The simplest evidence that the nationwide war on marijuana is a failure is this: Four states and D.C. have some level of legal marijuana with state-licensed growing and sales underway or on the books. End of the war ... but only here and there.
To witness the full scope of how silly and damaging the war on pot continues to be in the hodge-podge of states and localities still waging it, just sign up for a Google news alert pegged to "marijuana" (or in Bing or what have you). It'll flood your inbox, but you'll also learn a lot, most of it not very edifying.
Two recent examples from that list, and one I accidentally heard on an NPR program, nicely demonstrate the three main reasons the war is more than just bad public policy — it's injustice or un-justice or whatever the opposite of justice is.
Is pot THAT dangerous?
The first I'm calling the vagina search. It's the story of a heart-rending invasion of a person's body, in public ... in a gas station parking lot. Why did police officers pin a woman down and search her vagina in public earlier this summer? Why, for marijuana of course. Here's the gist of the story:
A deputy with the Harris County Sheriff's Department in Texas pulls a car over, thinks he smells pot. Searches car, no pot.
So he calls in two other deputies (it matters that they were female?), who force Charnesia Corley, 21, down on a gas station parking lot and digitally probe her vagina, searching for the "destroyer of youth."
Really? Wow.
The police say they found .02 ounces of marijuana "on her." No one has said where the pot was found or proved that it even existed, and the charges of resisting arrest and possession have been dismissed. So, class, what have we learned? Well, here's the salient part from the Washington Post:
Keep in mind that under Texas law, it takes more than four ounces of marijuana to bring a felony charge. (Photo: This is what four ounces of marijuana looks like.)When even the suspicion of marijuana, legal in four states, remember, can lead to this type of letter-of-the-law violation of basic human dignity, one has to ask: Is it worth it?
It seems doubtful that a woman could be casually driving around with that much marijuana stuffed into her vagina. So Corley was forced to the ground, stripped, and penetrated to search for evidence that at worst would have amounted to a misdemeanor. Which means that the Harris County Sheriff's Department believes it's perfectly acceptable to allow a stranger to forcibly probe a woman's vagina in order to prevent her from possessing a personal-use quantity of marijuana. And even that happened without a warrant, based only on one deputy's claim to have smelled the drug.4 ounces of marijuana
Does the act of enforcing this law cause far more harm (randomly, here and there across the land) than the drug itself?
How can the answer be "No"?
One can say "No" and talk about "the safety of children" and how we all have to obey the law, whether we agree or not.
But what if police were handcuffing and beating people to get them to admit they were speeding? Wouldn't that be OK, too? Of course not. For one, there are no federally enforced speed limits to hide behind.
So, unlike for speeding, local jurisdictions have a blank check when it comes to marijuana "investigations," because the Department of Justice is complicit in every one of these vaginal searches (of which there appear to hundreds, if not thousands, a year). The feds do not step in and investigate violations of rights when it comes to marijuana.
It's a war, after all.
Armored midnight raiders
The second example is just one of who knows how many bizarrely over-armed, middle-of-the-night, no-knock raids that strike like lighting ... randomly, just here and there ... causing great harm to innocent and guilty alike. This one from Aug. 17 jumped out at me because of the setting and result.
An HIV-positive guy who also has cancer and hepatitis C is living on his "remote and isolated" property with his son and wife in Arizona, a state with legal medical marijuana. He and his son have official medical marijuana cards. An Apache County-led task force of some 60 law officers, including SWAT teams with armored vehicles and the works, storm his property at 4 in the morning.
Screen grab from an Arizona TV station’s story on the raid.
"I was telling them from the moment I was standing there underneath the lights of their tanks, 'We are card-holding medical marijuana patients,'" Gregg Levendoski told a local TV station. "They told me, 'I don't care.'"OK, fine. The law's the law:
Screen grab from an Arizona TV station’s story on the raid.
"They are violating the law," Commander Lance Spivey of the Apache County Sheriff's Office said on the day of the raid. "Even if it is medical marijuana like they are claiming, there are rules and regulations they must follow."The officers claim they found nine plants over the 12-per-card limit the Levendoski family could legally have. Levendoski says it's not true.
Punchline: With 60 officers in trailers, vans and armored trucks storming the countryside looking for pot, this is what the big catch of the day came down to:
According to Spivey, with voter-approved medical marijuana now the law in the state, Arizona law officers are in the difficult position (of) Mtrying to determine what's legal and what's not. But at least one of the properties and its owners, Spivey says, is clearly in violation of the law's 12-plant limit. It's a property where Spivey says 36 plants were seized, 3 firearms were confiscated and 3 people were arrested.Now note, only nine plants were illegal (if they were there at all ... the officers still have to prove it). And the three arrests were the deathly sick guy, his wife and kid.
Was it worth it?
Clearly, these officers had to have done some basic investigation to determine this person had marijuana on his property. So, they must have known enough about the property to know it wasn't a hideout for the heavily armed Mexican cartel, but rather the rural home of some really sick guy with possibly a few too many plants.
They couldn't have gone up to the property in the middle of the day, at his remote and isolated home, and had a conversation with the guy? Nope, because the drug war myth is that anyone and everyone with a joint or pot plant will take refuge in a machine-gun nest and fight to the death ... even in a state with clear medical marijuana laws.
Will the DOJ investigate this military-style invasion? Nope, because it is complicit in the raid and the perpetuation of the obviously stupid use of military tactics to pluck nine plants out of the ground.
White girl alarm
The last example is the most important, though less immediately obvious. It is notable both for the innocent, well-meaningness of it and that it concerns heroin — a drug vastly more dangerous than marijuana (even the feds now admit it). I heard the conversation on the radio while running errands ... and it hit me on the side of the head like a cop's baton. See what it does to you:
The host of NPR's Here and Now is talking about the White House's new effort to push treatment over arrest in the effort to stem the rise of heroin-related deaths.
The host is talking with Timothy Cameron, sheriff in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and a member of Maryland's Heroin and Opioid Emergency Task Force.
He says:
"In 2014, we had 96 non-lethal prescription overdose cases, and we had two fatal overdose cases. In 2008 we had 102 non-lethal overdoses but 17 lethal overdoses and that opened the door for heroin." (I believe he's saying less prescription abuse meant more heroin use.)
Host: "Who are these people?"
"Well, that was the most alarming thing. When you look at our county it was certainly not the lowest socio-economic level of our community. It was in good homes. It was in the affluent portions of our county. It was young, white females. So, that was the alarming thing, was our young people were dying from overdoses of heroin. So, it took a complete mobilization of our community to realize that we needed to talk about this openly. And that it was not just a law enforcement issue, it's a public health issue."Just take a second and unpack that statement (the host didn't).
Cameron means something generous: It's such a big problem that it's showing up where one doesn't expect it. That's all he means on the surface of it. But, there's the entire spectrum of the unjust war on drugs (esp. marijuana) in there, too.
It's not until white girls from good homes start getting into trouble that we, all of a sudden, need to start thinking of drug use as a "public health issue."
Again, that's not what he's trying to say. But it's the reality of it. Busting down doors, dragging kids off the streets for possession and selling ... that makes sense in those "lowest socio-economic" neighborhoods. Toss in some white kids from good homes and that's something else all together.
Dear Congress and President Obama
The war on marijuana has been waged mostly against minorities and poor people and that's what everyone expects, even with a drug not even remotely as dangerous as heroin (or beer, for that matter). However, when suddenly it dawns on the white middle class that a lot of people they know use marijuana and might as well be taxed for it, the law changes.
But only here and there.
The war has created an injustice so ingrained and so hidden in our language and culture that this well-meaning officer, his community and even the NPR host aren't fazed by the obvious and ruinous implications of cracking down on poor people while rushing to the aid of white girls in trouble.
I just don't see how anyone can justify the war on marijuana anywhere in the country.
The evidence is in: The expensive war ruins lives with no hope of stemming use or supply. Random, mostly poor and minority people are violated (vaginally and otherwise), charged and stuck in jails when its use is widespread and even legal in many places. And, it has and continues to create a military-style wing of local law enforcement that makes a mockery of "serve and protect" with every no-knock raid on American citizens in the middle of the night just to pull a few plants out of the ground.
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