Many believe that the legalization of marijuana will mean less jail time, more jobs, and more tax dollars.
“The first thing we’re saying is regulate it and the second thing is, let’s bring in tax revenue,” said Matt Marsden, a spokesman for the Oakland County-based Michigan Cannabis Coalition.
In April, the group filed language for a ballot proposal with the Board of Canvassers in Lansing and a decision is expected sometime this month. If approved, the Michigan Cannabis Coalition would have 180 days to collect at least 252,000 signatures. Maybe more, considering some of those signatures could be deemed invalid.
The Michigan Cannabis Coalition is a collection of business groups in Oakland County. Their goal is to preserve the Michigan’s medical marijuana act, passed by 63% of state voters in 2008; taxing retail sales of marijuana at 10%, and letting Michiganders grow as many as 12 plants at home. However, the sale of it is prohibited, to sale it you would have to have a license.
Support for the legalization of Marijuana throughout the state of Michigan and the country tracks closely with age. Inevitably, change seems to be on the way.
“As a licensed psychologist, I know that alcohol and marijuana are both safer than the legal drugs that are prescripted today by the medical community,” said Doris Jeanette, Psy.D., from the Center for New Psychology. “Legal drugs are used to control behavior. This movement toward facts will definitely help the African Americans who are in prison and the ones who would be put into prison for using pot. Legalizing the use of Mary Jane will be helpful to our entire society.”
A recent Gallup poll found that 62% of people ages 18 to 29 favor full legalization, compared with 31% of senior citizens. As far as medical marijuana goes, Americans are nearly unanimous in their approval: 70% or more support it.
“The war on drugs has been an utter failure,” President Barack Obama said back in 2004 when he was an Illinois state Senator. “We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws … we need to rethink how we’re operating in the drug war.”
For the first time ever, a solid majority of Americans supports legalizing marijuana for recreational use: 56%, according to the most recent Rasmussen poll. Support for legalization has been growing steadily since the 1990s; in 1994, just 25% were in favor. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 54 percent of Americans support legalizing the drug, while 44 percent oppose it.
According to Human Rights Watch, whites and Blacks commit drug offenses at about the same rate, but Blacks are incarcerated for drug-related crimes at an overwhelmingly higher rate. And young African-American males are disproportionately targeted in police actions that amount to “trolling for young Black and Latino men” to arrest, Queens College professor Harry Levine, who has conducted numerous studies on arrests for marijuana possession said to the Michigan Chronicle.
And politicians are slowly discovering that lingering fears about being labeled “soft on crime” for supporting marijuana reform are unwarranted.
While national politicians remain murky on the issue, believing the drug war is the only viable position, national polling trends (especially by age) and state-level political movements indicate that serious consideration of marijuana reform makes sense.
In 2010 President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which drastically reduced the unfair disparity between crack and powder cocaine and, more important, he dropped the five-year mandatory sentence for crack possession. In 2009 President Obama had vowed not to interfere with marijuana distributors and cultivators operating under state laws that sanctioned medicinal use.
Many believe that the president has two choices – he could direct the Department of Justice to crack down and prevent the states from moving forward. Or he could finally, fully embrace sensible drug laws.
Though the drug war is fought on many levels, including the regulation of international trade and importation, its most prevalent effects are felt on the streets of America’s urban centers – from Detroit to Chicago; Philadelphia to New York City; and Oakland, Calif., to Los Angeles. The tie that binds these communities is their large African-American and Latino demographics.
And once a person is labeled a felon, life becomes more difficult. The current policies cripple thousands – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits.
According to a 2011 Human Rights Watch report, Black males are incarcerated at a rate six times that of white males and 2.6 times that of Hispanics. One in 10 African-American men ages 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009 – mostly for drug offenses – while only 1 in 64 white males were in prison.
Since the drug war was initiated by President Richard Nixon in 1971, it has led to more than 45 million arrests and hundreds of thousands of convictions, making the United States the world’s most incarcerated nation, behind even China – whose population of more than 1 billion trumps the U.S. population of just over 300 million.
“Marijuana legalization is clearly the right thing to do,” said Attorney George C. Creal, Jr., who specializes in DUI law. “It is unfair to incarcerate and decimate the records of young men and women for something as banal as Marijuana experimentation. Marijuana is a gateway drug only because you have to buy it from criminals who also sell Cocaine and Heroin and have an economic incentive to convert Marijuana users to other illegal drugs with higher profit margins that are also less bulky and easier to transport and manufacture. I believe that Marijuana legalization will see a broad decrease in the use of hard drugs with the accompanying law enforcement budgets, judicial budgets and correctional budgets.”
Zack Burgess is an award winning journalist. He is the Director/Owner of OFF WOODWARD MEDIA, LLC, where he works as a writer, editor and communications specialist. His work can be seen at zackburgess.com. Twitter: @zackburgess1
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