Only a matter of time before every state in the union follows suit, like gay marriage last decade. Then we get to work freeing everyone jailed for this.
Not just freeing people from jail but to finally stop prosecuting people and wasting 100's of millions in Tax Payer Money. How many young people have had their lives ruined over a joint? When I think of all the poor kids who got fucked over, that was the real crime. Any politician who stands in the way of legalization should be thrown out of Government, including the President.
I’ve been involved in dealing with pre-employment criminal background check red flags, and the number of times I’ve had to tell our (US) HR people that we don’t care if someone got busted for smoking low-quality pot in their college town once, it’s just one of the things that people learning about the world may try and do. I know I did.
The gratefulness of these hires is awful to see. And these are the middle class ones. Poorer and more disadvantaged groups have even less likelihood than otherwise of being in our hiring funnel because of this.
Strike these victimless “crimes” from the public record.
Straight facts. There is hundreds of millions not only wasted, but also much more than that to be made in tax revenue by legalizing and taxing it. The fact these people focused on petty crime and punishing people is sickening.
The reason I feel federally they will delay legalizing it as much as possible is due to tax revenue. Due to it being illegally federally, the irs does not allow anyone to write off their expenses accept expenses that contribute to the cost of goods sold. This increases the effective tax rate drastically
> "As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life," Mr Obama said.
>But he added that in terms of its impact on the individual consumer "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol".
I honestly think it’ll pass federally before most of the remaining holdout states come on over. I’m saying this from having worked in the industry. There’s very little resistance at the federal level other than inertia, and quite a lot of red state resistance.
You’re right that direct democracy measures are a correlation. My point was not that there’s a red/blue divide in current law, but that my educated experience working in the industry informs me that there’s low political will in many red states to legalize & high political pressure to resist it. I’m very familiar with the legal map, don’t need a wiki link thanks.
That's exactly what will happen. There will be at least 10-15 permanent holdout states that will never willingly legalize it. The same was going to be true of gay marriage. As a union we don't have to care about those holdout states, their positions are meaningless, just have to get a strong majority of the states on board and it's going to be taken care of at the federal level.
I'm not sure to what extent that's a political advocacy organization, so let's just call 0.1% a lower bound. The absolute upper bound is ~5%: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/985996204986241026 But that assumes that everyonearrested for marijuana possession (even if it was only one of the charges) was incarcerated. But that's absolutely not the case. Rather, marijuana arrests are almost always pretextual and used to intimidate; basically, catch & release.
There sure are a ridiculous number of arrests, though, and these days having any kind of arrest on your record can be a significant handicap.
First, those sources are terrible. The first is a single treatment center, with an obvious bias, that provides zero methodology. The second at least seems like a decent authority, but provides no reason to believe his statement.
Second, the actual number of people in for marijuana far outnumbers those charged with possession. Both sources ignore those arrested for "drug trafficking" violations which would still be misdemeanors at best under the new laws, neither considers what various three strike laws have done, and god knows how many people took a plea for something not labeled possession.
AFAICT, the 600k figure comes the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. And the author of that tweet is a criminal law and criminal justice scholar, currently a professor at Fordham University. I don't remember reading any of his works specifically, but I have read plenty of scholarship on the issue. This summary, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/how-we-misunde..., of his latest book seems consonant with everything I've read.
Criminal justice reform advocates created, or at least found themselves with, a particular narrative around the drug wars that heavily emphasized and even exaggerated aspects such as incarceration. That narrative helped to generate support for reform, but it wasn't very accurate. The truth is more complex, but no less in need of addressing. But if you don't have an accurate understanding of the underlying dynamics (e.g. not just that the system is racist, but why and how--those are vary important details) you're not going to be able to remediate it very well.
>And the author of that tweet is a criminal law and criminal justice scholar, currently a professor at Fordham University
Yes, an excellent authority, but it is still just an appeal to authority. The first one was the truly objectionable one.
I'm not saying that legalizing marijuana will solve all the legal systems problems, but it would remove a significant weight from an overburdened system. ~5% of prisoners alone is a lot of people, plus think of how many public defender hours are spent on these matters.
I am the last person to ask for a citation, but you are responding to a comment which provided one, so your lack thereof does hurt your credibility.
I would be very interested to know what the numbers are for each of the instances you claim, as well as how many of those people were only charged with marajuana offences. It is very common for people to be charged with drug and violent crimes, but 'plead out' of the violent crimes; these people would likely have been jailed/imprisoned for the latter crimes alone (though perhaps for less time).
I would need a citation if I was saying the figures they claim are wrong. I'm saying they provide no detail on how they got those figures, have clear monetary interest, and are only presenting a portion of the people in jail for marijuana charges. My "source" is reading the sources the poster provided.
I think you misunderstand the impetus for freeing the people arrested for breaking marijuana laws. It isn't just to reduce crowding in jails -- it's to free people who were arrested and imprisoned under an unjust and insane law.
Sure, even if it's a merely a fraction of the prison population, the sheer human cost of those remaining in prison is incalculable. Still, from a public policy point of view at some point it sort of becomes indistinguishable from the background population of those unjustly incarcerated for myriad other reasons, and trotting out rare examples of long-term marijuana possession prisoners confuses the debate.
We're like 15 years into marijuana decriminalization--actual decriminalization at the state and even Federal level, not simple advocacy. It became a mostly bipartisan endeavor, at least on the national level since at least 2015 when Paul Ryan became Speaker. Though for various reasons most of the GOP remain non-committal, and will only tacitly support passive decriminalization.
Nonetheless, that's at least 15 years of slowly emptying our prisons of not only marijuana offenders, but drug offenders generally. The state of affairs today is nothing like the numbers that advocates were throwing around 15 years ago (and what most people still believe is the case), and even then they were exaggerated. There's still a ton more that needs to be done, and some reforms even need to be walked back or reverted because it turns out decriminalization alone exposes some serious problems and deficiencies elsewhere in the system. But if everybody's empathy is focused on the de minimis incarceration problem it's difficult to regroup and shift efforts.
Even take it at face value .1% of 2.3 million people incarcerated is 2000 people. Then you have to consider the number of people who get criminal charges on the record and face employment issues in the future because of it
Even if we pretend it's such a low number (which it's obviously not), the even bigger problem with marijuana criminalization laws is the terror they cause. They terrorize the population, literally. It's government tyranny flat out. It's unjust, it's evil, it's cruel to torture your citizens that way, that they should have to live in fear when they're not harming other people.
The politicians that produced and executed the war on drugs across decades are all vile bastards, on both sides of the political spectrum. Anyone involved should never be allowed to hold elected office, and that includes the current President.
The burden should be on the government to have moral reasoning for incarcerating people. As long as they aren’t harming others, people should not have to change their behavior to avoid incarceration
What about all the people who are harassed and/or killed in situations where cops would otherwise have no reason to? What about the extreme race disparity in who is charged with marijuana+other crimes?
Your dubious metric, if true, does not capture the essence of the problem.
When talking about the prison population in America, keep in mind that America has the largest prison population in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita.
So when you talk about the percentage of people locked up for X is small, this is skewed by the vast amount of people we lock up in general. If X is small compared to the prison population as a whole, it may still be an awful lot of people.
Exactly, now you're getting it. Certainly all people jailed for personal possession of any kind of drug and all small scale dealers should be pardoned and dealt with by social workers instead, or simply allowed to live their lives unharassed.
Another thought comes to mind (which I mention just for novelty's sake): even if a full rational analysis says that taking, say, heroin is a bad idea (for pretty much anyone who plans to live for more than a year, or whatever), it seems legalization should open the door to people tweaking the formula to come up with something with similar positive effects and fewer drawbacks. It seems to me that a great way to get people to stop taking dangerous drugs is to make something that's just better and is also less dangerous.
I've read a few things over the years saying that medical and psychiatric researchers (all but the bravest) have absolutely avoided doing anything remotely connected to the illegal drugs because of fear; given marijuana's use in pain management, and more recent results about psychedelics being possibly useful to treat depression and PTSD, this has probably set back research by years, possibly decades.
There are countries with prescription heroin, safe injecting rooms and addiction support not just looking at mental health, but also housing, work and relationships.
There are indications that this strategy works in decreasing harm, decreasing economic impact, and decreasing supply by drying up demand in illegal supply chains.
As always with public health and challenges to existing socio-cultural norms, there’s a lot of room to further discuss.
Diamorphine is already very safe, has few side effects, and is commonly used as a stronger version of morphine in cancer treatment.
What is diamorphine? Well, it's the scientific name for heroin. However, it differs from the drug in being far purer, being used in a clinical setting, and with carefully controlled dosages. Other than that, it's identical to heroin.
This means we can conclude that the negative aspects of heroin come from impurities, addiction, mental health issues of the users, unsafe injection practices, and unknown strengths resulting in overdose.
You can, with access to medical grade heroin, use it occasionally with no negative side effects. We know this because it is used daily in hospitals around the world.
Please read up on the crack epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. You probably didn't live through it so see what widespread drug use does to society and especially cities.
Not sure why everyone is so obsessed with the federal elections. Things take time and often bubble up via states.
The US needs more decentralization if it want's progress on a realistic timeline (ie, one that reflects the populace). It also helps weeds out the more radical emotion-driven stuff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but California is the US's highest spending state [0] with a budget of around 200 billion. Its entire budget is smaller than the US Federal government's deficit (measured in single digit trillions).
The reason everyone cares about federal elections is because there are earth-shattering amounts of money involved. The resources that get consumed have to come from somewhere.
It's about half entitlements, 27% Medic* + 22% SS, and this percentage will increase quickly.
But that's still $3T for other stuff in average years. Plus they just passed $2T of extra one-off spending for the second time in a year.
That means the Federal government is basically taking all the spending power of the nation and then redistributing it, giving it enormous power compared to the states.
If anything, the US’s progress is being held back by
federal government inaction. The freedom to move across state lines causes many problems that require taxpayer subsidies to solve.
For example, no state can offer taxpayer funded healthcare, because it would attract benefit recipients and would repel taxpayers.
And no state can offer housing for homeless, for the same reason as the above.
*Almost every state. Eventually it'll become a pissing contest for which one can hold off on legalization the longest, until they are dragged kicking and screaming.
See South Dakota, where a constitutional amendment passed on the ballot but the asshole governor is still trying to block it in court. One of her main reasons? Setting up the new licensing laws would cost ~$4 million dollars and the predicted tax revenue of $10 million a year won't come in til 2022 at the earliest. How they can make that argument with a straight face is beyond me.
Look at what happened in Idaho. They past joint resolution 101 and now it's part of the State Constitution where even if the voters vote to legalize it will never be allowed. Totally Insane.
See Idaho attempting to pass a constitutional amendment banning any legalization, even medical.
Passed the senate with a 2/3 supermajority a couple days ago, about to go to the house for a supermajority vote, then a simple majority ballot measure in 2022.
Some states will simply not pursue legalization until their voting demographics have turned over sufficiently to elect more progressive representation (and the Marijuana Policy Project, who has championed legalization in many states, has said there are only a few states left where this can be done with a ballot initiative versus state legislature).
For many, they’ll need to vote with their feet and migrate to better states. Or the federal government legalizes it.
> until their voting demographics have turned over sufficiently to elect more progressive representation
Which for a large number of states is never. Let's not pretend there aren't many states out there that would eagerly overturn all social progress we have made in the last 50 years tomorrow if they could, fully supported by a voting majority of their constituents.
We didn't wait for states to abolish racial segregation one by one. Marijuana legalization (and drug laws overhaul in general to favor rehabilitation over criminalization) similarly has to be enacted and enforced at the federal level.
Marijuana is a bit different from purely social issues like gay marriage, it has majority support among Republican voters too. (Nationwide, that is, not in every state.)
If a majority of Republicans support it and a majority of democrats support it, then why hasn't it passed already? Surely there cannot be enough state level skew on this issue that a majority of Senators don't represent states where legalization is favored by most voters?
It's not a major issue among the Republicans who don't care, while it's often a major issue for those who do. You don't lose much of your base by opposing it, but you lose a bunch if you support it.
Representatives are doing their job as the system designed. I don't love how it's playing out, but I don't think there are shenanigans afoot.
>If a majority of Republicans support it and a majority of democrats support it, then why hasn't it passed already?
Because the demographics that write the laws aren't representative of the electorate in general. The people making the rules are on average middle age or older.
The US system has atrophied enough that the will of the people no longer really matters.
There are certainly lobbies against it (prison lobby, police lobby) but there are also some that are for it (cigarette lobby would like those weed dollars). But the actual problem is that everyone's gonna vote the way they were anyway, so there's no need to actually address the issue.
And that's really both parties. Like, Biden could unilaterally order federal descheduling tomorrow. The President has authority to order the DEA to schedule or deschedule something. It would literally be another 5 minute thing he could do by executive order that would prevent the ongoing ruining of thousands of people's lives currently being ground up by the justice system. Will he? No.
I put more weight on the politicians elected by the Right as opposed to a poll of the constituency. The elected officials are going to be more representative of how people actually feel, and what ideas they hold as taboo.
Historically politics changes surprisingly quickly. Events like 911 shape a generation, yet that was before some voters in the last election where born. Give it say another 40 years and heavy handed TSA regulations will just seem like a silly waste of cash to the overwhelming majority of voters.
I could go into actual flip flops, but people get very defensive when their party changes stances on an issue.
> Let's not pretend there aren't many states out there that would eagerly overturn all social progress we have made in the last 50 years tomorrow if they could, fully supported by a voting majority of their constituents.
Well, let's look at one particular issue – marriage equality. In 2017, there was only one state (Alabama) where >= 50% of people said they opposed legal same-sex marriage, and even there the figure was only 51%. So, in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court overturned Obergefell v. Hodges and allowed states to reimpose bans on same-sex marriage, it looks like Alabama is the only state in which there would be majority support for doing so, and that majority would be paper-thin. (Plus, this survey was 3-4 years ago, and opinions continue to shift, so for all we know, opposition in Alabama may have fallen beneath 50% since then.)
There are a lot of issues that people are indifferent on though — they agree with it in principle, but it's not enough to swing their vote.
It feels like they'd need to poll something like: "You broadly think your representative has voted in favour of your issues, but they have also voted to repeal same-sex marriage. Would you reelect them?"
If you have a large vocal minority against something, politicians start to assess an appeasement strategy. "How many votes would it lose me to get these people onside?"
As a completely different example, I don't remember any polling in the UK in favour of the Brexit referendum before David Cameron called it, he was definitely playing to the vocal minority. & though polls show most people wish we had remained, it doesn't seem to be enough of an issue to sway people away from voting for Boris Johnson & the Tories generally.
The Brexit example is quite good I think, as it illustrates the horse-trading inherent in these things. It was a promise to a wing of the Tory party in exchange for concessions on other issues. From the polls I can remember it wasn't something the vast majority cared about, it consistently came very far down the list of important issues facing the UK. But when the promise was activated, those with political power who were opposed to EU membership managed to make it into an issue, and I think drugs are an area of policy where it is easy to do the same thing, to create and energise a base that had no great feelings either way. It helps enormously that drugs are a taboo subject, and that usage is associated with groups of people that are easily painted as undesirables.
Plenty of states never legalized gay marriage until the Supreme Court forced them to. (And I seriously doubt the Court will ever rule that the states aren’t allowed to ban cannabis.)
But it's still a federal Schedule I drug, isn't it?? I'm not going to rely on Washington's pinky-swear not to enforce the law, and then there are the big employers that drug-test.
I was a little surprised that Trump didn't. That seems like an easy beat-the-establishment policy win, or more likely, he'd put the media in the position of having to defend drug laws.
He was a 70 year old teetotaler and probably bought into the demon weed paranoia. Ironically so is Biden but dems seem much more willing to move on this based in the states so far
Drug legalization, Snowden/Assange pardon, de-classifying stuff, congressional term limits...
For Trump, being anti-establishment was always about catchy slogans "drain the swamp" and irrelevant "own the media" stunts like skipping the White House Correspondents' dinner.
Biden does not have the ability to legalize weed. That would require an act of Congress, which would require both parties to agree to it (or at least agree not to filibuster it).
A lot of the places have legitimate reasons for it. You drug test sometimes because drug users can and will steal you blind if they are addicted enough. You don't want drug users operating heavy or critical machinery, or in any job with a modicum of danger. You don't want your day care provider with workers who show up high; by the time you realize it to fire them, they may have done damage.
There are plenty of folks who would fail a marijuana drug test who I'd have no problem in childcare. Your concern is like, "We should test to ensure that someone has had zero alcohol. You don't want your day care provider showing up drunk."
Urine drug tests don't test for active inebriation. They test for metabolite presence, which for cannabis can linger for up to a month depending on a number of factors. That's why drug testing is not the answer to your problem.
The hard drugs that tend to have more destructive effects don't even show up on a urine drug test for much longer than 72 hours. So, while the person who only smokes weed after work in the evening is at risk of being caught by a drug test, the person who gets off on Friday, goes on a cocaine binge, and then tests clean on Tuesday or Wednesday has nothing to worry about. Which would you rather have in your employ? I'd choose the pothead over the cokehead without hesitation.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons to test for the use of particular drugs - and in the case of marijuana, operating heavy plant, or flying aircraft, or driving trains etc, would qualify; anything where alertness and reaction time is crucial.
I'd quibble, though, with your statement: "... because drug users can and will steal you blind if they are addicted enough."
It is important not to lump all drug use together. There is a huge difference between marijuana use and use of heroin, or other opiates, which are extremely physically addictive and which do cause users in withdrawal to turn to crime to rob you blind for the next fix.
Alcohol addiction is also physical, and the need for alcohol by addicts craving a drink creates lots of petty crime.
Marijuana is not physically addictive, and users do not suffer from withdrawal symptoms/effects. Burglary and violent crime are just not fuelled by marijuana use in that way.
> users do not suffer from withdrawal symptoms/effects
I smoke a lot of weed. Withdrawal isn't a big deal, but it is a thing. It's closer to caffeine withdrawal than alcohol/nicotine withdrawal though. Symptoms I've experienced when taking a break are typically irritability and insomnia for about a day or two. And of course cravings over the longer term which often brings me back.
I should have been clearer in that I meant physical withdrawal - where your body needs a substance, previously provided externally by the drug, to function. So someone accustomed to heroin use will suffer jangly nerves (among many other things) when it isn't in their system. See [1].
Similar, if lesser, physical effects happen to those with an alcohol dependency when alcohol is suddenly cut off [2]
These things are physical, not just psychological. I'm an inveterate cannabis user, and have been since the age of 15, with a happy daily habit uniterrupted for years until I went to work in Qatar for just over a year. No cannabis was available, but I had no physical ill effects - was just grumpier and less chilled in general. Similarly, currently locked down and away from my usual habitat, I've not had a spliff for quite a few months. Again, I miss the vibe etc, but I am not in any physical pain.
Idaho is going the other way, the Senate just passed a bill that will constitutionally prohibit cannabis and any other illicit psychoactive drugs if voters pass it with simple majority in 2022.
We're talking about a state without big cities, a comparatively tiny population, generally not a lot of crime, and a mostly white population. The only thing we'd be able to learn is whether drug usage in that state is affected at all by not changing a thing (it's illegal now). This would indeed be surprising as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a sign of insanity (to paraphrase Einstein). Also, it would be a good way to characterize decades of drug policy making in the US.
It won't. I'm a legalization supporter, but you can't pretend that being surrounded by states with legal cannabis won't cause the availability of cannabis to be huge. If cannabis causes negative effects, they're going to get hit with a double effect of readily available cannabis and no tax revenue to offset it.
Then again, I don't get the impression that it's ever been difficult to find cannabis, even when it was illegal all over the US.
You're right, nobody will be automagically freed as a result. That being said, pushing for amnesty, and pushing for pardons is completely how the law works, and very doable.
What is stopping a law from being passed that operates in a similar way to a pardon?
"All people convicted of X set of laws have their sentences nullified and this criminal conviction removed from their records" as a law passed, or something like that?
>What is stopping a law from being passed that operates in a similar way to a pardon?
Nothing. In fact[0]:
"As of this writing [12 March 2020], 26 states, D.C., and one territory have legalized or decriminalized marijuana to some degree. Eleven states and D.C. have done both. Seventeen states and D.C. have enacted expungement, sealing, or set-aside laws specifically for marijuana, or targeted more generally to decriminalized or legalized conduct. Four states have pardon programs for marijuana offenses."