LA Police Chief: why not regulate marijuana?
Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton isn’t some run of the mill beat cop, this man has the kind of record that most officers would envy. Bratton served in Vietnam, holds a BS in Law Enforcement from UMass, graduated from the FBI National Executive Institute and was a Senior Executive Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Don’t get me wrong, this man is no friend of the kind, but the situation that Law Enforcement is in has obviously gotten unsustainable in his eyes.
“I think that the policy of the federal government at this time is unfortunate. I think the policy of this state is Looney Tunes,” Bratton said Wednesday at a Parker Center news conference.
“While I fully support its use for medicinal purposes, why don’t we regulate it like we do Lipitor or Viagra,” Bratton said. “You can’t buy those two without getting it through a legitimate pharmacy. If this drug is so important and so helpful, why is it not regulated like every other drug?”
Bratton is crying out for a directive that he can follow. He wants to beat pot smokers heads in, but he can’t figure out when he can do so. It was so simple just a scant 20 years ago, if you found pot you locked the Citizen up and gave him a record that would haunt them until the day they died. Now his deputies have to check cards and give back plants to patients, you can’t even bust a dispensary anymore without some mob showing up to harass you.
The simple point that Bratton makes is a telling one, that the War on Marijuana is unsustainable, and it might as well be treated the same as any other medication (or alcohol for that matter).
[This echoes what I've heard when I talk to cops at Seattle Hempfest or Portland Hempstalk. One said, "I wish you guys would just legalize it! This half-and-half thing, some medical, some not, is just ridiculous. Either everybody goes to jail for weed or nobody goes to jail for weed, but the way it is now just makes our jobs a whole lot harder!" And he's got a point - why is the guy in a wheelchair a patient but the guy who can walk is a criminal if they're both smoking a joint? Because the second guy committed the crime of being too healthy to smoke pot? -- "R"R]
Any way we can get cops to support Cannabis reform and call for the regulation of weed is ok with me. Maybe some one should tell him about LEAP.