Pubdate: Mon, 17 Feb 2014
Source: Record, The (Troy, NY)
Copyright: 2014 The Record
Contact:  http://www.troyrecord.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1724
Author: Cynthia Tucker
Page: A4

IT MAKES NO SENSE TO CRIMINALIZE PEOPLE FOR GETTING STONED

By the time my 5-year-old daughter leaves for college, it's quite
likely that marijuana use will be broadly decriminalized. Alaska has
become the most recent state to move toward legalization, placing an
initiative on the ballot for an August vote. If it passes, Alaska
would join Washington and Colorado, which have already made
recreational use legal for adults.

The trend will probably continue, since 52 percent of Americans
support legalization, according to the Pew Research Center. That's
good news - and not because I want my daughter to indulge.

Quite the opposite. Having grown up in the years of cannabis
prohibition, I know all about the dangers of the weed. Even though I
don't accept the exaggerations of such propaganda as "Reefer Madness,"
a 1930s-era film that portrayed pot-smoking as the road to
destruction, I know that marijuana overuse is dangerous. That's
especially true for adolescents, whose brains are stunted by frequent
pot smoking, research shows. Overindulgence in alcohol is dangerous,
too. Yet the nation learned through wretched experience that
Prohibition was worse. It bred a gaggle of violent criminals who
trailed death and devastation in their wake. Their crimes were
generated by the law itself: Making alcohol illegal did not stop its
use; it merely fostered a huge and profitable black market.

The futile War on Drugs has done the same thing, promoting violent
crime throughout the Americas and fueling the growth in prison
populations.

According to the FBI, about half of the annual drug arrests in the
United States are for marijuana.

The so-called war has done its greatest damage in black America,
decimating whole neighborhoods as young black men are locked up for
non-violent crimes, then released with records that will restrict
their employment opportunities for the rest of their lives.

At a time when policymakers are struggling to close a yawning income
gap - to find ways to support equal opportunity for all - it makes no
sense to criminalize a group of people for getting stoned. Not only
does a drug record stigmatize them for life, but a prison sentence
also forces them into close quarters with hardened criminals, making
it more likely that they will graduate to violent crimes themselves.

And here's the thing that's especially galling: Whites don't pay
nearly the same price. (If they did, marijuana would have been
legalized decades ago.) Although studies show that whites and blacks
smoke pot at about the same rate, blacks are 3.7 times more likely to
be arrested, according to a 2013 report by the American Civil
Liberties Union. "The war on marijuana has disproportionately been a
war on people of color," Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU
Criminal Law Reform Project, said last year.

There is no doubt that most narcotics are more dangerous than pot and
may need to be treated differently. The recent death of actor Philip
Seymour Hoffman is a stark reminder of that. But we can distinguish
between cannabis and heroin just as we distinguish between Tylenol and
Oxycontin.

Unfortunately, the federal government stubbornly clings to an outdated
view, insisting that its law enforcement authorities will continue to
view marijuana sales and possession as a crime. That's dumb, and
President Obama ought to know better. He has long admitted his
youthful pot use, and he recently acknowledged in a New Yorker
interview that it is no more dangerous than alcohol.

That doesn't mean he wants his two daughters to smoke pot, any more
than I want mine to. But I certainly don't think any of them should go
to jail if they do.
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MAP posted-by: Matt