Marijuana prohibition makes life more dangerous for all of us – even those who don’t smoke pot.

We tell story after story of the crime inherent in an unregulated market.  Dealers shoot other dealers over turf.  Deals go bad and consumers are killed.  Rippers come to steal the marijuana grown and harvested by others because it is so profitable and because what is the victim going to do, call the cops?

In this recent case in Chicago, the victim did:

A man who called police to report being robbed of two pounds of marijuana and a laptop was arrested himself early Thursday after police found narcotics in his Lincoln Park apartment.

Police were called to the Fullerton address at 12:40 a.m. because [the arrested man] and a 19-year-old man had reported being robbed of their marijuana and a laptop, [police] said.

The 19-year-old said he’d been hit over the head with a bottle and suffered a cut to his back during the robbery, [police] said.

[The first man], who reported being punched, refused medical attention and was arrested when they found him in possession of narcotics, [police] said.

Some people will read this and think “What did they expect, getting involved with two pounds of pot?”  These are the same kind of people who will question the dress of a rape victim.  Whether it was two grams or two pounds, do you feel safer knowing that someone in your apartment building can be beaten in their home in the middle of the night and have no recourse to police?

Consider that the next young man who reads this article may learn a lesson and decide he needs to get some guns to protect himself and his two pounds in the apartment.  Then consider what leads someone to hoard two pounds of pot is its profitability due to its scarcity.  People don’t hoard cases of tequila and nobody busts into their apartments to steal it.

Then consider that even the casual consumer at that two gram level could be a crime victim; thieves may want their home electronics, jewelry, and other valuables.  Does that consumer call the cops and risk the detection of some contraband in his home?

Finally, consider that you may be the victim of a crime.  Does your pot-smoking neighbor call the police, knowing he may be called on to answer some questions about that funny smell coming from his door?

Eleven percent of American adults will smoke pot this year and over 6% will consume cannabis this month.  Can we really be safe as a society where 25 million of us are criminals loathe to cooperate and interact with police?

(The Denver Channel) DENVER — Two Denver elementary schools were put on temporary lockdown Wednesday morning after an armed robbery at a medical marijuana dispensary.

Munroe Elementary and Castro Elementary were locked down after shots were reported fired at The Healthy Choice Wellness Center, at 3005 W.Gill Place in southwest Denver. The lockdown was lifted shortly before noon.

According to a co-owner of the business, two people tried to rob the dispensary and shots were fired.

Three people were transported to the hospital with unknown injuries.

One of the robbers was arrested and a second robber is still being sought.

I can hear the reefer mad prohibitionists now, wailing about how the dispensaries bring crime and violence to the neighborhood and My God, What About the Children!?!

Why do people commit robbery?  In this case, they were either desperate for money or desperate for marijuana.

If they were desperate for money, they could’ve robbed a bank or a convenience store, and nobody would complain that we shouldn’t open banks and stores near schools.  They robbed a dispensary because it is flush with money, because marijuana prohibition keeps the price of marijuana artificially high.

If they were desperate for marijuana, either for themselves or for resale, then once again, it is the prohibition of marijuana that makes its theft a lucrative option and its acquisition more difficult for healthy people.

This is the backlash I fear on the path from medical marijuana to legalization.  For years we’ve been told drugs create violence, corruption, and death.  We know it is the prohibition, not the drugs, that is the cause (prohibit sugar and you’d see sugar gangs and sugar wars), but that point is missed by most of the public.

So when a violent armed robbery occurs in a dispensary, it’s their opportunity to say, “See, we legalized marijuana just a little bit and look what happened!  We told you drugs cause violence and crime!”  Where prohibition’s social harms had been blamed on the drug itself, now there’s the risk of the harms being blamed on the effort to legalize the drugs.

(Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice) The 2008 figures show California’s crime index (key offenses reported to police) stands at its lowest level since 1963, including the lowest rates of homicide in 40 years. Among youth, 2008 arrest rates continue the trend of the last seven years, with felony rates at their lowest level since statistics were first kept in 1955 and record-low overall arrest rates around half the level of the 1950s. For every race and both sexes, youth crime rates are at their lowest trough since reliable records have been kept.

Of course, “fair is fair”: those who would own crime decreases should also own crime increases. California’s new 2007 and 2008 figures contain some truly bad news as well: the aging crime and drug abuse waves continue to crest. Here, we have a pretty good idea what went wrong. Conservatives in power fought the 1980s and 1990s middle-aged drug and crime surge by tossing tens, then hundreds of thousands in prison for longer periods—which, it turns out, actually worsens addiction (who could have known?). Liberals ignored the crisis altogether and still do. In 2007, a record 4,100 Californians died from overdoses of illicit drugs, triple the number in 1980. Now we have what no one thought possible: a burgeoning 40- and 50-age crime epidemic, whose felony totals rocketed from 22,000 in 1980 to 112,000 in 2008.

How has California law enforcement attacked this graying crime scourge driven by surging abuse of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, pills, and booze? By drastically boosting arrests for one particular offense… wait for it… misdemeanor marijuana possession. Note carefully: arrest rates for violent crimes, property offenses, felony drug sales, all other drugs, all felonies, all misdemeanors—that is, virtually everything else—declined (often sharply) over the last 15 years. But arrests of Californians for simple marijuana possession rocketed from 21,000 in 1990 to 61,000 in 2008—a population-adjusted rate leap of 127%.

Where did this lunatic strategy come from? Granted, there’s a massive aging drug crisis bellowing for attention, but it’s not pot. Meanwhile, crime clearance reports show that in 2008, law enforcement FAILED to solve 43% of all reported murders, 58% of reported rapes, and 57% of felony violent crimes—one of the worst years for policing on record.

The reefer mad, like the “Officer X” who was on the Rob Van Dam show when I guested, would say that it’s because of the marijuana arrests that crime rates are so low.  This is what I call “Magic Tiger Rock thinking”.  See, I’ve had this magic tiger rock ever since I was a kid, and since I’ve had it, no tigers have attacked me.

Policing is a zero sum game.  Officer time spent on a misdemeanor marijuana possession arrest is time not spent on patrol for real crime.  This is how prohibition endangers even those who don’t use cannabis.  Busting potheads is an easy day at work.  Tracking down murderers, rapists, and thugs is real work… and those people shoot back!

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

Marijuana law reform is a civil rights struggle.  I will not attempt to equate this struggle to those of minorities, women, or gays and lesbians; however, there are some parallels among our fight and theirs and, indeed, some threads of drug law injustice are woven directly into the struggles of these groups.  The prohibition of drugs was one of the tools of oppression – the “Negroes” for their cocaine, the “Chinamen” for their opium, and the Mexicans for their marihuana.  It remains so today – while people use drugs at about the same rate regardless of race, African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and serve longer sentences for drug use than white people.

Aside from the racist nature of the origins and applications, cannabis prohibition itself is an unjust law.  First consider that it isn’t merely against the law to possess, cultivate, traffic, buy, and consume marijuana – it is against the law to be marijuana.  Federal and state law enforcement spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours flying helicopters attempting to spot cannabis growing out in the wild.  Ninety-eight percent of what is seized is known as “feral hemp”, which is wild ditchweed with unsmokably-low levels of THC.  Officials rip up and destroy every plant they see whether it is owned or tended by any human, whether or not it could possibly intoxicate any human.   Logically, then, the ultimate goal of marijuana prohibition is not to simply stop humans from using it for intoxication, but to eradicate the species cannabis sativa L. from the earth!

Think of that: our official policy is the extinction of a species of life.  Certainly that’s not entirely new.  We’re dedicated to the extinction of all manner of microscopic life, after all, but that is a justifiable policy for self-preservation – we kill bugs that kill us.  I cannot think of another plant or animal we treat like cannabis.  Deadly plants like nightshade and belladonna are legal, annoying plants like poison ivy and poison oak are legal, even intoxicating plants like coca and poppy are legal when cultivated for prescription medications.  But the cannabis plant, the plant that cannot kill you is completely illegal*.  The plant that can provide the food, clothing, shelter, and medicine humans need to survive is illegal.  Nature itself is illegal.  How much more contrary to eternal law and natural law could this unjust prohibition law be?

The fight against cannabis prohibition, against this unjust law, is a civil rights fight.  This declaration will offend some people who will point to four centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, to lynchings and cross burnings, and to beatings and firehoses and condemn my declaration as making light of the plight of those who were truly oppressed.  I do not make light of those struggles, but I also recognize that civil rights are not a zero sum game and the degree and manner in which one is being oppressed are not what make the fight against oppression a just one.  Dr. King dreamed of a day when children would be judged by not by the color of their skin but the content of their character; I dream of a day when workers are judged not by the metabolites in their urine but the quality of their work.

Later in King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. …

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. …

The unjust law of marijuana prohibition is difference made legal.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our intoxicant, but does not bind itself to forgo their intoxicant.  The majority compels our minority forgo our medicine, but does not bind itself to forgo their medicine.  The majority compels our minority to forgo their religious sacrament, but does not bind itself to forgo their religious sacrament.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our source of food, fuel, and fiber, but does not bind itself to forgo their sources.

The majority may argue that they do not prohibit intoxication, medication, religious sacrament, or food, fuel, and fiber cultivation, so long as it doesn’t involve marijuana.  This to me sounds like the argument against same-sex marriage rights, that gays and lesbians are just as free to marry someone of the opposite sex as everybody else.  If we are given a right, but then proscribed from exercising that right in the manner that benefits us without a valid reason from the majority, it is not really a right.  When intoxication, medication, and sacrament are legal rights, but we are proscribed from using a demonstrably safer intoxicant, medicine, and sacrament, that is difference made legal.

No, we do not face the firehoses and the dogs and the lynchings, nor do we suffer in as great of numbers as did the African Americans Dr. King so graciously led in the years before my birth.  Our oppression is more subtle and codified into laws that restrict our housing, employment, and educational opportunities.  We do not tremble in fear of the midnight ride of white-robed vigilante Klansmen; our terror comes in the form of midnight no-knock raids of body-armored SWAT teams.

Like the civil rights struggles of the past, we work to change laws that oppress people, laws that enjoy support from the majority and are rationalized by tradition, religion, and junk science.  Unlike the civil rights struggles of the past, our constituency is an invisible group defined by lifestyle, not genetics.  That choice to use cannabis should not disqualify our fight to be treated as equals under the law.  After all, the choice to worship the God of your understanding is not genetic, it is a lifestyle choice as well, and our law recognizes that one cannot be discriminated against for that choice.  In fact, it is a bit ironic that one’s choice of God, a belief that cannot be proven by science to beneficial, is a protected right, yet one’s choice of cannabis, a plant that can be proven by science to be beneficial, is a federal crime.

The freedom to worship, of course, is an explicit right recognized by our First Amendment, but its foundation is in the inalienable rights given to us by our Creator, among them being Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness.  If that last one – the Pursuit of Happiness – doesn’t give me the right to smoke a joint so long as I don’t affect anyone else’s Life and Liberty, then the Constitution isn’t worth the hemp paper on which it was drafted.

Also from King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

Today’s freedom fighters are the people like Eddy Lepp and Charles Lynch, providing aid and comfort to the sick and dying by growing and supplying them with medicine, only to face the rest of their natural lives behind bars because what they did was “illegal”.

Today’s “whites-only” establishments are the “drug-free” workplaces keep cannabis users confined to low-paying part-time or temp service jobs, while the rest of the workers are allowed all the alcohol, nicotine, and prescription medications they desire.

Today’s lynchings are the Rachel Hoffmans and Jonathan Magbies who are murdered by police negligence, solely over their use of cannabis.  Today’s institutionalized discrimination is the over 20 million in my lifetime whose lives are marked with the scarlet letter of a drug conviction, affecting their child custody, government assistance, college financial aid, employment opportunities, professional licenses, voting rights, and liberty.

The prohibition of cannabis ultimately degrades human personality and is against moral law.  It is an unjust law that cannot stand, and we have a moral responsibility to disobey it.  In doing so, we express the highest respect for the law.  On this day when we recognize the greatness of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream, and on tomorrow, when we see part of that dream fulfilled, remember that we don’t fight to “make pot legal so you can get high”; we fight because the Pursuit of Happiness is our right and caging us for our method of pursuit is unjust.

Smoking pot is our civil right!

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

* I recognize that marijuana is legally grown at ElSohly’s lab at the University of Mississippi.  But consider that marijuana’s two purposes – to supply five people grandfathered in to the IND program and to provide marijuana for studies to prove how awful marijuana is to justify its prohibition.  In this metaphor it would be akin to saving a few vials of polio virus so you could use them to make vaccines.

States ponder early release for prisoners – Economy in Turmoil- msnbc.com
NEW YORK – Their budgets in crisis, governors, legislators and prison officials across the nation are making or considering policy changes that will likely remove tens of thousands of offenders from prisons and parole supervision.

In California, faced with a projected $42 billion deficit and prison overcrowding that has triggered a federal lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000. He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates — steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.

In Kentucky, where the inmate population had been soaring, even some murderers and other violent offenders are benefiting from a temporary cost-saving program that has granted early release to nearly 2,000 inmates.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is proposing early release of about 1,000 inmates. New York Gov. David Paterson wants early release for 1,600 inmates as well as an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.

Here’s an idea: how about you stop arresting so many of those non-violent drug offenders in the first place?  Based on the numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2007:

• California arrested 289,449 people for drugs
• Kentucky arrested 11,883 people for drugs
• Virginia arrested 32,941 people for drugs
• New York arrested 61,163 people for drugs

Now if it is too scary to think about not arresting the users of all illegal drugs, let’s narrow it down to cannabis.  The FBI didn’t give me state-level breakdowns of cannabis arrests, but nationwide cannabis accounts for 47% of all drug arrests.  For the four states mentioned, that’s 185,854 cannabis arrests, and since 89% of those are possession-only arrests, that’s 165,410 otherwise law-abiding pot smokers arrested – not growers, traffickers, or dealers, just tokers.

To be fair, most of these 165,410 don’t spend much more than their booking time in a jail.  But it still takes time, money, and space to prosecute them and that begins to add up.  If these four states mentioned just taxed and regulated cannabis like Jagermeister, combined they’d raise $1.9 billion every year.  That wouldn’t completely solve these states’ budget crises, but it sure would keep a few more actual criminals behind bars.