On July 1st 2015, the main provisions of Oregon's proposition 91, which was voted on by a large majority of Oregonians, will go into effect. This will end a nearly 8 decades prohibition on marijuana in Oregon, and a happy day for all stoners, smokers, potheads, and followers of the green. It seems as if the barriers and stigmas surrounding the use of marijuana recreationally are finally starting to come down. Especially when one takes a look at the national polling trends concerning legalization of marijuana.
The fight for a sane and rational drug policy in this country that doesn't punish consenting adults in participating in something that is largely considered far less harmful than the deleterious effects of alcohol is just heating up other states that aren't Colorado, Washington and Oregon. And for good reason: marijuana busts accounted for 52% of all drug busts from 2010-2014. Every 36 seconds someone was busted by our insane and, quite frankly, completely backwards and corporatist criminal justice system over pot, something that a plurality of Americans think people should have the freedom to possess and enjoy. And of course, what good would a drug law be without the racial axe grinding, from the same ACLU link:
Nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana.
Which of course, has shaded the stigma against recreational pot usage in this country from the beginning
(from PBS's Marijuana Timeline)
Fear of marijuana
During the Great Depression, massive unemployment increased public resentment and fear of Mexican immigrants, escalating public and governmental concern about the problem of marijuana. This instigated a flurry of research which linked the use of marijuana with violence, crime and other socially deviant behaviors, primarily committed by "racially inferior" or underclass communities. By 1931, 29 states had outlawed marijuana.
In 2014, Oregonians had enough of the vestiges of this old racist pablum that has incarcerated and ruined countless lives. But the fact of the matter is, Oregon has been fairly progressive on marijuana for a fairly long time. In fact, marijuana has been
decriminalized here since 1973, and marijuana usage here has outpaced other states by up to almost 40%. So it makes sense that we would finally scrub clean the last little tiny bit of the laws making pot illegal. It is just the beginning, the tiniest of cracks, in the wall that is authoritarian drug policy in the United States, and the fight to end these insane drug laws lives on.
Its the beginning of the end of an error, to be sure. But there is still much work to be done. In the wake of the drug war, millions of people, most among them African American, Latino and the poor were swept up in a wave of mass, for profit incarceration for little more than possessing small amount of marijuana, cocaine, LSD, heroin, etc. Even in Oregon, people are still getting swept away in the drag net of the drug war, going into prison as barely adults, and coming out completely institutionalized; robbing them of their chances at living a normal life. People still receive felonies for relatively low amounts of narcotics which prohibits them from ever living a decent life again. Felons find it harder to find jobs, housing, help for college from the government and basic necessities. Not only that, but in most places in the US felons cannot vote, meaning they have no means by which to improve their political (and therefore economic and social) situations. It is sociological fact that a person with a criminal record in the United States has their life chances reduced drastically.
A whopping 52% of all drug arrests are for marijuana related offenses, as I said above. Africans Americans are on average 3.7 times more likely to get busted for weed, even up to 8.4 times more likely in Minnesota. Many of them of all races do not have the money or skill necessary to defend themselves against the massive machine of the state incarceration system. That means that we are swooping up hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who disproportionately do not have the means to defend themselves in a court of law and ruining their lives, quite literally destroying their life chances, for a crime that has very few victims outside of the violence of the drug war. And, of course, as history teaches us with alcohol prohibition; the violence is caused by the prohibition itself.
So yes, July 1st is a small milestone in the path to bringing change to drug policy in the United States, just as the legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington were. But activists who see these statistics and make the connection between the drug war, racism, and over-policing should be aware: the fight is not even close to won. The war on the war on drugs is just beginning.