Hello friend,
You live in California, or Maine, or Massachusetts, or Nevada, or Arizona, like me. You are a voter, like me. But unlike me, you have still not decided how to vote on the marijuana initiative on your ballot.
You are concerned about the mixed research about the effects of legalization on teen use, you know that the police haven’t yet found a legally reliable way of detecting whether someone is driving while stoned, and you feel that the people who really “need” marijuana for medical reasons in your state can already access it. You’ve heard that the initiatives and propositions on the ballot have a tendency to favor big growers with vested interests, and you fear that something will go terribly wrong with your state’s little experiment.
So you’ve asked me how I’m voting. And I told you I’m voting “Yes.”
It’s very important to me that these proposals win next month, and I’m going to try to explain why.
You are right, friend, that heavy marijuana use might be associated with permanent loss of IQ points and that marijuana use among teens might tick up in some states that legalize recreational weed. But when you told me that “alcohol use is much higher in teens than marijuana, and [you’d] rather it stayed that way,” I actually disagree.
I would much rather that a child—my child, even—experiment with marijuana than with alcohol as a teenager. The loss of IQ points (which, again, is only medically associated with very heavy use) feels small compared to the 4,300 underage Americans who are directly killed by alcohol use each year. Or—and perhaps this is the more true choice—I’d rather my kid get cross faded from dual use of alcohol and marijuana once or twice than get sucked into a drug gang or caught in the crossfire.
We talk about the Prohibition Era these days, even in history classes, as a big joke. But it’s important to remember that it was the pet cause of the Women’s Movement and Christian Left at the turn of the century because they saw it as the source of a great many injustices—abuse of women and children, vagrancy and unemployment, and prostitution. It was a movement of principle, and they were right. Allowing the use of alcohol in our society has a great many negative consequences.
But those consequences don’t justify banning it. We learned during the 13 years of alcohol prohibition that it created as many problems as it solved. And most of us living today—I’m drinking a margarita in my easy chair as I write this—can’t imagine a world in which alcohol prohibition would be an intelligent policy.
I see all forms of prohibition as a kind of justice issue—people have the right to do what they will with their bodies, so long as “what they will” doesn’t directly harm others. This concept of bodily autonomy is fundamental to my understanding of the world, and it underlies our laws about organ donation, reproductive rights, sexual assault, and burial. It’s the reason we’ve regulated the packaging and advertising of tobacco but never completely banned it. It’s even at the heart of the Supreme Court case overturning anti-sodomy laws. Only with regards to today’s illegal drugs do we take a detour and impose arbitrary limits on the right to bodily autonomy.
Anti-marijuana folks frequently complain that the parallels between alcohol prohibition and cannabis prohibition are overplayed, and I agree.
Cannabis prohibition is much worse.
Because in addition to this justice issue, there is the racial justice issue.
More people were arrested for marijuana-related charges in the United States in 2015 than for all violent crimes combined. Despite black, brown and white folks using marijuana at very similar rates, black and brown people are 3.7 times more likely to be the subject of one of those arrests than a white person. In some states, the disparity is as high as 6 times.
And for the poor black or brown people who are likeliest to be subject to marijuana arrests, it is life-ending. If you can’t afford a lawyer, you are likely to plead out (about 95 percent of defendants do), earning a felony charge that makes it nearly impossible for you to live in public housing, collect benefits, or find work. If you can’t afford to pay bail, you could spend two or three years in prison for that marijuana arrest before ever meeting your jury. And if you’re convicted, you can plan to spend as much time in prison as most of our major allies would give for a murder conviction.
Not to pick on you, friend, because I appreciate your vulnerability and willingness to start a dialogue with this conversation, but when you say, “I guess my feeling is that people who were going to use pot anyway want immunity from legal action,” I hear, “as a white(-passing), college-educated person, I and most of my friends and family can access marijuana with little threat to our lives and livelihood, so I don’t think eliminating the ‘legal action’ that accompanies marijuana for most other people is worth going the extra mile to fight.” In other words, I hear privilege. It’s a privilege to say that.
But if we’re going to look at this from that privileged position, consider—as a current educator and aspiring attorney, one marijuana arrest (not even conviction) would be devastating to my own life and livelihood. I would be fired from my current job and could be prevented from ever joining a state bar. Consider that.
I understand the perspective that these particular propositions are flawed. I also have issues with the specific pieces of legislation on the ballot—for one thing, they ban people with felonies from working in legal marijuana establishments, meaning that the people who make their livelihoods in the marijuana industry would lose their means of supporting their families. As felons, they already can’t work in nearly any job.
That’s an issue that needs its own proposition. We need to eliminate felon disenfranchisement and discrimination against people with criminal records in the job market. But voting against Prop 64, Question 1, Question 4, Question 2, or Prop 205 on that basis would be a vote for creating new felons in order to prevent economic harm to existing felons. That doesn’t make sense to me.
And the idea that preventing the problem of Big Drug is worth continuing the problem of Big Police State is equally nonsensical to me. The existence of Big Pharma doesn’t mean I want to ban prescription drugs, and despite Big Agro, the world still needs GMOs. Corporation-regulating, trust-busting legislation also needs to be passed, but that’s a separate issue entirely.
We’re in a catch-22 of our own making here, friend. Some people don’t want to support marijuana legalization until we have more research on the medical effects, but so long as prohibition continues, many forms of marijuana research are illegal. Many communities don’t want to support marijuana legalization until we have more research on the economic effects, but that won’t happen until communities are brave enough to step forward as test cases—to say that, as a value issue, this is worth the minor economic repercussions that could come at first.
And meanwhile, people are dying. Do you know how many people die in prison, or on the streets, or in police custody because of this stupid, stupid, stupid war on drugs we are fighting?
The question on the ballot could literally be “Should we end the war on drugs in exchange for making Donald J. Trump president?” and I would still consider voting “yes.” You know me—you know how unlikely it is that I would say such a thing. But as much as Trump hates people of color, he couldn’t do as much damage to black and brown communities as drug prohibition already has.
Marijuana legalization in general and these initiatives in particular might only be the beginning of ending that war, but this, to me, is like the decision to vote for Hillary: Of course she isn’t going to fix everything, but she’s the start of the incremental change we need, and she’s a far sight better than the alternative.
So please—please, please, please—vote for marijuana legalization.
Thanks for meeting me, my friend. Let me pick up the tab. I hope you’ll think about what I said, and choose to vote ”yes” in the end.
But most of all, I hope you vote.
