Drugs, Law and Conflict

Testimony from last week’s hearing in the California Assembly of A.B. 390 (the Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act) is available here. This bill is moving through the state legislature at the same time that reformers are working on three separate legalization ballot initiatives. For more on this, see the NYTimes coverage here.

Full results here.

**Photo courtesy of TIME.

New federal guidelines coming out of the DoJ this morning. According to early reports, “prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.” For more information, see the Huffington Post or WaPo.

Update 10/20: Check out the text of the DoJ memo here, and differing views of the new policy over at the NYTimes.

There are two new bills out, one in the Senate, the other in the Massachusetts House, that show interesting drug policy developments. The Senate Bill (S.1789) would eliminate sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine (see this WaPo article on the subject).

The MA bill (No. 2929) would create a taxation and regulation scheme for marijuana. See the bill here. As you may recall, in November 2008, Massachusetts decriminalized personal possession of marijuana.

A friend of mine recently published a well-researched and thought provoking article in Slate on the regulation and taxation of marijuana. Considering the new proposals from California to Illinois, Jeremy asks reformers what specific policies they recommend for taxing the drug. He gets a real sense of the mood of the movement right now, and clearly points out the challenge in finding the right tax level and system to achieve the three oft-promised goals of legalization: eradication of black markets, reduction of budget deficits, and improvements in public health.

Richard Evans, principal author of the petition to legalize and tax marijuana in Massachusetts, emailed me to share the wonderfully informative website he’s put together: http://www.cantaxreg.com/.

Especially interesting are the pages including the text of previous state and national legislation related to legalization, and the page covering HB 2929 and SB 1801, the bills before the Massachusetts state congress.

**Photo courtesy of Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images.

Part 1 of a 4-part weeklong series

• What’s going on with the California marijuana legalization proposal? The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Rep. Ammiano has yet to find a single co-sponsor. Nevertheless, the always cheeky Ammiano warns, “Oh, don’t underestimate me, pal.” A hearing is planned for late fall or early winter 2009.

• “An Act to regulate and tax the cannabis industry.” Massachusetts legislators have introduced two bills to legalize marijuana in the state: House Bill 2929 and Senate Bill 1801. The initiatives would go beyond the current decriminalization of consumption, to legalize responsible use for adults over 21 years old.

• “The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs. Fortuitously, legalization is the right policy for a slew of other reasons.” Jeffrey Miron, Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Harvard Economics Department, received a fair bit of press last month for his op-ed promoting drug legalization. His argument extends beyond the marijuana proposals currently sitting in the California and Massachusetts state legislatures. He writes,

Legalization is desirable for all drugs, not just marijuana. The health risks of marijuana are lower than those of many other drugs, but that is not the crucial issue. Much of the traffic from Mexico or Colombia is for cocaine, heroin and other drugs, while marijuana production is increasingly domestic. Legalizing only marijuana would therefore fail to achieve many benefits of broader legalization.

• How much money would legalization really save state governments? Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times investigates the claim that marijuana is California’s largest cash crop, and comes to the conclusion that the math is all fuzzy.

• Is cocaine getting more expensive? The Washington Office on Latin America takes on the official statistics from Washington.

• The Sentencing Project: changes in racial dynamics of drug offenses buck quarter century trend. According to the Christian Science Monitor, from 1999-2005, “the number of African-Americans incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons has declined more than 20 percent while the number of white imprisoned drug offenders has increased more than 40 percent.” Why? The Sentencing Project, which released the report, points to the growing use of drug courts and alternatives to incarceration at the state level. Nevertheless, this occurs amidst a still-massive growth in the total number of imprisoned drug offenders: from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 500,000 today.

• But racial disparities still obvious and unjust, says Human Rights Watch. In their report “Decades of Disparity: Drug Arrests and Race in the United States,” the leading human rights organization states that that “adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007.”

• Americans for Safe Access on the right to (valid) information. The advocacy organization Americans for Safe Access (ASA) has appealed a case before the 9th Circuit Court to get the Department of Justice to reconsider its stance on medical marijuana. After requesting the DEA reclassify marijuana several years ago, ASA has now used the Information Quality Act to petition the Department of Health and Human Services to review its statements that marijuana “has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” See the appellant’s opening brief here and listen to the oral argument here. (via Eric Sterling)

• New links: the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information.

• The real story behind 4/20, from Alternet.