800,000 Americans Busted Annually For Pot

SOME 800,000 AMERICANS

BUSTED ANNUALLY FOR POT

By Sherwood Ross

Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in federal and State prisons---but the public is starting to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two political scientists say. Thousands of other pot users and sellers are confined in local jails as well.

“People convicted of possessing even one ounce of marijuana can face a mandatory minimum sentence of a year in jail, and having even one plant in your yard is a federal felony,” progressive organizer Jim Hightower and co-author Phillip Frazer point out in the November issue of “The Hightower Lowdown.”

Police arrest someone in America every 36 seconds on marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made in 2007, “more than for all violent crimes combined,” Hightower and Frazer point out. They note that 89 per cent of all marijuana arrests “are for simple possession of the weed, not for producing or selling it.”

They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will,” because (1) it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; (2) it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; (3) it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and (4) it allows “police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.”

The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.

Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search warrants to be used in drug war probes, including pursuit of marijuana users. The Act's provisions were supposed to be applied only for suspected terrorist acts. Only three of the Justice Department's 763 requests for “sneak-and-peak” last year were used for terrorism searches, they report in Lowdown.

By outlawing drugs, Hightower and Frazer contend, Congress has created “a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico” to satisfy U.S. consumer demand for the drugs. And Plan Colombia, the multi-billion operation started by Bill (“I didn't inhale”) Clinton in 2000 to eradicate cocoa production there, has failed, judging by the 15 per cent increase in coca production.

For all the legislation against it, pot is more plentiful than ever and 10 per cent of Americans told surveyors they have enjoyed using it in the previous year while four in ten say they used it at some point in their lives. Plus, a 2005 survey found 85 per cent of high school seniors claimed pot was “easy to get”, easier than alcohol, which is a regulated drug, Hightower Lowdown points out.

The publication quotes a University of Michigan student who told them, “If the government trusts society to use alcohol responsibly, it is idiotic to assume citizens are somehow incapable of responsible use of cannabis.”

A Gallup opinion poll in 2005 found that 51 per cent of Americans stating alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana and 52 per cent saying it should be legalized, taxed, and regulated.

State and local governments, Hightower and Frazer report, “have begun walking step by step away from the weed war.” Since 1996, 13 states from Rhode Island to Alaska have passed laws to allow growing and distribution of doctor-prescribed marijuana for medical purposes. What's more, pot possession is no longer criminalized in a dozen states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon.

The drive now is for outright legalization of pot, the authors say. This would enable officials to take the exorbitant profit and violence out of illicit black-market weed by legalizing it and turning it into a revenue-producer that would rake in tax dollars.

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