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10 December 2012
MARIJUANA: The legalization of marijuana is a major milestone in the effort to end the War on Drugs.
By Kayla Chang
This past election, voters in Washington and Colorado passed historic measures legalizing recreational marijuana use. These results invited an endless barrage of hackneyed munchies jokes from major news anchors and pundits, who apparently only saw this as an opportunity to relive their college days through thinly veiled stoner references. (Except Fox, the incontinent old man of cable news, who voiced its concern over people now potentially driving while “potted up on weed.” Oh well. Still safer than voting while Fox-ed up on delusion.) But by legalizing marijuana, these states are sending an important message to the federal government: end the War on Drugs.
This is what the American people are pushing for. This is the next chapter in our nation’s history. 26 states have either legalized medical marijuana use or passed laws minimizing and/or eliminating penalties for possession of small amounts of cannabis. Counting up the electoral votes from those states, the number comes to 271—one more than needed to elect a president. Furthermore, a Gallup poll last year found that 50 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legalized—up 4 percent from the previous year and the highest since 1969, when Gallup first started tracking public attitudes on cannabis. And these numbers—like a well-watered marijuana plant, incidentally—just keep growing.
Keeping marijuana illegal has serious implications for American pot smokers and non-smokers alike—implications beyond having one’s “mellow harshed.” It’s created a non-taxed underground industry and tossed non-violent offenders into private prisons for minor drug infractions, all while doing nothing to decrease marijuana consumption. It’s not about rehabilitation; it’s about making money. These prisons are for-profit corporations that rely on incarceration for their government checks, and they don’t care how many people they have to imprison in order to max out the stockholders’ bottom line.
And it doesn’t stop at marijuana. What essentially started as an overreaction to hippies has now escalated into a 40-year, trillion-dollar war. Ever year, $25 billion that could be spent on education and rehabilitation is instead funneled into a draconian, counterproductive drug war that has made us the chief jailer of the world. America contains 5 percent of the world’s population, yet 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Crime rates have declined over the last 20 years, yet incarceration rates have climbed through the roof. I suppose that’s one way to end poverty: just arrest all the poor people.
This so-called “War on Drugs” has been a war on anything but. It’s been used as everything from a pretext for clamping down on immigration to a way of boosting the pharmaceutical industry’s sale of drug addiction, legal and sanitized for your convenience. Heavily armed bootleggers—I mean traffickers—get rich feeding America’s demand for drugs, and banks get rich by destroying homes and confiscating private property. Police invade poor countries—I mean neighborhoods—to get terrorists—I mean drug dealers—and accidentally kill and imprison thousands of innocent people. So who actually benefits from the war? Cops and crooks—real crooks.
African-Americans have, as in almost every other aspect of American society, been disproportionately targeted in the drug war. Since 1994, incarceration of African-Americans has rocketed 500 percent, again despite the declining crime rate. And despite the fact that white people actually smoke pot in greater numbers than black people. I guess it’s no surprise; it’s the new Jim Crow. It’s yet another way of color-coding the population so that society may easily identify the criminals. The drug war has strained the sociological ecosystem of the black community and, wittingly or unwittingly, perpetuated the idea that skin suffices as a prison uniform.
The legalization of marijuana would be a huge step toward ending this war. Representatives of the states that have already acted in defiance of the federal government should push harder. The collateral of the drug war—civil rights, Central America, Fourth Amendment, inner cities—is human collateral. Don’t let your leaders stop pushing, don’t them drag their feet, don’t let them collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. Something must be done, and soon.
So lawmakers, jump on the bandwagon. Or jump, miss, snag your shirt collar on the back and get dragged along screaming helplessly. Either way, you’re coming with us.