Pubdate: Wed, 17 Dec 2008
Source: Telluride Daily Planet (CO)
Copyright: 2008 Telluride Daily Planet, A Division of Womack Publishing Company
Contact:  http://www.telluridegateway.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3881
Author: Reilly Capps, Staff Writer, Daily Planet
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

WHAT DRIVES COP SHOP

Every week I write the Cop Shop -- my favorite task at this paper. My 
life is so boring, and some of my neighbors' lives are so interesting 
in all these incredible, horrible, spectacular ways.

The Telluride cops sometimes capture, in their police reports, a side 
of this town in a way official records rarely do.

Every week we brawl over little things, we pass out on the sidewalk, 
we steal our roommate's stuff and pilfer little girls' bicycles.

And why are we acting so boneheaded?

It's (partly) because we are confused or frustrated, or angry or 
selfish, or because life hasn't panned out the way we thought it 
would. But partly it's because we are drunk.

Nothing turns regular people into criminals faster than alcohol.

Writing Cop Shop has taught me that drinking alcohol to excess 
contributes to more egregious violence and stupidity and death than 
pretty much anything else.

How bad is it? Cops found a guy passed out in an elevator. They 
breathalyzed him, and his blood alcohol content came in at a 
staggering .489. Medically, he should have been dead.

"Hold on," he told the cops when he regained consciousness. "Let me 
go have one more drink. I know I can break .500."

I've done some pretty low-IQ things while drunk (putting on a coconut 
bra and trying to fight a guy just for wearing a Texas cap, to cite 
just one example), but the elevator guy is one sign that people drink 
for the wrong reasons, to excess, not as a social lubricant or a 
celebration, but to black out.

Meanwhile, every so often, someone gets caught smoking marijuana. And 
every time the cops catch dope smokers, without fail, that illegal 
drug causes them to do absolutely nothing that is violent, cruel, 
deadly, or criminally stupid. (Sure, people do stupid things on weed. 
But forgetting to show up to work is not illegal. Changing your car's 
oil using Mrs. Butterworth's syrup is not illegal.)

Me, I don't like weed. It makes me Jessica Simpson-dumb and paranoid 
to the point of paralysis, and when I smoke I end up cowering in my 
apartment, phone off, eating Fritos and watching South Park.

But other people like it. And while it's probably not good for 
anybody, there's no way it should be illegal.

This has all been said before, over and over, but it bears repeating: 
marijuana doesn't hurt anything that much. And criminalizing weed, by 
declaration of Congress in 1937, didn't help anything.

Americans, according to a new study, smoke more pot than residents of 
countries where it is legal, including Holland. Forty-two percent of 
us have tried marijuana, compared with just 20 percent of Dutch 
people, even though the Dutch can buy a joint in any coffee shop, and 
we all had to break the law.

Plus, all that law-breaking means that we've been jailing drug 
offenders as though someone were making money off it, and now we have 
more prisoners than China.

Cops around here don't write many marijuana citations. I think that 
it could be because most cops, including our sage Sheriff, know the 
Drug War doesn't work, and semi-secretly wish it would end.

So here's what I'd like to see on next November's ballot: legalize it.

Sure, a marijuana initiative failed three years ago. But it failed 
because it was confusing, talking about "lowest law enforcement 
priority" instead of saying simply: weed is legal here.

Denver did it. And nothing bad has happened. Why can't we?

A ballot initiative isn't any pressing matter. But in the same way 
that small communities -- including our own -- have been pushing 
climate change legislation by adopting the Kyoto Protocol on their 
own, small communities can also push the debate on the War on Drugs 
toward a policy that would make Americans safer, smarter and more 
free, and toward a policy that might contribute to even fewer 
marijuana entries in the Cop Shop, and (maybe) even less stupidity.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom