With the war on drugs, everyone loses.
Civil liberties go out the window, communities get turned into war zones and public money that could be used for more productive purposes get flushed down the toilet like a brick of dope at the first sign of a police raid.
The latest evidence that it is time to change the paradigm is an ACLU report issued yesterday that shows that
The aggressive enforcement of marijuana possession laws needlessly ensnares hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system and wastes billions of taxpayers’ dollars. What’s more, it is carried out with staggering racial bias. Despite being a priority for police departments nationwide, the War on Marijuana has failed to reduce marijuana use and availability and diverted resources that could be better invested in our communities.
According to the ACLU, 8 million were arrested on pot charges between 2001 and 2010, or “one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system” at a cost of “about $3.6 billion a year.” Despite this, “Marijuana use has increased since 2007.“
In 2011, there were 18.1 million current (past-month) users—about 7.0 percent of people aged 12 or older—up from 14.4 million (5.8 percent) in 2007.
While pot use “is roughly equal among Blacks and whites,” the ACLU says, “Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”
The ACLU report calls for legalization of pot for “persons 21 or older through a system of taxation, licensing, and regulation.”
Legalization is the smartest and surest way to end targeted enforcement of marijuana laws in communities of color, and, moreover, would eliminate the costs of such enforcement while generating revenue for cash-strapped states. States could then reinvest the money saved and generated into public schools and public health programs, including substance abuse treatment. If legalization is not possible, the ACLU recommends depenalizing marijuana use and possession for persons 21 or older by removing all attendant civil and criminal penalties, or, if depenalization is unobtainable, decriminalizing marijuana use and possession for adults and youth by classifying such activities as civil, not criminal, offenses.
In the meantime, the ACLU says, police departments should back off their aggressive enforcement of marijuana laws, “end racial profiling and unconstitutional stop, frisk, and search practices, and no longer measure success and productivity by the number of arrests they make.”
The Star-Ledger is pushing this new paradigm, but stops short of calling for legalization, instead preferring the “reanimation of a legislative move to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”
That doesn’t mean legalization; possession would still be subject to a fine but, like a traffic ticket, it would not be a criminal offense that now carries a punishment of up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.
Gov. Chris Christie has taken the wise and compassionate step of directing those convicted of nonviolent drug offenses to treatment instead of a jail cell. Why not extend that sensible approach to the front end of the system, ending costly arrests for possessing small amounts of pot?
It’s a good question. The answer is that the politicians have yet to buy into the shift away from a law-enforcement model, one that brings with it impressive visuals (in this, the press is complicit, running photos of smiling law enforcement and their impressive looking catches), to the less visually alluring efforts to treat drug use as the health problem that it is.
My preference is legalization — and in states like Colorado and Washington, which have an initiative-and-referendum process, that remains a short-term possibility. In other states — like New Jersey — the process is going to have to be more incremental, proving at each step that the loosening of pot laws has not caused the sky to fall, so that fence-sitting politicians may eventually do the right thing.
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Hank Kalet 