(Harm Reduction Journal) Background: As the “war on drugs” enters the latter half of its third decade since being forged into the American lexicon by President Ronald Reagan, the public has grown more skeptical of the current strategy and has proven to be receptive to a broader consideration of alternatives to incarceration. This has been the case most notably with marijuana offenses, where the policy discussion has shifted in some localities to one of decriminalization or de-prioritizing law enforcement resources dedicated to pursuing possession offenses. Despite the increased profile surrounding marijuana policy in recent years, there remains a significant degree of misunderstanding regarding the current strategy, both in terms of how resources are being allocated and to what eventual gain.

Methods: Previous studies have analyzed drug offenses as a general category, but there has yet to be a single study that has focused specifically on marijuana offenders at all stages of the system. This report analyzes multiple sources of data for the period 1990–2002 from each of the critical points in the criminal justice system, from arrest through court processing and into the correctional system, to create an overall portrait of this country’s strategy in dealing with marijuana use.

Results: The study found that since 1990, the primary focus of the war on drugs has shifted to low-level marijuana offenses. During the study period, 82% of the increase in drug arrests nationally (450,000) was for marijuana offenses, and virtually all of that increase was in possession offenses. Of the nearly 700,000 arrests in 2002, 88% were for possession. Only 1 in 18 of these arrests results in a felony conviction, with the rest either being dismissed or adjudicated as a misdemeanor, meaning that a substantial amount of resources, roughly $4 billion per year for marijuana alone, is being dedicated to minor offenses.

Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that law enforcement resources are not being effectively allocated to offenses which are most costly to society. The financial and personnel investment in marijuana offenses, at all points in the criminal justice system, diverts funds away from other crime types, thereby representing a questionable policy choice.

Ah, but those funds are being effectively allocated to offenses that keep cops employed, arrest numbers up, and grant and seizure money flowing.  Law enforcement can point to the increase in “drug abuse” arrests and say how awful the drug problem has become to justify bigger budgets.  If other crime types should increase due to diversion of manpower and money to pot offenses, then law enforcement points at increased crime and tells us how much crime has risen because of the awful drug abuse problem.

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Wayne Kramer’s post on returning to Sing Sing prison to perform a concert with Tom Morello, Jerry Cantrell, Billy Bragg, Perry Farrell, and other musicians:

(Huffington Post) The Sing Sing show was a bonus. To say it was memorable would be a massive understatement. As would be understating the importance of reaching out to the people on the receiving end of the greatest failure of social policy in America’s domestic history.

You would have to be living on the moon to not know what a disaster the “War On Drugs” has been. Twenty billion dollars a year for the last 30 years, two million Americans in prison — 60% of them non-violent drug offenders — and you can go out on any American street corner and buy cheaper, higher quality heroin and cocaine than you could anywhere in America 30 years ago. The political expediency of “get tough on crime” along with the sure-fire vote getting “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality has successfully created the highly profitable Prison Industrial Complex.

On Saturday, I asked a corrections officer at Sing Sing what the prisoner population in New York State is right now. “Just over 50,000,” she replied. Then, it occurred to me: When I was imprisoned for drug offenses in the 1970s, the entire Federal Prison population totaled just over 50,000 inmates. Then the C.O. added that, when she started her career in corrections 20 years ago, there were 23 prisons in New York State. As I write this today, there are over 60!

Crime stats have stayed consistent over the last 30 years, but incarceration rates have more than quadrupled. It’s the human cost that has been the most damaging. I’m talking about non-violent drug offenders. Countless families broken up, the marriages destroyed, three generations of kids with fathers (and mothers) in and out of the system. These are mostly brown and black people. People from America’s cities who, as screenwriter David Simon describes them, “Leftover people. People who were necessary in an industrial America but who are of no use to the economy today.” Non-violent drug offenders who are locked up are people who are pawns in urban political gamesmanship. Nobody talks about them. There’s no political will to look at it. There’s no political capital in it. It’s a no-winner. But, there’s certainly money in prison building and guard hiring.

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Imagine a quiet, residential neighborhood in which two dogs are roaming unleashed. One is a 90-pound pit bull that has mauled to death several children and multiple family pets; the other is a 10-pound poodle that, other than violating the leash law, has done no harm. The public policy question is this: Should the local dogcatcher spend his time in pursuit of the pit bull or the poodle?

The dogcatcher’s first priority, it seems rational to conclude, is to neutralize the more ominous threat, but public policy is often irrational. The federal government’s “War on Drugs” is a conspicuous example. In effect, the government has unleashed the murderous pit bull (alcohol) while dispatching agents by the dozen to chase the poodle (marijuana). This, despite the fact that the harm inflicted upon society by alcohol is exponentially more severe than the collateral damage incurred by marijuana.

It’s worse than that. Imagine that in that neighborhood, the children are subjected 24/7 to advertisements on their TV telling them that pit bulls are cool, pit bulls are sexy, all the cool people have pit bulls, wait til you’re 21 but then, by God, get yourself a pit bull!

Poodles?  The very spawn of Cerberus itself  — demon dogs!  Whatever you do, kids, don’t even think of touching a poodle!  Poodles are vicious killer dogs, and once you pet a poodle, you’ll want to pet coyotes, wolves, and even bears!

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(Before we start: Change.gov is Barack Obama’s official transition website.  Change.org is not affiliated with Obama, but is a collection of non-profits lobbying the Obama Administration.)

The first time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana and made it the #1 question.  Obama answered “No” and offered no explanation.

The second time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  To balance the responses they created categories of requests instead of one big open poll.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana, making it the #4 question overall and #1 within the National Security category (as “end the war on drugs”).  Obama didn’t even answer, but instead referred to the previous “No” and no explanation.

So now, the third time, Barack Obama’s Change.gov is opening up “the Citizen’s Briefing Book”, where once again, citizens can submit their policy ideas and vote on the ideas.  Guess which policy idea is #1 again, with “44,950 points” (whatever “points” are) as of this posting?

Ending Marijuana Prohibition
I suggest that we step back and take a non-biased “Science Based” approach to decide what should be done about the “Utter Failure” that we call the War on (some) Drugs.

The fact is that Marijuana is much less harmful to our bodies than other Legal Drugs such as Tobacco and Alcohol. And for the Government to recognize Marijuana as having Medicinal Properties AND as a Schedule I drug (Has NO medicinal Properties) is an obvious flaw in the system.

We must stop imprisoning responsible adult citizens choosing to use a drug that has been mis-labeled for over 70 years.

Click over if you like and vote.  It may get just as much notice as the first two times (none), but clicking is free and easy.  The effect of having one of the most popular issues rise again and again, only to be ignored, is building this story in the media.  We’ve got the people directly asking Obama three times to rethink the drug war, Change.org will present that same notion from The People tomorrow, and Congress had to resort to blackmail to get El Paso city leaders to shut up about it.  The ONLY person who doesn’t want to talk about this is Barack Obama, and that’s going to become a deadly meme for the “open and transparent, change we can believe in, government responsive to the people, reliant on science” aura Obama wants to build in his Administration.

(I think a few “Why Won’t You Talk About The Drug War?” signs at the Inauguration would be a beautiful site to see, don’t you?)

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