SouthCoastToday.com: What is law enforcement smoking to oppose Question 2?
All the suits who make a living — monetarily, politically and otherwise — off the criminal marijuana laws were there the other day…, ready to protect the public against… those horrible marijuana laws, the ones that if we don’t keep in place, everyone in Massachusetts under 18 will soon be heading for the corner drug dealer. As if any kid who wants to doesn’t do that now.

But there they stood the other day, Bristol and Barnstable counties’ finest, all the folks employed by this big, big government business we call the War on Drugs…. They were competing with each other for most alarmist comment of the day.

“This will lead to more violence,” said Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter…, ”This ridiculous initiative would put our children and young people in dangerous situations” with violent marijuana dealers, he intoned.

And “I don’t want to hear,” he said, those “specious” and “bogus” arguments that marijuana is like alcohol. Alcohol, he informed the media event, can have health benefits. You know, like wine, he said.

And tobacco? Why, that takes a long time to do damage, he informed.

Not to be outdone, Fall River Mayor Bob Correia trotted out the time-tested “gateway” argument.

“Marijuana,” he said, is “the one they start our children off with!”

Ah, the children. It’s always the children.

So on went the show, speaker after speaker pointing out that hard drug users are also marijuana users and that they inhabit a violent economy.

So what? These hoods are also alcohol users, and maybe a lot of them like pizza, too.

The only guy to bring a modicum of reality to the proceedings was Barnstable County Sheriff Jim Cummings. He sounded as if he knew he was trapped in a politically-correct soap box but dared not get out.

“This morning, in the Barnstable County correctional facility, no one there was serving time for 1 ounce or less of marijuana,” he said.

The sheriff was conceding that no one even prosecutes for 1 ounce or less of marijuana now! But he quickly slipped back into the gateway argument, saying it’s just “common sense” that decriminalizing marijuana sends the wrong message about other DRUGS!…

All the blue-shirts in the world speaking authoritatively won’t change the fact that the 50-year drug war has failed relentlessly.

The simple fact is — as was proven during equally crime-ridden Prohibition — you can’t enforce a law the public is determined to ignore.

The Barnstable County sheriff’s argument is one of my favorites: We don’t really lock anyone up for simple possession of marijuana, so it is vitally important that we keep the laws that allow us to lock anyone up for simple possession of marijuana!  The corollary, of course, is that marijuana is such a deadly dangerous addictive gateway to hard drugs, violence, and crime, yet we don’t lock anybody up for it.

Make up your minds, fellas!  If it’s so dangerous, why aren’t you locking people up?  If you’re not locking people up, how can it be so dangerous?

As the writer, Jack Spillane of South Coast Today.com noted, the danger is that some law enforcement types might lose their jobs without the make-work possession arrests of cannabis users.