The Hill Blog – Criminalization of Marijuana Must End
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 10:15 am | By: Radical Russ
NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre is featured in a post on the influential blog, “The Hill”, a daily read for most of the politicians in Washington DC. Here’s a snippet:
Topics: Allen St. Pierre, The Hill, Washington DCThe Hill Blog» Blog Archive » Criminalization of Marijuana Must End
Each year in this country we arrest more and more of our citizens on cannabis charges. In 2006, the last year for which the data is available, we arrested 830,000 Americans on cannabis charges, and 88% of those arrests were for personal possession and use, not trafficking. They were otherwise law-abiding citizens who consume cannabis.Since 1965, a total of nearly 20 million Americans – predominantly young people under the age of 30 — have been arrested on cannabis charges; more than 11 million cannabis arrests just since 1990. Thousands have been disenfranchised, tens of thousands have been unnecessarily sent to “drug treatment,” hundreds of thousands have lost their eligibility for student aid, and perhaps an entire generation (or two) has been alienated to believe that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection.
Currently 47% of all drug arrests in the country are for cannabis, and another cannabis consumer is arrested every 38 seconds. Police arrest more people on cannabis charges each year than the total number of arrestees for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
Of course, not everyone busted for possessing small amounts of pot receives jail time — most do not. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer significant hardships stemming from their arrest. Seldom emphasized penalties associated with a minor cannabis conviction include probation and mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, removal from subsidized housing, asset forfeiture, loss of federal student aid, loss of voting privileges, loss of adoption rights, and the loss of certain federal welfare benefits such as food stamps. In many states, convicted cannabis offenders are automatically stripped of their driving privileges, even if the offense is not driving related. Thousands of Americans suffer such sanctions every day.
