For Release Sunday, July 11th, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Close to 40 years after Richard Nixon sparked America’s “war on drugs,” California voters this November get to vote on the war’s biggest challenge ever.
It’s a ballot initiative making it legal for any Californian 21 or older to grow or use marijuana. If passed, there will be no more requirement to prove medical need (today’s law in California and 12 other states). Cannabis would be subject to taxes, potentially yielding billions of dollars in state, county and city levies.
California will be voting in the wake of Gallup polling that shows nationwide support for legalizing marijuana up to 44 percent, an eight-point jump since 2005. Support is higher in California: recent polls show the legalization initiative leading by margins of 56 to 42 percent and 49 percent to 41 percent.
But that doesn’t assure passage: historically, a modest poll lead for an initiative can melt away, especially as opponents wage fierce negative campaigns close to election day. Stiff opposition to the marijuana measure is likely from California’s “prison-industrial-complex” including police chiefs, prosecutors and prison guards.
Still, the California stage is set by the state’s early approval of medical marijuana and the Obama administration’s key decision last year to reverse earlier policy to shut down marijuana dispensaries even when countenanced under states’ laws.
Voters will likely debate social impacts of legalization versus potential state and local tax gains. But waiting in the wings is a deep moral issue: how marijuana prohibition laws were written in part to subjugate minority populations.
Last week the California State Conference of the NAACP issued an “unconditional endorsement” of the legalization initiative. Alice Huffman, the group’s president, attacked the current marijuana laws as a de facto way to criminalize young black men.
She cited a Drug Policy Alliance report showing that while total marijuana arrests in California spiraled from 20,000 in 1990 to 60,000 in 2008, arrests for “youth of color” rose four times faster. Federal surveys have consistently shown that young whites are more likely to use marijuana than young blacks. But in every one of California’s largest 25 urban counties, arrests of African-Americans for possessing marijuana exceed those for whites. In Los Angeles County, blacks are 10 percent of the population but account for 30 percent of marijuana arrests.
“It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,” Huffman said.
And it’s not just a California phenomenon. New York City’s marijuana arrests are also racially skewed, reports Harry G. Levine, Queens College sociologist. Arrests for small amounts of marijuana in New York City have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, he reports, with blacks (20 percent of the city’s population) constituting 52 percent of arrests, and Latinos (27 percent of the population) 31 percent of arrests.
For the cops, this is good business, notes Levine: “Narcotics and patrol police, their supervisors and top commanders” benefit from arrests that “are comparatively safe, allow officers and their supervisors to accrue overtime pay, and produce arrest numbers that show productivity.”
But for youth — nearly all handcuffed, put into the back of a police car or van, taken to a local station to be photographed and fingerprinted, and most often held one or more nights in jail — it’s a traumatic experience. Often they can escape longer incarceration by pleading guilty — but then have a felony conviction likely to haunt them for life.
Yet New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asked in his first campaign if he’d ever used marijuana, replied: “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it.” One in three Americans, and two recent presidents, have also tried the weed.
Small wonder. Marijuana has been used by humans for some 10,000 years. President Nixon’s hand-picked commission on marijuana found its “health impacts are minimal” and “the ‘gateway’ drug theory has no basis.” Yet Nixon, as part of his cultural war on black militants, hippies and campus revolutionaries, made marijuana a chief target.
He wasn’t the first. As Mexican workers brought marijuana across the border in the early 20th century, local prosecutors and editors publicly decried the “loco weed.” One critic associated marijuana (called “marihuana” at the time) — not only with Mexicans but “Negroes, prostitutes, pimps, and a criminal class of whites.” States began outlawing the drug, one Texas senator asserting “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”
In the ’30s Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, spearheaded the campaign to make marijuana possession a federal crime because (in his words) of “its effect on the degenerate races” — not only Hispanics but blacks whom he suggested were deluded by “reefer” to “think they’re as good as white men.”
Ironically, current polling shows Hispanics the only California ethnic voter group leaning against the fall initiative. A refresher on the odious history of marijuana prohibition ought to be enough to shift that.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.
5 Comments
That is indeed an interesting irony there at the end about Hispanics being the only ethnic group leaning against legalization. I suspect the Catholic Church’s historic hardline stance against marijuana is a major contributing factor (although that may be slowly changing thanks in part to a growing recognition by the Church of the benefits of medical marijuana: http://www.mapinc.org/tlcnews/v04/n915/a04.html?94560).
WTG Neal. BTW, my profession – police – spends hundreds of millions enforcing marijuana prohibition. This money will be saved AND we will be able to arrest more DUIs and pedophiles.
Message received in response to the column:
Jonathan Steigman here. Thanks for the good article on Tax Cannabis 2010, especially for pointing out the racist underpinnings of the War on Drugs. I am active in the medical cannabis (the correct term) movement here in the Bay Area and it has been quite eye-opening for me. There’s a tendency for progressives to support medical cannabis for “seriously ill people” with cancer and AIDS. But what I’ve found out is that virtually all use is medicinal. Without realizing it, a lot of people medicate for anxiety, depression, ADHD, social phobias and many other mood disorders for which the pharmaceutical industry peddles far more dangerous and toxic drugs.
The DEA ruled in 1988 that cannabis is “safer than many foods we commonly consume” and that it is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” Despite this ruling (and other similar rulings from medical and scientific organizations before and since), the government continues their insane war on the American people. Especially, as you point out, the poor and non-white.
However, please take a closer look at the Tax & Regulate initiative. It is sponsored and financed by Richard Lee of Oaksterdam University, who stands to make a fortune if it passes. It is OPPOSED by many of the leading lights in the pro-cannabis movement, including Dennis Peron (who got Prop 215 passed) and the late Jack Herer.
Why do they oppose the initiative?
1. It forbids consumption in public. No smoking cannabis at concerts, festivals and picnics or the police can arrest you. You can drink alcohol (up to 100,000 deaths/year) and smoke tobacco (435,000 deaths/year) but you can’t use cannabis (0 deaths in 10,000 years).
2. It forbids consumption at home “where minors are present.” No smoking in your own home if you have kids or the police can arrest you. Again, no criminal penalties for alcohol or tobacco.
3. It codifies the ways for the police to put people in jail. If you give cannabis to anyone under 21, you face a mandatory 6 months in jail. If you give cannabis to someone under 18, you face 3, 5, or 7 years in jail. I don’t want anyone giving my 14 year old son cannabis, but if they do I most certainly don’t want them to go to jail for it. Especially considering cannabis is safer than any other drug AND safer than any pharmaceutical medicine out there.
I know very few people who first used cannabis after the age of 21. Hell, returning Iraq veterans under 21 won’t be able to use it for PTSD unless they get a medical exemption (currently forbidden by the VA). These rules are a recipe for continued harassment of young men.
4. It allows possession of up to 1 oz by adults but it also allows growing in a 5 x 5 area, which will result in far more than 1 oz. They say personally grown cannabis is exempt but what if you want to take some of your production and give it to your friends? This is a perfect situation for a setup.
5. There is language in there that says you can possess cannabis supplied by an authorized supplier. Do you need to keep a receipt for your cannabis to show the police?
As far as I’m concerned, cannabis is a powerful healing plant. Anyone should be able to grow it and gift it to anyone else. The government has no right to control it in the first place.
Taxation is wrong. We don’t tax plants and we don’t tax medicines. We tax products. If you turn your cannabis into a hemp wallet, or a cannabis soft drink, then it should be taxed. But cannabis the plant — absolutely not.
I don’t want the government monitoring what I do at home in my own garden. Taxation is an excuse for them to go after people they don’t like. It continues the consensual crime model of cannabis prohibition and allows the government and police to go after troublemakers — said hippies, anti-war activists and other social progressives — using cannabis as an excuse. It is a prohibition bill masquerading as a “legalization” bill.
The police and the prison-industrial complex make billions on their war against cannabis. They will not give it up easily. With Tax Cannabis 2010, they will still have lots of excuses to arrest people.
Read the text here: http://www.taxcannabis.org/index.php/pages/initiative/
It is interesting that the opponents of Prop. 19 (the California measure to legalize marijuana sales) call themselves “Public safety first”. And this is when it has been conclusively shown by experts that Cannabis use suppresses violent behavior (as opposed to alcohol), and that Cannabis can even be potentially useful in addiction treatment — i.e., in helping people stay off booze and dangerous hard drugs or prescription drugs. Mexican drug cartels also oppose legalization because if Cannabis is legalized all their illegal distribution networks are no longer needed. A recent scientific conference in Los Angeles also stressed that current situation is unacceptable and unsustainable, and that it is supported by “prison-industrial complex” in this country because those are the people who benefit financially from more prisons and more prisoners. The so-called “public safety first” campaign against Proposition 19 is simply not entitled to use this name for their lies and distortions, because if we talk about “public safety”, it is the supporters of Prop. 19 and not its opponents who really care about it. Public safety will be much better served if the proposition passes, rather than if it fails!
Comment received Richard Evans, Northampton, Mass.: