Marijuana: Less of a priority
By Nick Ellerbrock
IV Leader Columnist, Oct. 2, 2003
A few days ago I read that the people of Seattle voted in favor of Initiative 75, which makes the city’s prosecution of marijuana possession the city’s “lowest law enforcement policy.” This means that marijuana possession is now considered even less of a priority than parking tickets.
Such a decision is a real turnaround from the Bush administration’s current philosophy on the drug. Thanks to the President, if you are arrested with a joint you are no longer eligible to receive financial aid, though if you’re a convicted murderer you’re still eligible.
His demonizing of a relatively harmless drug is comparable to President Reagan, who during his term said that medical professionals were finding that marijuana was the most dangerous drug in America. Or Bush’s father, who proposed that drug trafficking, even trafficking of marijuana, should be grounds for the death penalty.
This country came close to finally stop making criminals out of honest citizens starting in 1972 with the Ann Arbor City Ordinance to make possession of marijuana equivalent to a parking ticket, much like what we are seeing in Seattle. In 1973, the first state to actually decriminalize marijuana was Oregon, and soon 10 other states joined.
This decision was partly based on the findings of a committee set up to advise President Nixon on the dangers of the drug. They found none (even so, Nixon still continued his War on Marijuana). The DEA’s law judge Francis Young even stated, “In strict medical terms, marijuana is safer than many foods we commonly consume.” However, starting with the Reagan presidency, the idea of decriminalization faded away.
Though most officials say the War on Marijuana is aimed at the seller, not the user, statistics show otherwise. In the year 2000, 88 percent of the nearly 735,000 people arrested for marijuana were arrested for possession only. That amounts to about 646,000 people who now have criminal records for possessing the buds of a harmless plant. And let’s not forget that about $215 billion of our tax money was spent on the War on Marijuana between 1980 and 1998.
I applaud the people of Seattle for standing up against this ridiculous prohibition, and I hope to see many more cities and states follow.