COMMON SENSE FOR PHILLY: DECRIMINALIZE POT, IMPLEMENT CIVIL FINES NOW!
For example, I think it is unfair, inhumane and bizarrely stupid that we have about 1,000 people in jail (at a cost of more than 30k per year per prisoner) who are accused of non-violent offenses, who are deemed not to be safety risks, but who cannot afford the nominal bail that is set for them. If you or I were ever accused of a crime like low-level possession, someone would come forward with the couple hundred bucks and bail us out. But if you are poor, you sit in jail, and we as a City pay for it. It is just so dumb. Yet, that proposal was bundled together with inhumane options, such as overcrowding our jails. So, a small majority voted no, because they didn’t want more overcrowding. If the proposals were separate, we would have easily earned ‘points’ and advocated for a humane policy.
CNN: “Drug violence spins Mexico toward ‘civil war’:
Mexico, a country with a nearly 2,000-mile border with the United States, is undergoing a horrifying wave of violence that some are likening to a civil war. Drug traffickers battle fiercely with each other and Mexican authorities. The homicide rate reached a record level in 2008 and indications are that the carnage could be exceeded this year….
The violence along the border is particularly worrisome, analysts say.
“The spillover into the United States is bound to expand and bound to affect U.S. institutions,” Birns said.
Pastor and Hakim note that the United States helps fuel the violence, not only by providing a ready market for illegal drugs, but also by supplying the vast majority of weapons used by drug gangs….
“What worked in the U.S. was not Eliot Ness,” he said, referring to the federal agent famous for fighting gangsters in 1920s and ’30s. “It was the repeal of Prohibition.”
That viewpoint has picked up some high-level support in Latin America.
Last week, the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil called for the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use and a change in strategy on the war on drugs at a meeting in Brazil of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
Remember the visit the police paid to my house at 3:00 AM two years ago?
My former housemate Tim’s best friend from high school is a legendary DJ from one of Philadelphia’s seminal hip-hop bands who disappeared for a long time because he was in prison on drug-related charges. During that time, all of his equipment went out of date and his samples went into storage….
Unfortunately, he hadn’t exactly left a lot of his habits behind. At one point he showed up at his parents’ former residence in Northeast Philadelphia at 3:00 AM or so and began banging on the door: the new occupants weren’t too thrilled and called the cops on him. Later, and more seriously, he got busted for violating the terms of his parole when he got caught in a park rolling a blunt. He was hauled off to the county clink for possession for a few weeks, and later released on his own recognizance, after which it seems he pretty much ignored his appointments with his parole officer and skipped out on his hearing….
At three this morning, it became something to worry about. We were awoken abruptly by my housemate Nelson knocking quietly but urgently at the bedroom door. “Brendan, wake up! Brendan! The cops are here, they have a warrant.”
how much do you think the police were paid to serve the warrant and search the premises? How much were the court costs, the continuance costs? When my former housemate’s friend was finally captured and sentenced, that also added to the costs of the drug war, siphoning monies that could be used to improve our city, fund libraries and pools, and keep our fire engines running.
This will probably get me flagged at the border (we were stopped on the return from Philly, and the border guards brought out the dogs to sniff at our car), but it needs to be said Philadelphia and the rest of the nation cannot afford our archaic and ineffective drug laws.
On the way home from Montreal, we heard an interesting news article that 11 states are currently considering decriminalizing marijuana because they can no longer afford to enforce the law. I am unable to find the article, but i hope it is true, and I hope Pennsylvania is on that list.
Braintree, Massachusetts has the right idea:
The town council’s committee on ordinances and rules is scheduled to talk about a proposal to make public pot smoking a civil offense carrying a $300 fine. This discussion is set to take place during the committee’s Feb. 24 meeting at 6:30 p.m. in the Cahill Auditorium of town hall.
“I’d love to hear from concerned residents, pro and con,” Chairman Ronald DeNapoli of District 5 told the Forum about the proposal he has brought forward, which would apply to anyone who smokes marijuana “while in or upon any street, sidewalk, park, playground, or other public place in the town.”
nyone caught with an ounce or less of marijuana will owe a $100 civil fine instead of ending up with an arrest record and possibly facing jail time.
It sounds simple, but David Capeless, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said the new policy presented a thicket of questions and complications.
One of the most basic, Capeless said, is who will collect the fines and enforce other provisions of the law. For example, violators under 18 will be required to attend a drug awareness class within a year, but it is unclear who will make sure that they do so. The fine increases to $1,000 for those who skip the class.
Connecticut, also facing a brutal deficit, is considering decriminalization as well:
we’d save lots of money with the proposal of state lawmakers Martin Looney and Toni Harp of New Haven, who suggested following Massachusetts’ lead in decriminalizing marijuana on the grounds that we can’t afford to keep arresting and prosecuting people who use it….
If a decriminalization bill passes the legislature, will Rell sign or veto it? In 2007 she vetoed medical marijuana, which is why Connecticut still prosecutes and imprisons sick people for treating themselves with the “wrong” medicine.
But these prosecutions happened before the economy entered meltdown mode. The threat of statewide financial collapse might change Jodi Rell’s mind where simple human compassion did not.
Marijuana prosecutions are stupid and harmful not only to the people targeted but to society as a whole. Indeed, in our zeal to punish potheads, we are robbing ourselves of revenue sources, and i don’t just mean in terms of the prison system or civil fines. Current law prevents anyone who has been convicted of a drug offense from receiving federal student aid, trapping potentially productive citizens in dead end low wage jobs, which may lead to more run-ins with the judicial system when they turn to drug-dealing or other crimes to make ends meet.
Our drug laws ruin people’s lives needlessly, and are detrimental to our economy. In Philadelphia, which is facing a ballooning deficit of $2 billion or more over the next five years, these laws are taking much needed funds from institutions, systems and programs that improve people’s lives and help communities. The Mayor’s proposing cuts to libraries, rec centers, parks, pools, fire engines, and programs for ex-offenders. What he should propose is ending Philadelphia’s participation in the drug war, and he should try to enlist our legislators in the fight.
We can’t afford our obsolete marijuana laws.
February 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Whole show on WHYY today about this:
“Michael Phelps, Olympic gold medallist, will not face charges after a photograph showed him using a marijuana pipe. His case raises the question of the ambivalent relationship our country has with this drug. Our guests are RICHARD BONNIE, Director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia Schools of Law and Medicine and MARINA GOLDMAN, Research Instructor at the Addiction Treatment Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how marijuana effects the brain.”
http://www.whyy.org/podcast/021809_100630.mp3
February 19th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Amen to that!
February 19th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
[...] The Buzz wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt… of District 5 told the Forum about the proposal he has brought forward, which would apply to anyone who smokes marijuana “while in or upon any street, sidewalk, park, playground, or other public place in the town.” … [...]