Santa Monica Mirror

3-9 May 2000

War Against Marijuana Goes On

By Dan Hamburg

(Dan Hamburg, a former member of Congress, is executive director of

Voice of the Environment, a Bolinas-based nonprofit. )

The war against marijuana took two interesting, and very divergent, turns

last week. In Ukiah, California, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors

placed a measure on the November ballot to decriminalize the personal

cultivation and use of marijuana. In Sacramento, the Assembly Public Safety

Committee voted to reimpose California's "Smoke a Joint, Lose Your License"

law.

Mendocino County is where the state's war on marijuana began 21 years ago.

In a headline-grabbing event that helped fuel his gubernatorial ambitions,

then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, accompanied by automatic

rifle-toting, flak-jacketed agents, descended by helicopter on a northern

Mendocino County garden. Since then, billions of dollars have been spent

annually on all aspects of the marijuana war, and the weed is more

prevalent than ever.

The message from this state of affairs is so plain and simple that only a

politician could miss it --- prohibition doesn't work. But the war on

marijuana has never been about stopping marijuana use so much as it has

been about pandering to a public that is legitimately concerned about

health and safety, especially the health and safety of children. Pandering

is where Governor Gray Davis and the Assembly Public Safety Committee come in.

The "Smoke a Joint, Lose Your License" mandate was devised by the Bush

administration as an attack on California's marijuana decriminalization law

under which possession of less than an ounce is deemed an infraction rather

than a misdemeanor. To this day, the feds withhold transportation funds

from states that refuse to take drivers' licenses from drug offenders,

regardless of whether the drug offense has any relationship to operating a

vehicle. States that don't wish to abide by the mandate can "opt-out" with

the signature of the governor. Thirty-two states, including every state

west of Texas, have taken advantage of the "opt-out" option. Despite polls

showing that two-thirds of Californians disagreed with him, former Governor

Pete Wilson chose to support the Bush mandate. That Wilson law is due to

expire in July 2000.

Now, to the shock of many of those who supported his bid for high office,

Governor Davis has made it clear that he wants the Wilson policy extended.

This, despite the fact that California will be forced to continue spending

millions processing minor pot offenders, whose charges would otherwise be

dismissed with a ticket, to come back to court in order to defend their

licenses. This despite the fact that the law Davis supports, AB 2595, would

make it a worse offense to have a joint in your pocket or purse at home

than to be caught speeding, driving recklessly, or with an open liquor

container in your car.

The governor and our misinformed state legislators need to pay heed to the

discussion now going on in Mendocino County. Sheriff Tony Craver signed the

initiative to legalize the personal cultivation and use of marijuana. He

did this not because he supports marijuana use but because as a longtime

law enforcement official he has seen that prohibition is a bust. If the

initiative passes, he believes it will "send a message to policy makers in

Sacramento and Washington that despite decades of efforts to suppress

marijuana, the number of users and amount of plants seized continues to

increase."

Mendocino supervisors were urged by County Counsel Peter Klein to perform

their ministerial duty of putting the initiative on the ballot, but then to

challenge its legality in court. Klein argued that the initiative was

unenforceable because it preempts state and federal laws prohibiting the

possession and use of marijuana.

However, as Supervisor Richard Shoemaker pointed out, Proposition 215, the

1996 "medical marijuana" initiative, purportedly had similar problems and

is now being successfully implemented. Supervisor David Colfax reminded the

Board that it would be "bizarre" to challenge the marijuana initiative

while continuing to subsidize the county's robust wine industry. The Board,

which has a conservative majority, voted unanimously to reject their

counsel's advice and move forward to a test of the voters' will in November.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it is in the county where the

pot war got started that it's now winding down. Mendocino County has

experienced many of the negative effects of illegal pot. Millions of

dollars spent by law enforcement, skewing priorities and clogging the

courts. Thousands of casual users arrested, sometimes imprisoned and left

with indelible marks on their records. The hypocrisy of preaching against

pot while pushing more dangerous drugs. A culture of greed and occasional

violence brought about directly by astronomical prices. The unseemliness of

an economy whose largest cash crop is an illegal weed.

Meanwhile, in the halls of the State Capitol, our leaders, eager to prove

how much they care about kids and despise crime, sip their martinis and

condemn pot smokers. Many of them have no doubt "experimented" themselves.

Even more, no doubt, have children who have. When those kids get in trouble

they are typically "diverted" from the system, given clemency due to the

extenuating circumstance of having a powerful parent. For the rest of our

kids, and ourselves, it's "smoke a joint, lose your license," or worse.