800,000 Americans Busted Annually For Pot - A Downside
9 November 2009By
Sherwood Ross
Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995
on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in
federal and State prisons---but the public is starting
to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two
political scientists say. Thousands of other pot users
and sellers are confined in local jails as well.
“People convicted of possessing even one ounce of
marijuana can face a mandatory minimum sentence of a
year in jail, and having even one plant in your yard
is a federal felony,” progressive organizer Jim
Hightower and co-author Phillip Frazer point out in
the November issue of “The Hightower Lowdown.”
Police arrest someone in America every 36 seconds on
marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made
in 2007, “more than for all violent crimes combined,”
Hightower and Frazer point out. They note that 89 per
cent of all marijuana arrests “are for simple
possession of the weed, not for producing or selling
it.”
They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than
marijuana itself ever will,” because (1) it diverts
hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious
crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; (2) it
costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to
catch, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and
sellers; (3) it enables government to snatch the cars,
money, computers and other properties of people caught
up in drug raids even if they have had no charges
filed against them; and (4) it allows “police agents
at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their
eagerness to nab pot consumers.”
The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in
the form of unjust sentencing, which confines
crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for
longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly
white.
Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted
the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in
non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search
warrants to be used in drug war probes, including
pursuit of marijuana users. The Act’s provisions were
supposed to be applied only for suspected terrorist
acts. Only three of the Justice Department’s 763
requests for “sneak-and-peak” last year were used for
terrorism searches, they report in Lowdown.
By outlawing drugs, Hightower and Frazer contend,
Congress has created “a vast, murderous narco-state
within Mexico” to satisfy U.S. consumer demand for the
drugs. And Plan Colombia, the multi-billion operation
started by Bill (“I didn’t inhale”) Clinton in 2000 to
eradicate cocoa production there, has failed, judging
by the 15 per cent increase in coca production.
For all the legislation against it, pot is more
plentiful than ever and 10 per cent of Americans told
surveyors they have enjoyed using it in the previous
year while four in ten say they used it at some point
in their lives. Plus, a 2005 survey found 85 per cent
of high school seniors claimed pot was “easy to get”,
easier than alcohol, which is a regulated drug,
Hightower Lowdown points out.
The publication quotes a University of Michigan
student who told them, “If the government trusts
society to use alcohol responsibly, it is idiotic to
assume citizens are somehow incapable of responsible
use of cannabis.”
A Gallup opinion poll in 2005 found that 51 per cent
of Americans stating alcohol is more dangerous than
marijuana and 52 per cent saying it should be
legalized, taxed, and regulated.
State and local governments, Hightower and Frazer
report, “have begun walking step by step away from the
weed war.” Since 1996, 13 states from Rhode Island to
Alaska have passed laws to allow growing and
distribution of doctor-prescribed marijuana for
medical purposes. What’s more, pot possession is no
longer criminalized in a dozen states: Alaska,
California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio,
and Oregon.
The drive now is for outright legalization of pot, the
authors say. This would enable officials to take the
exorbitant profit and violence out of illicit
black-market weed by legalizing it and turning it into
a revenue-producer that would rake in tax dollars.
Instead, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
says, Americans spend $9 billion a year buying pot
from Mexico; $10 billion on pot from Canada, and $39
billion on home-grown pot, now America’s Numero Uno
cash crop---“topping the value of corn and wheat
combined.” By one estimate, legalization would produce
annual tax revenues of $6.2 billion. In Portugal,
which legalized all drugs in 2001, hard drug use has
showed a stunning decline while the numbers of people
getting detox aid has soared, Time magazine reported
last April 26th. By contrast, USA has the highest
rates of drug use in the world.
As Rep. Barney Frank has said, “I now think it’s time
for the politicians to catch up to the public. The
notion that you lock people up for smoking marijuana
is pretty silly.”
There is, however, a downside to the legalization of
pot: some of the individuals in the legal system who
depend on the arrests of pot smokers might have to
find worthwhile jobs instead. Look at all the
paychecks that get cut: The cops make their collars.
The bail bondsmen get their rake off. The prosecutors
make their cases. The social workers write up their
interviews. The clerks push their papers. The lawyers
collect their fees. The judges render their verdicts.
The prison guards make their rounds. The vendors sell
their baloney sandwiches. The construction firms build
their additions. And the shrinks nod their heads.
One last thought: cigarettes kill 440,000 Americans
every year and sicken millions---but no one reportedly
ever has been killed by smoking a joint. If the
growers and peddlers of pot belong in jail, where do
the manufacturers of brand name cigarettes and cigars
belong? In two years’ time they kill more Americans
than all the Blue and Grays who died (620,000) in the
Civil War. Indeed, in the next two years, 440 times as
many Americans will be killed by smoking cigarettes
than all U.S. troops killed in six years of fighting
in Iraq. While this writer opposes the use of all
drugs, and does not indulge himself, it’s easy to see
the prosecution of pot smokers and growers for
victimless crimes is, as Hightower Lowdown (lowdown@pipeline.com)
reports, “preposterous.”
(Reach the author, a former reporter for the Chicago
Daily News, at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)
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