Prohibition Didn't Work for Alcohol. Neither Does It For Marijuana
by John Lawrence
Prohibition of alcohol was in effect from 1920 to 1933. During this time period, marijuana was legal. After the prohibition of alcohol was lifted, the prohibition of marijuana went into effect. Neither prohibition has worked, and both have only increased criminal activity regarding the making and selling of the banned substances. Now 29 states have legalized marijuana for medical use and 8 states have legalized it for recreational use. As a result the crime of marijuana distribution and sales will decline although there will still be black market distribution and sales in the states where it is still illegal.
California is the latest state legalizing marijuana for recreational use. As a result many people now in jail for use or sale of marijuana will be exonerated and have their records expunged. This is a blow to the private prison industry which has made a fortune off the incarceration of these individuals, many of them black way out of proportion to their numbers in the general population.
The Huffington Post reports:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the U.S., totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black.
Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning, Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of N.Y.C.’s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.
Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions is sicking his dogs on the legal marijuana industry because, while it's legal in certain states, it's illegal at the Federal level. I guess states' rights doesn't matter since it only evidently applies to red states. The Federal focus should just be on the illegal shipping of marijuana from legal states to illegal states, and the prosecution of any marijuana coming in over the Mexican border. The legalization of marijuana should, if not putting a stop on marijuana from Mexico, at least slow it down considerably which is a good thing. The Mexican drug cartels will lose money.
