Pubdate: Thu, 09 Jan 2014
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2014 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: E.J. Dionne

MARIJUANA INJUSTICES

The Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates Are Shameful

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. 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 in 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 the 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, my friend 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. "What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want
to encourage?"

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 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 nonmedical 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.

Decriminalization, Adam Serwer wrote a few years ago in the American
Prospect, might avoid the problems created by a wide-open marijuana
market. "I'm not sure what a world with a fully commercialized
marijuana industry that profits from turning people into potheads
looks like," he said, "but it makes me nervous." The alternative is to
permit a normal market while sharply restricting advertising and other
forms of marketing, as we do with cigarettes.

One way or another, public sentiment is moving toward change, and for
good reason. A 2013 Pew poll 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