Examining the 2012 Campaigns to Legalize Cannabis: Colorado. By Patrick Wood

The following blog post was written by Patrick Wood, a student at SUNY- Geneseo in New York. Patrick was an intern for the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation during the summer of 2012, and we thank him for his excellent work on this and other projects throughout the summer. This is the first of a three part series written by Patrick. 

The official campaigns of the initiatives to legalize cannabis in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington all make big claims about what the initiatives will do for their states if they are passed. How do these claims stand up to the facts?

This post examines Colorado’s Amendment 64 as the first of a three part series regarding these cannabis legalization initiatives.

Colorado’s Campaign for Amendment 64 says on its website that the initiative will do four things:

·                     Reduce teen marijuana use

·                     Minimize teen access to marijuana

·                     Reduce exposure to more dangerous drugs

·                     Take Sales Out of the Hands of Criminals

Evidence supporting that legalization would both reduce teen marijuana use and minimize teen access to marijuana:

                                         

”If the existing enforcement machinery were [left in place for minors], this smaller market (with older users drained off by the licit supply) might find it hard to function; marijuana from illicit sources might be less  available to kids than it is today”. - Mark A. R. Kleiman in Marijuana; Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control page 164

“Although legalization would make drugs cheaper and more readily available, sales to minors could be discouraged by harsh punishments and by restricting legal sales to designated shops. The present system has not been effective in discouraging drug experimentation by the young in part because suppliers are subject to punishments whether they sell to adults or children. “ Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker in It’s Time to Give Up the War on Drugs

Link: http://home.uchicago.edu/gbecker/Businessweek/BW/2001/09_17_2001.pdf

Evidence supporting that legalization would reduce exposure to more dangerous drugs:

“There is no control on the quality of the cannabis sold on the black market. Cannabis may be cut with other, more harmful substances, and its THC content may vary in unpredictable ways. Minors are also able to purchase cannabis in the absence of any age restrictions, and the retail cannabis black market is not separated from that for cocaine and heroin. Individuals seeking to buy cannabis may therefore be introduced to other illicit substances they otherwise would not know how to obtain.” – Wayne Hall “A Cautious Case for Cannabis Depenalization” in Mitch Earleywhine’s Pot Politics  

Evidence supporting that legalization would take sales out of the hands of criminals:

“If, as we have argued, federal marijuana enforcement influences the extent of marijuana consumption only negligibly, while worsening the effects on users of the remaining consumption and increasing the wealth and power of criminal organizations and their use of violence and corruption, then federal marijuana enforcement ought to be cut back.” - Mark A. R. Kleiman in Marijuana; Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control page 163                            

“One is that legalization would save the law-enforcement and social costs of arresting hundreds of thousands of adults each year. (Most proposals would keep marijuana illegal for those under 21.) Another is that pot's underground economy—estimated at $15 billion to $30 billion annually—would be largely wiped out if marijuana were legalized throughout the country.” - Beau Kilmer in “The Marijuana Exception” published in The Wall Street Journal

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303425504577353852663443304.html

“A rational [black market marijuana] trafficker ought to fear legalization above all things…” Mark A. R. Kleiman in Marijuana; Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control page 177 

Additional:

“The high prices due to the [drug] war have provided huge profits for cartels and others who evade detection and punishment. Estimates place the world market value of illegal drugs at several hundred billions of dollars--in the same league as the markets for cigarettes and alcohol.” - Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker

Link: http://home.uchicago.edu/gbecker/Businessweek/BW/2001/09_17_2001.pdf

Further information supporting that the Colorado initiative would have numerous benefits is available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1977152

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Martin Lee: Medical marijuana raids to appease "Fast and Furious" critics

According to the excerpt from acclaimed drug historian Martin Lee's latest book, Smoke Signals, published in TruthOut, he argues that the 2011-2012 campaign against California medical marijuana dispensaries was designed to deflect partisan political criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice for the blunders of the "Fast and Furious" BATF undercover operation. "Fast and Furious" was intended to discover how the Mexican drug cartels were acquiring high-powered American firearms. But the guns "walked" (BATF lost track of a couple thousand of them), the weapons ended up in the hands of the criminals and a several were used to shoot or kill U.S. law enforcement agents.

The GOP-controlled House Government Reform Committee, having an opportunity to be outraged at BATF, a unit of the Justice Department, demanded to know what Holder knew about the raids. He stonewalled. Some Members of Congress have sought his resignation, and the House of Representatives has voted him to be in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the Committee's subpoena. It is a big political embarrassment for the Administration.

But Lee's “explanation” does not hold water. It is an interesting hypothesis unsupported by any facts or analysis of the context and history.

Aside from the complete lack of evidence in Lee's explanation, the ostensible political rationale does not make any sense. There is no evidence that the Representatives “gunning” for Holder and Obama regarding Fast and Furious were especially outspoken critics of medical marijuana to the degree that their ire with law enforcement incompetence in the Fast and Furious case might be mollified by a concerted enforcement effort against medical marijuana.

The premise is flawed. Anyone who has followed the 40-year history of the hatred of the NRA, and its congressional allies, for the BATF knows that nothing is going to substitute for an attack on BATF. I was in the middle of this hatred starting in March 1981 when President Reagan was shot, until I left Capitol Hill in 1989. I set up at least a dozen hearings on some aspect of gun control in that time. I handled the House consideration of the NRA's "wet dream" (the Firearms Owners Protection of Act of 1986), the "cop killer bullet" legislation, the undetectable plastic handgun imbroglio, and development of the "Brady Bill" that we got out of the Judiciary Committee in 1988. (Speaker Tom Foley kept the bill from going to the House floor). For comparison, the loathing for BATF on the part of scores of Members of Congress is probably greater than the loathing of the Pentagon felt by many liberals during the depths of the Vietnam War.

Simply consider how a political/enforcement shell game, such as the one Lee suggests motivated the medical marijuana policy change from the 2009 Ogden memorandum, would be executed. There is no evidence, for example, that Administration critics were given private briefings immediately in advance or after medical marijuana raids or enforcement initiatives, such as sending forfeiture-threatening letters to landlords or notices to banks. In the kind of campaign Lee imagines, this would be a prototypical step to give the critics politically useful opportunity to make a timely or newsworthy condemnation of the “evil” of medical marijuana. That is the kind of special political consideration that would be used to curry favor on Capitol Hill that Lee imagines. In addition, there is no evidence that the raids were targeted in the districts of Holder’s critics to especially appease them.

In fact, given that the critics were pro-gun, the BATF letter to all Federal firearms licensees stating, if licensed gun sellers have knowledge that a prospective gun buyer is a legal state medical marijuana patient they are in violation of the Gun Control Act prohibition on sales of guns to known illegal drug users, made no sense. It created political outrage in the Mountain West where almost everyone owns a firearm. That letter could not have been part of an effort to use medical marijuana enforcement to mollify Administration critics of BATF as Lee asserts.

Fundamentally, the medical marijuana raids themselves were not as Lee says, “an all-out vendetta.” They were, to a shocking degree, so ad hoc, unfocused, uncoordinated and poorly announced to the press and public that it is inconceivable that anyone in the Administration believed these raids could be held up as an exemplar of DoJ law enforcement competence and vigor. If anything, the discombobulated character of the DoJ attack on medical marijuana operations invited further attack upon the Obama administration by its enemies as further evidence of law enforcement incompetence.

While the attacks have shuttered hundreds of dispensaries, including numerous first class operations, and have devastated many friends of drug policy reform, objectively, as a concerted law enforcement initiative – especially one designed for a political purpose -- it has been a shockingly incoherent mess. A better analogy of how DoJ has gone after medical marijuana is that of unconnected guerrilla operations, with units striking here and there with the hope of disheartening a much stronger enemy, but not substantially changing the political reality or the balance of power.

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Absolut Tampax

Here is a splendid blog post by Michael Durfee from Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society about moral panics.

Durfee analyzes the reporting of a Phoenix TV station about the "shocking" "new" and "dangerous" phenomenon of teenage girls soaking tampons in alcohol and inserting them in their vaginas in order to get drunk. Durfee looks into the phenomenon -- in a way that so-called journalists do not -- to reveal the kind of media behavior that was behind the crack frenzy, the designer drug frenzy, the Salvia frenzy, and more recently, the synthetic marijuana frenzy and the bath salts frenzy.

On my home turf, we had a mini-panic in Spring 2012 when a police commander repeatedly hyped as the latest rage the phenomenon of "pharm parties" at a local anti-drug program about the crisis of overdoses due to heroin and prescription opiates. A member of the county council in the audience was completely distracted by this, and said at a hearing a few days later that he had told 200 persons about pharm parties. No one questioned why a drug user would put a $50 Oxycontin pill in a bowl along with Excedrin(R) or aspirin and hope that plucking a pill from the bowl would produce a nice high. The premise is absurd.

I asked the police captain who was liaison to the advisory committee on alcohol and drug abuse if this phenomenon was at all recent. He told me he believed it happened back during the ecstasy epidemic. He was not aware of any cases in the past two years, he told me. At his next presentation at a county-wide drugs and alcohol prevention program at the Board of Education meeting room in May, he mocked me by name for telling him I thought the phenomenon was an "urban myth" and that I had cited -- smirk, smirk -- Wikipedia's articles about pharming parties which link to Jack Shafer's excellent reporting in 2006 and 2008 which labeled them a "media invention." When it comes to anti-drug hysteria, even the best police hate to give up a good scare.

A tip of the hat to Michael Durfee, a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at SUNY Buffalo. Michael Durfee works under the advisement of Points Contributor Dr. David Herzberg. His prior education includes an M.A. in history from SUNY Buffalo and an M.A. in education from Lewis and Clark College. He is currently at work researching his dissertation which analyzes the dynamics of Crack Era reform from 1986 to 1992, loosely constructed.

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July 2012 Newsletter

The July 2012 CJPF newsletter is out! It's been a busy two months, check out our recent activities!

To subscribe to the CJPF bi-monthly newsletter, click here.

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Obama White House looking at Clarence Aaron commutation petition (updated Jul 19, 10:51 am EDST)

Dafna Linzer writes in The Washington Post (online July 18 and on p.A3 in July 19 print edition), and ProPublica, that the Obama White House is reviewing Clarence Aaron's petition for a commutation of sentence.

Clarence Aaron was a college football player whose childhood friends recruited to arrange to buy cocaine for their Mobile, Alabama crack ring. Aaron played a minor role, did not plead guilty, and at trial the jury hung. The government tried him a second time and he was convicted. The quantity that the government witnesses said was involved triggered, under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, three concurrent life sentences! Parole was abolished in federal criminal cases after Nov. 1, 1987.

In 1999, film-maker Ofra Bikel, working with PBS FRONTLINE, told the story of how mandatory minimum sentences encourage defendants to inform on their friends or family to avoid long prison terms. The program, "Snitch," aired in January 1999. Bikel was able to get into federal prison to interview Clarence Aaron. Her documentary included the moving anguish of his parents and how one of Clarence's cousins testified against him. The brilliant climax of the documentary was the interview of Willie Jordan, one of the jurors at Aaron's trial.

Did they get the sentence they deserved?

Well, you know, I meant to look in the paper later to see what kind of sentence they served and somehow or other I missed it. And I never did know what kind of sentence they got.

What did you think they should get?

... Well, I wouldn't have thought of a large number of years, no. Just probably a short sentence. Now what a short sentence is I don't know, three to five years, maybe something like that ... .

Clarence Aaron got life.

Life?

Three life concurrent sentences.

Three concurrent life sentences. There's no hope of parole?

No.

Well, that's more than I thought it would be. Well, see, I had no idea. ... I'm surprised at that, I really am, that [he got] that harsh a sentence.

Does it sadden you?

Yeah, it does, somewhat, it sure does. It sure does. We weren't told anything about [sentencing] guidelines. And, of course, the judge, I guess, did the sentencing.

Jurors are not supposed to know about sentences; they are just supposed to determine guilt or innocence.

That's right. ...

Do you think the verdict might have come out different if you had known the sentences the defendants were facing?

It might have been a little tougher, but the evidence was such that I don't think we could have had any other conclusion other than guilty. ...

How do you feel about the sentence?

I wish I didn't know now that they'd got life.

Clarence's photograph, sitting in prison, became the visual shorthand for the entire movie.

On May 13, Dafna Linzer reported that the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice did not fully disclose to President George W. Bush the position of the prosecutor and the trial judge in Clarence Aaron's case regarding commutation of sentence, in a blockbuster front page story in The Washington Post. Later that month, U.S. Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Bobby Scott (D-VA) wrote to President Obama asking him to commute Aaron's life sentence.

Bikel's documentary also featured the case of Dorothy Gaines, a mother of three whose boyfriend was a crack addict. A raid of Gaines' home yielded nothing. The State of Alabama dropped charges against her. But the federal government used the informants against her, she went to trial, and was sentenced to over 20 years. In December 2000, President Clinton commuted her sentence and reunited her with her family.

"Snitch" included interviews with U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), former U.S. Attorney in Alabama. Sessions, perhaps as a consequence of his depiction in "Snitch," became the key Senator in getting partial reform of the crack cocaine mandatory minimum quantity triggers through the Congress. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 was signed by President Obama in August 2010. (I played a major role both in writing the original 1986 crack law (secs. 1002 and 1302 of P.L. 99-570), and in achieving the 2010 reform. In 2005, I wrote the model for section 4 of the Fair Sentencing Act, which increased the monetary penalties for major drug trafficking violations, in order to encourage law and order Members of Congress to support the bill.)

Please write to President Obama and simply ask him to grant Clarence Aaron's petition for commutation of sentence, and tweet #FreeClarenceAaron.

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