Pubdate: Thu, 09 Jan 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group

WEEDWARS: NATION'S MARIJUANA SENTENCES ARE UNJUST

I have no desire to smoke marijuana, partly because doing so might
drive me back to the cigarette habit I broke two decades ago. I don't
want to be one of those "cool parents" who pretend to be as culturally
advanced as their kids. In my case, that's a ridiculous aspiration
anyway.

And I agree with those who call attention to the dangers of excessive
indulgence in marijuana and want to encourage people to resist it.
Nobody wants us to become a nation of stoners.

Nonetheless, I have come to believe that we should legalize or at
least decriminalize marijuana use nationally. The way we enforce
marijuana laws is unconscionable. The arrest rates for possession are
astoundingly and shamefully different for whites and
African-Americans. The incongruence between what our statutes require
and what Americans actually do cannot be sustained.

The key document in this debate should be a study released last June
by the American Civil Liberties Union. It found that marijuana use is
comparable across racial lines- 14 percent for African-Americans and
12 percent for whites in 2010. But the arrest rates are not. It turns
out that "a black person was 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for
marijuana possession than a white person."

"In states with the worst disparities," the report noted, "blacks were
on average over six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana
possession than whites. In the worst offending counties across the
country, blacks were over 10, 15, even 30 times more likely to be
arrested than white residents of the same county."

True, we could equalize things by massively diverting police energies
to make sure that whites got arrested at the same rate as
African-Americans, thus adding to the ranks of those with rap sheets.
But to offer this "solution" is to show how absurd it is. If we're not
willing to guarantee that a law is enforced with rough equality,
doesn't this tell us something about what we think of it in the first
place?

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks made the classic
argument for keeping marijuana illegal. "Laws profoundly mold culture,
so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture?" he asked.

The "law as teacher" thesis is attractive until you start jailing
people and creating arrest records that can harm them for many years.
And we don't need to make something illegal to discourage its use, as
we have learned in the battle against cigarette smoking.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
proportion of cigarette smokers in our country dropped from 42.4
percent in 1965 to 18 percent in 2012. We have built legal fences
around tobacco, using regulations to send the signals Brooks is
talking about without making tobacco consumption a crime.

I know Brooks doesn't approve of the racial disparities in marijuana
enforcement, and I'm sure that's also true of my Washington Post
colleague Ruth Marcus, who wrote last week that "widespread
legalization is a bad idea." At the same time, she asserted: "Throwing
people in jail for smoking pot is dumb and wasteful." This second
point is entirely right, which is why we need to change our marijuana
statutes.

The debate we need is not between the status quo and legalization but
between legalizing marijuana for non-medical uses and decriminalizing
it. Decriminalization would be a form of public disapproval without
all of the contradictions and injustices of our current approach.

Here, our federal system can help us. Colorado and Washington have
embarked on their legalization experiments, while more than a dozen
states have decriminalized pot by imposing, at most, limited,
speeding-ticket style penalties for possession.

Public sentiment is moving toward change, and for good reason. A Pew
poll last year found that 72 percent of Americans agreed that
"government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are
worth."

That's true, and those costs are far heavier for some of our fellow
citizens than for others.  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D