“It’s estimated that the state of Oregon spends $60 million enforcing marijuana laws. Meanwhile the state is facing shortfalls in school and health care budgets. We’re wasting time that should be used to catch real criminals and money that should be spent on our people’s education and health care!”
– Madeline Martinez, executive director of Oregon NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), 41,000 Signatures Turned In for Lowest Priority Initiative, Cannabis Community News, Summer 2006; ORNORML.org
Some cities have voted to make personal marijuana use among its citizens the lowest law enforcement priority. In November 2006 the city of Santa Barbara, California, did so with apparently no incident. Voters there overwhelmingly approved Measure P, which made smoking marijuana for any reason the lowest priority of law enforcement.
In November 2006, when the voters in the city of Santa Monica, California, approved a measure to make personal marijuana use the lowest law enforcement priority, the city’s new police chief, Timothy Jackman, stated, “My officers have a lot more important things to spend their time on, like tracking down murderers and rapists.”
The day after Santa Monica voters approved the measure to place marijuana as the lowest priority of the police department, the city erupted into massive rioting. Teenagers who smoked weed ran through the streets shattering store windows and overturning cars. Crazed office workers stoned on pot threw their computers and office furniture into the streets. Hippies under the influence of marijuana chased terrified elderly residents through the streets. Bank workers blazing on high-grade chronic opened the vaults, threw piles of money into the streets and lit them on fire. The police department was overwhelmed and retreated into City Hall. Pot smokers began smashing cars into schools and setting public buildings on fire. Driverless trucks were rammed into gas stations, which caused the underground storage tanks to explode. The fire department refused to enter the riot zones. Half the city became engulfed in flames. So many people were smoking weed that the smell of it permeated the city. Huge clouds of pot smoke were wafting into surrounding communities, which also experienced some rioting, looting, and instances of crazy stoned grandmothers wildly dancing in the streets. News helicopters trying to film the uprising from the sky were shot at by machine gun-brandishing pot-smoking hellions. Packs of marijuana-puffing, bikini-clad surfer girls overtook, tied up, and sexually assaulted the local lifeguards. Bong-toking retirees in high-rise condos threw bottle bombs onto passing cars. Society as the city residents had known it came to an abrupt halt.
Actually, that last paragraph may be what some people think could happen if personal marijuana use were legalized. But, the day after the law passed, nothing out of the ordinary happened in Santa Monica. Life went on as usual. The only difference was that the police department could focus on matters other than the possible crime of marijuana smoking.
When it is taken into consideration that marijuana can easily be purchased by anyone who wants it, and that it is being grown in homes, commercial buildings and secret gardens throughout North America, one would have to wonder why the government spends the enormous amount of money it does on trying to control the plant.
“The FBI reports that 65 to 75 percent of violent crime is alcohol related.”
– Family Council on Drug Awareness, FCDA.org
“Cigarette smoking is the most important preventable cause of premature death in the United States. It accounts for nearly 440,000 of the more than 2.4 million annual deaths. Cigarette smokers have a higher risk of developing several chronic disorders. These include fatty buildups in arteries, several types of cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (lung problems). Atherosclerosis (buildup of fatty substances in the arteries) is a chief contributor to the high number of deaths from smoking. Many studies detail the evidence that cigarette smoking is a major cause of coronary heart disease, which leads to heart attack.”
– American Heart Association, December 2008
“The total cost of caring for people with health problems caused by cigarette smoking – counting all sources of medical payments – is about $72.7 billion per year, according to health economists at the University of California.”
– The Berkeleyan, By Patricia McBroom, Public Affairs, September 16, 1998; berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan
“Every year, cigarette smoking causes an estimated 259,494 deaths among men and 178,408 deaths among women. The three leading causes of death attributed to cigarettes are lung-cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and heart disease. An estimated 38,112 lung cancer and heart disease deaths annually are caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.”
– Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, 2005
Alcohol is a drug and cigarettes contain a drug called nicotine. Alcohol and cigarettes are a much greater problem than marijuana has ever been; yet alcohol and cigarettes are advertised and sold everywhere possible. Alcohol plays a part in over 60 percent of all murders, and half of all driving fatalities. Even legal drugs, which we call “prescription drugs,” play a part in the deaths of more than 100,000 Americans every year. When was the last time you heard of someone dying from marijuana?
A French study that reviewed 10,748 drivers who were involved in fatal car accidents found that 28.6 percent of the accidents were attributed to alcohol and 2.5 percent were attributed to marijuana. Three percent of those in the marijuana group also had alcohol in their system.
– Cannabis intoxication and fatal road crashes in France: population-based case-control study; British Medical Journal; December 1, 2005 BMJ.com
Many people who drink alcohol do so because they say it “relaxes” them. That is the same reason many people smoke marijuana.
“Lushes” was a term used in the jazz and blues community of the 1920s to describe alcohol drinkers who didn’t smoke reefer, but who seemed to cause a lot of problems.
“Man, they can say what they want about vipers [weed smokers], but you just dig them lushounds [alcohol drinkers] with their old antique jive, always comin’ up loud and wrong, whippin’ their old ladies and wastin’ up all their pay, and then the next day your head feels like all the hammers in the piano is beatin’ out a tune on your brain. Just look at the difference between you and them other cats, that come uptown juiced to the gills, crackin’ out of line and passin’ out in anybody’s hallway. Don’t nobody come up thataway when he picks up on some good grass.”
– A friend of jazz musician Milton Mezz Mezzrow talking to Mezzrow as recalled in his 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues
Probably the large majority of the people involved in arresting and convicting marijuana offenders either smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, or both. What makes the recreational activities of the enforcers of the corrupt marijuana laws any better than the people they are arresting for marijuana use?
Maybe Richard Nixon explained it really well. Or maybe he didn’t.
Richard Nixon: “Why in the name of God do these people take this stuff?”
John Ehrlichman: “For the same reason they drink. It’s uh, they’re bored, it’s uh, it’s a diversion.”
Nixon: “Drinking is a different thing in a sense. Uh, Linkletter’s point I think is well taken. He says, ‘A person may drink to have a good time’ ”
Ehrlichman: “Mm-hmm.”
Nixon: “But a person does not drink simply for the purpose of getting high. You take drugs for the purpose of getting high.”
Ehrlichman: “Yep, yep.”
Nixon: “There is a difference.”
– Oval Office conversation 510-3 between Richard Nixon with John Ehrlichman, June 2, 1971, Time: 3:16 pm - 4:15 pm. As detailed on the Web site for Common Sense for Drug Policy, CSDP.org/News/News/Nixon.htm.
Nixon was referring to Art Linkletter, the TV personality, who became an outspoken advocate of stronger drug laws after his daughter fell to her death from a high rise building while she was under the influence of LSD. Linkletter later changed his views on the Drug War, considering that it isn’t the solution.
“Despite its lurid reputation, marijuana seems no more harmful than alcohol. Though habitual criminals often use it, psychiatrists and police narcotic experts have never been able to prove that it induces criminal tendencies in otherwise normal people. It is less habit-forming than tobacco, alcohol, or opium.”
– The Weed, Time Magazine, July 19, 1943
“The only clinically significant medical problem that is scientifically linked to marijuana is bronchitis. Like smoking tobacco, the treatment is the same: stop smoking.”
– Dr. Fred Oerther, M.D., 1991
Even the amount of jail time that a so-called marijuana offender receives is beyond unfair. A person convicted of manslaughter may spend one year in prison. A pot grower may spend five or more years in prison.
“In 1978, after 202 years of Nationhoood, there were 300,000 Americans in state and federal prisons and another 150,000 in country jails (for all crimes). There were only 45,000 prison guards nationwide. At that time, the construction of schools and universities was a thriving growth industry. At least five times more was being spent on schools than on prisons.
Suddenly, in 1978, new leadership in prison guards unions molded the previously ineffectual guards into one of the most politically powerful lobbying blocks in the country. What the guards wanted was longer and longer determinant sentences for less and less serious crimes, and with virtually no time off for good behavior to assure rapidly growing prison populations.
In the last 20 years, these powerful correctional officers unions became the largest single contributors to state legislators – and mostly to the Republican party. Now in 1998, there are more than 1,200,000 people in prison, 550,000 in jail and the penal system supports 230,000 prison guards!
Today, prison construction and prison employment are among the largest growth industries in the U.S., while federal and state spending for new schools has dwindled to less than one-fifth that of prison building expenditures.
What kind of society would rather build jails than schools?”
– Jack Herer, Los Angeles, August 6, 1998; author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; JackHerer.com
The marijuana convictions do not accomplish anything other than create problems, destroy the lives of those who are convicted, and use up tax money and court time that can be used on something more useful and meaningful to society. This is done at the expense of taxpayers — not only because it costs money to convict and imprison the offenders, but also because the offenders lose their jobs and therefore cannot pay taxes while they sit in prison. If everyone in the U.S. who has smoked pot were to be jailed, there would have to be jails built to hold tens of millions of so-called marijuana offenders. You can be charged with any number of crimes, still hold a job, and consume lots of alcohol and be a chain smoker of cigarettes. But if you work at certain companies that do urine testing for marijuana, you can be out of a job for smoking a joint.
Meanwhile, schools are rightly declared to be drug-free zones, but every day American children swallow truckloads of risky prescription personality drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that carry the side effect of suicide. The teachers take their breaks to smoke cigarettes, which are more addictive than cocaine and heroin. In the cafeterias they are serving junk food, fried food, candy, sodas, and foods containing saturated fat, trans fats, cholesterol, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and chemical food additives that destroy health – and alter brain function and compromise neural development.
“Politicians like to use the mantra of ‘protecting our children’ to help pass draconian drug war legislation. Most of the drug war’s financial resources, however, are actually spent protecting consenting adults from themselves, while the little that is devoted to protecting young people is wasted on programs with a long history of proven failure. The drug policy reform movement should make developing effective drug education a high priority. Decades of research has consistently determined what does more harm than good: ‘scare-based’ prevention tactics, overuse of authority figures, talking down to people, and conveying over-the-top messages or ideas that don’t conform to people’s perceptions and experiences. More specifically, policymakers have hooked prevention resources to three failed programs: DARE, the National Youth AntiDrug Media Campaign, and student drug testing.
A 2003 study by the Unities States Government Accountability Office found that every evaluation of the DARE program the agency reviewed proved that ‘DARE had no statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit drug use.’ Numerous other studies have reached similar conclusions.”
– Bill Piper, Executive Director Drug Policy Alliance, in his article Congress 2007: The Agenda Ahead, Cannabis Culture magazine, March/April 2007; CannabisCulture.com; DrugPolicy.org
Public schools in the U.S. seem to be doing a very good job at turning out hordes of obese children who speak one language, who have a distorted view of the world gained from taking white-washed history classes that teach myths and lies, whose time and talents are wasted on low-quality education, and who have to sit through silly and degrading antidrug public service announcements that only leave the schoolchildren curious to explore the drugs they are told to avoid.
“Marijuana prohibition needlessly destroys the lives and careers of literally hundreds of thousands of good, hard-working, productive citizens each year in this country. More than 700,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges last year, and more than five million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the past decade.”
– National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML.org; 2006
Being incarcerated in prison changes people, most often for the very worse. Hard drugs are rampant in U.S. prison systems. Many inmates who have never done hard drugs begin to do so while they are in prison. Prisons are referred to as “correctional facilities.” But what they often do is harden people by exposing them to a harsh environment that damages their soul.
The laws governing the use, possession, and sale of marijuana are horrible laws. They were created using fake news stories, lies, and distorted information. They destroy lives. If anything can be described as evil, it is the marijuana laws that result in the arrest of hundreds of thousands of people and prevent the farming of industrial hemp that can provide the raw materials used to replace products that are causing great harm to the global environment.
“This report concludes that legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts would produce an annual savings in state and local expenditure of about $120.6 million while generating tax revenue of at least $16.9 million.”
– From the report: The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Legalization in Massachusetts, by Jeffrey A. Miron, Professor of Economics, Boston University; August, 2003
If a relatively small state like Massachusetts can experience savings of over $135 million in state and local expenditures every year if pot were made to be a legal, taxable product, then states that are struggling with annual budgetary shortfalls, such as California, could make a big dent in their debt simply by legalizing marijuana. Industrial hemp farming could also be legalized and farmers could begin benefiting from a whole new, very needed, and environmentally sustainable crop.
But the federal government stands in the way, preventing laws from being changed, increasing the number of marijuana arrests every year, and determining that billions of dollars get spent on marijuana enforcement.
Rather than wasting billions of dollars to pay law enforcement workers to find and arrest people who possess, grow, or sell marijuana, and spending billions more to prosecute, imprison, and feed the otherwise harmless citizens, the money would be put to better use if it were spent to improve the nations’ educational facilities, on giving raises to the grossly underpaid teachers who work in the American school systems, and on environmental matters. Spending billions on those issues would improve society. Putting people in prison for marijuana charges does not.
In consideration of what could happen in a society where marijuana was legal, one has only to look at Holland where cannabis is sold in designated “coffee shops.” That country has the lowest imprisonment rate in the Western world, and they are able to spend more money on social programs, healthcare, and the environment. A smaller percentage of teenagers there regularly use marijuana than do the teenagers in the U.S. The same is true for adults in Holland.
“Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.
This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”
– Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate economist in An Open Letter to [White House drug czar] Bill Bennett, Wall Street Journal; September 7, 1989
“I would legalize marijuana. In fact, I would change the whole drug policy. This approach of War on Drugs has not succeeded. We’ve spent billions of dollars on it, and we still have a problem. The problem is a public health problem. It’s not a war problem. And of course our jails are overloaded with people who got picked up for a joint or what have you. That’s another problem we have to deal with. As we correct that situation, these people who have been incarcerated for bad policy should be re-examined and helped to be rehabilitated. The marijuana problem is a simple one. We legalize that and you should be able to buy that at a liquor store, just like you buy alcohol. But the rest of the drug area needs attention, needs medical attention, so that when a person needs to get drugs, they can go get a prescription for a doctor. They get it, it’s not a problem. Then they have to be registered and then when they are ready to be rehabilitated we have the resources to do that. Right now we don’t. We catch you, throw you in jail. And that’s no rehabilitation because it brings about unbelievable recidivism in the whole process.”
– Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, former U.S. Senate, Alaska, 1969-1981; Alaska House of Representatives, 1963-1966; On C-Span, May 3, 2007