steve Fox
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.