Another Reason to Decriminalize Marijuana
Anyone else keeping up with the “Tainted Justice” series in the Daily News? It’s an ongoing investigation looking into a corrupt cop, his informer, and the havoc that has been wreaked as a result of their collusion. The city has to revisit “scores of drug cases”, and is probably exposed to quite a few costly lawsuits as a result.
And now it looks as is the cops were stealing from local businesses as well, during these possibly illicit drug raids.
The store owners typically had thousands of dollars in cash on hand at the time of the raids. The money came from lottery, cigarette and phone-card sales. They also used cash to pay wholesale grocery vendors and store rent or mortgages, they said.
Luciano Estevez, 39, a Dominican who co-owns the J R Mini Market in West Philadelphia, which was raided in August 2008, told the Daily News that he had about $9,000 in the store, but the police property receipt documented about $800, he said.
“They take money and don’t write it down. They [are supposed to be] the law,” Estevez said. “Taking money like that, I don’t think that’s right. We pay a lot of taxes.”…
During [a different] raid, Vargas said, Cujdik and fellow squad members confiscated $700 in phone-card money that he kept in a cigar box, $1,500 in a bag to pay vendors, $200 in the cash register and $1,400 from his pocket to pay the mortgage – totaling $3,800. The police property receipt that the officers filed, however, reports that only $1,456 was seized.
“They opened the fridge doors and took juices – energy drinks,” Vargas said. “They emptied it.”
A judge dismissed all charges against Vargas after ruling that prosecutors failed to present their case in a timely fashion, according to court records….
And on and on we go. Meanwhile, the Feds have announced they’re not cracking down on medical marijuana anymore. And NPR reported that with every single state in the union facing budget crises, many are considering a whole host of decriminalization measures:
For years, the lawyers who represent poor people have complained that their offices are overworked and underfunded. Now some states are starting to believe that the solution is not to throw more money at the system. Instead, they’re talking about putting fewer people in jail.
“There’s this long New Hampshire tradition of tough on crime, but there’s a huge New Hampshire tradition of being pretty darn stingy,” says Chris Keating, executive director of New Hampshire’s public defender program.
But being tough on crime can be expensive, and Keating says in New Hampshire, the tradition of stinginess is starting to win out. The insider term is “decriminalization.”
New Hampshire’s state Legislature is considering measures that would take away the threat of jail time for some offenses, and in the U.S., the government only has to pay for a defense lawyer when poor defendants face incarceration. So taking away the threat of jail saves money, and Keating believes New Hampshire is trying to distinguish between people society is mad at and people society is afraid of….
William Wren, the commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, says tough budget prospects are forcing him to look at closing a whole prison and laying off 97 positions. For that reason, Wren wants fewer people sent to prison, and he is asking lawmakers to examine which crimes really deserve time behind bars.
“I’ll give you a good example — our theft statutes, the threshold dollar amount for going from a misdemeanor to a felony crime is $500. That was set 31 years ago. What $500 was 31 years ago is a lot different from what it would equate to today,” he says.
If we decriminalized marijuana, or better, legalized it, taxed, it, and regulated it like booze, our country would be a stronger, more economically viable place. It would save billions.
The drug war is over. We lost, just like we lost the war on alcohol. Get used to it.
