What harms marijuana users most are the laws against marijuana and how those laws are being enforced. Many people have been killed in drug raids, or by overzealous law enforcement. Tragically, many law enforcement officers have also been killed while enforcing the marijuana laws. Many of those arrested on marijuana charges have had their lives destroyed by getting arrested, being put on probation, having their belongings seized, losing college funding, losing their jobs, having their children taken away, accumulating legal expenses, and/or being sent to prison for breaking the marijuana laws, which are clearly based on misinformation, lies, and unrighteous dominion.
“Amnesty International, the UN and Human Rights Watch have all condemned womens’ prisons in the U.S. due to the extreme violence and inhumane conditions that women are enduring in American prisons today.”
– Renee Boje Legal Defense Fund, ReneeBoje.com, 2006. Renee Boje is living in Canada with her son and husband, but the U.S. government is trying to extradite her to the U.S. to imprison her for up to her entire life on marijuana charges because she lived in a house where marijuana was growing.
“Myth: Marijuana and violence are linked.
Fact: Absolutely not.
No credible research has shown marijuana use to play a causal factor in violence, aggression or delinquent behavior, dating back to former President Richard Nixon’s ‘First Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse’ in 1972, which concluded, ‘In short, marijuana is not generally viewed by participants in the criminal justice community as a major contributing influence in the commission of delinquent or criminal acts.’ More recently, the Canadian Senate’s 2002 ‘Discussion Paper on Cannabis’ reaffirmed: ‘Cannabis use does not induce users to commit other forms of crime. Cannabis use does not increase aggressiveness or anti-social behavior.”
– Marijuana: Myth vs. Fact, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML.org
“There is no systematic empirical evidence, at least that drawn from the American experience, to support the thesis that the use of marihuana either inevitably or generally causes, leads to or precipitates criminal, violent, aggressive or delinquent behavior of a sexual or nonsexual nature.
Laboratory studies of effects have revealed no evidence to show that marihuana’s chemical properties are, by themselves, capable of producing effects which can be interpreted as criminogenic; that is, that marihuana is an independent cause of criminal or aggressive behavior. If anything, the effects observed suggest that marihuana may be more likely to neutralize criminal behavior and to militate against the commission of aggressive acts.
… In other words, the observed relationship between the use of marihuana and criminal, violent, aggressive and delinquent behavior is spurious. It is dependent on such extra-pharmacological factors as the age, race and education of the user; the type of community in which he lives; his past history of psychosocial maladjustment; and his involvement in a criminal or delinquent subculture (use of other drugs; drug buying and selling activities; associations with friends who also use, buy and sell cannabis or other drugs).
… To put it still another way, to believe that marihuana causes criminal, violent, aggressive or delinquent behavior is to confuse the effects of the drug with the people who use it.”
– Shafer Commission Report: Marihuana, a Signal of Misunderstanding: The Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse: Summary and Conclusions: Marihuana and Crime; Commissioned by President Richard M. Nixon; March 1972
“Does it cause violence?
No; if anything, it reduces it. The only crime most cannabis users commit is obtaining and using marijuana. The U.S. Shafer Commission report, one of the most comprehensive studies ever done on drugs, reported that cannabis smokers ‘tend to be under-represented’ in violent crime, ‘especially when compared to users of alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates.’ The California Attorney General’s panel wrote in 1989 that ‘objective consideration shows that cannabis is responsible for less damage to the individual and society than alcohol and cigarettes.’ The federal government reports that 71 million Americans have smoked it… possibly including some of the nicest people you know.”
– Family Council on Drug Awareness, 2006; FCDA.org
“There is no evidence that spending billions of dollars over the past 20 years for antidrug messages has diminished young people’s interest in trying marijuana.”
– ChangeTheClimate.org
“I think that’s long overdue.
I think everybody knows what (U.S. Senator) John McCain said is right: We’ve pretty well lost the War on Drugs doing it the way we’re doing it. Drugs are more available and cheaper than ever before. What we’re doing is not working.”
– The lead Texas governor candidate Kinky Friedman, running as an independent to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Perry. He was saying he’d make marijuana legal and release all those jailed on marijuana charges to free up prison space and save money. September 2006
“Drug users and police officers are both responding to a larger social policy context that reinforces their mutual roles as victims and aggressors or, viewed from the perspective of the police, law breakers and law enforcers. It is our decision as a society to criminalize drug addiction, rather than understand and treat those behaviors as medical and social issues, that ultimately forces both sides of the equation into an endless dehumanizing cycle of criminalized behavior, arrest, incarceration, release, and further criminalized behavior. And until we change the way we deal with drug use, we will not have a real opportunity to heal this wounding cycle.”
– Vancouver’s Pivot Legal Society, October 29, 2002
“What we ought to do is try to get at the source of this problem, which is poverty and disillusionment, and put out resources behind that and turn it around. I suggest it is time to abolish the prohibition – to cease treating indulgence in mind-alteration as a crime. The result would be the elimination of the profit motive, the gangs, the drug dealers. Obviously, the model is the repeal of [alcohol] Prohibition and the end of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.”
– U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet, addressing the Drug Policy Foundation, 1991
“If we judge whether the existing drugs policy is working by measurable reductions in the number of people who use drugs, the number who die or suffer harm as a result, the supply of drugs, the amount of crime committed to get money to buy drugs and the organised criminality involved in transporting and supplying drugs, we have to say that the results are not coming through.”
– The Association of Chief Police Officers, UK
“I have long believed that the laws regarding marijuana are too harsh. Those who keep pot for their own personal use should not be treated as criminals. Thirty years in prison makes no sense whatsoever. I’m with you.”
– Ann Landers, advice columnist, in her response to a mother whose son was arrested on marijuana charges; January 5, 1999