Pubdate: Sun, 09 Dec 2012
Source: Las Cruces Sun-News (NM)
Copyright: 2012 Las Cruces Sun-News
Contact:  http://www.lcsun-news.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/674
Author: Peter Goodman
Note: Peter Goodman and his wife Dael live in Dona Ana County.

MARIJUANA LAWS USED TO PUNISH NONCONFORMISTS

During my first year of college I knew slightly a kid named Bennett 
Hertzler. A gentle, harmless sort of guy. In a police search of 
dormitory rooms, he was caught with three or four marijuana seeds in 
a desk drawer - and sentenced to years in jail. While the rest of us 
continued our college educations, Ben languished in prison. It 
destroyed his life.

Could have been me. I smoked marijuana when I was young. Liked it 
fine. Then one evening, as I smoked, I became convinced that I was 
dying. In fact, I was fine physically, but I was sure I was dying, 
for about a half an hour. Thereafter, whenever I smoked the same 
thing happened. The pleasant high just wasn't worth the miserable 
fear I had to go through first, and I was busy with professional 
tasks and obligations anyway, so I stopped. But I have friends who 
continued smoking for decades without any apparent problem, and still 
do so. Some are grandparents.

Should marijuana be illegal?

Marijuana is relatively harmless. It doesn't make people violent or, 
so far as I can discover, cause them serious medical problems.

Studies show that driving a car while high on marijuana is far less 
dangerous than driving while high on alcohol. Alcohol abuse over 
decades leads to serious illness and even death.

It is said that marijuana use by kids leads to use of stronger and 
more dangerous drugs. That can be true, primarily because the society 
that prohibits marijuana (a) tosses kids who want to smoke into the 
company of people who also sell other illegal drugs and (b) does so 
with propaganda that undermines our credibility when we tell kids 
about the very real dangers of more powerful drugs. It's like telling 
kids that masturbation causes blindness, then expecting to be 
believed when we explain later why it's important to avoid 
unprotected casual sex.

The alcohol prohibition didn't work. While perhaps a noble 
experiment, it made drinking alcohol more fun, killed or injured 
people who drank bad booze, decreased respect for laws, increased 
corruption, enriched criminals, and generally caused new problems 
while failing miserably to solve the original one.

The marijuana prohibition doesn't work. It leads to broken lives like 
Ben Hertzler's, decreases respect for law, costs society an amazing 
amount for enforcement, trials, and prison space, enriches criminals, 
and prevents people from smoking marijuana that's either homegrown or 
grown by someone licensed and inspected. It also keeps people who 
live in pain from easy access to marijuana's ability to lessen that pain.

This is what we said decades ago and were thought crazy.

More recently, these thoughts have become more acceptable. A 
blue-ribbon panel of former public officials from all parties reached 
the same conclusion about the war on drugs. Fifteen states have 
decriminalized marijuana. Three states voted this year to legalize it.

Here's the choice: spend vast sums of money in bad economic times to 
arrest, try, and imprison people for something they do in their own 
homes, or legalize marijuana - and perhaps regulate it and tax sales..

Why do we choose one way regarding alcohol and differently for 
marijuana? Why do we do so even though alcohol causes greater driving 
impairment, a deeper addiction, and harsher medical issues than marijuana?

Initially, prejudice was part of the reason: our parents and 
grandparents had drunk alcohol, but marijuana was associated with 
blacks and later with the 1960s "counterculture."

The inequity persists because people with money like it that way: 
alcohol is big business; and selling marijuana illegally is far more 
profitable than selling it legally. Ending the marijuana prohibition 
would be devastating to cartels, which could no longer charge a 
"danger premium" to customers for something folks could grow it in 
their own homes.

Thus it's heartening to see that a bill to lower penalties in New 
Mexico will be introduced soon.

It's disheartening that if it passes Governor Martinez might veto it. 
That would be one more reflexively bad choice by our governor, who's 
rapidly increasing her chance of serving only one term.

Martinez's "defense" of her position sounds like an admission of misconduct.

Her press secretary says stiff marijuana penalties are good because 
"the vast majority of people convicted for possessing small amounts 
of marijuana are diverted to treatment programs, and those who are 
sentenced to prison are individuals with long criminal records with 
convictions for things like assault, burglary, and other crimes."

That is, these laws are great tools to put away folks with bad 
records against whom we can't prove anything serious right now. For 
folks we approve of, it's like driver education classes for speeders. 
Folks we don't like could go to jail for several years.

That's like criminalizing coffee and tea so that when you suspect 
someone of a crime but can't prove it, or just don't like someone, 
you can punish people you suspect of real crimes but can't catch.

There was a time when students who questioned the wisdom of the war 
in Vietnam or associated with folks of different "races" were thought 
dangerous and unpatriotic, but they had free speech rights. 
Small-minded district attorneys could do little. Conveniently, 
though, a lot of those rebellious young folks smoked marijuana, and 
could be imprisoned for that when the real complaint was their 
thought and speech.

That ain't justice.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom