By Kelli M. Evans

Every year tens of thousands of people in California are arrested for simply possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests overload our already stressed courts and jails. They also divert scarce public safety dollars that could be used to address violent crime. California’s Proposition 19, on the November 2010 ballot, offers a remedy that will move marijuana policy in a direction that makes sense.  The California Legislative Analyst’s Office explains that the passage of Proposition 19 would allow redirection of court and law enforcement resources to solving violent crimes.

The ballot measure would allow adults age 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of their own marijuana for personal use, and would allow cities and counties to regulate and tax commercial sales. Unless individual cities and counties enact local regulatory structures, marijuana sale would remain illegal under state law. Similarly, driving while intoxicated will remain against the law, and employers will retain the right to regulate drug use on the job.

Proposition 19 has a growing coalition of support. The three California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union recently announced their endorsement of the initiative and join a broad coalition of this common sense approach to controlling marijuana, including former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, the California NAACP, labor unions, and law enforcement officials from around the state.

Enforcement of marijuana prohibition laws consumes California’s police and court system resources, and has a devastating disproportionate impact on communities of color. In 2008 alone, California police made 60,000 marijuana possession arrests, the majority of them young men of color. The arrests don’t indicate actual marijuana usage. A new report from the Drug Policy Alliance reveals distinct racial disparities in California arrests for low-level marijuana possession. Data in the report reveal that African Americans in California are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, but more white youth use marijuana than black youth. Other reports, including a study out of Seattle, show that whites sell drugs at similar – and possibly higher – rates than African Americans.

In Los Angeles County alone, the marijuana possession arrest rate of African Americans is more than 300% higher than the same arrest rate of whites, although blacks made up less than 10% of the county’s population, according to the DPA report.

The significant racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests have serious consequences, for young men of color in particular. The impact of a misdemeanor conviction for marijuana possession creates barriers to finding a house, a job, and even a school loan.

We need a solution that will work.  By regulating and taxing marijuana for adults, Proposition 19 is a step in the right direction.

Kelli M. Evans is Associate Director at the ACLU of Northern California

Major policy changes often happen as a result of a sudden shift that is, in fact, not so sudden at all. Public attitudes and behavior steadily change over time, but a political system whose practitioners have made up their minds on a topic years ago, before that change became apparent, are typically unwilling to accept the new reality. Until something changes – a new generation of leaders takes power, a financial crisis causes people to become more open to new ideas. Or perhaps it’s just as simple as an idea whose time has come, an idea whose wisdom can no longer be denied.

We’re at such a turning point with marijuana. One of the state’s main cash crops, the economic base of many small towns in the North Coast (and of a growing but hard to track number of metropolitan households), marijuana is already widely available in California, whether on the black market or at a quasi-legal dispensary. As more and more Californians are comfortable with the use of marijuana, even if they do not partake of it themselves, the decades-old drug war has become seen as more and more absurd when it comes to marijuana.

When an April Field Poll found 56% of Californians back marijuana legalization, it became only a matter of time before the topic became a fully mainstream subject, deemed appropriate for “serious” conversation at everything from public policy summits to the dinner table.

And so this week California is witnessing a fundamental shift in marijuana policy, where for perhaps the first time it really is a question of “when,” and not “if,” the sale and use of marijuana will become legal in California.

The biggest news comes from the federal government, where Attorney General Eric Holder has followed through on his early signals and announced the Justice Department will no longer prosecute people for using medical marijuana in accordance with their state’s laws. Holder is not yet embracing full legalization, of course. But this is a significant shift that recognizes states do have a right to innovate when it comes to drug policy. Whether the Obama Administration intends it or not, the new policy will be further evidence that a strict federal “War on Drugs” is no longer desirable or viable.

Here in California, more fundamental changes are under way. As a judge rules LA DA Steve Cooley’s attack on dispensaries to be invalid, the movement for full legalization is well under way. Tom Ammiano’s bill to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana, AB 390, will get its first hearing in the Assembly next week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking at a bill signing ceremony in Merced yesterday, said he is “basically opposed” to legalization but believes it’s time to have a debate about the issue. In Arnold-speak that says he doesn’t see legalization as a political loser, even if he’s not quite willing to go there himself. His comments show that legalization has gone from being a sensible idea on the fringes of our political discourse to something we can debate as easily and naturally as, say, water policy.

Meanwhile, armed with the Field Poll results – as well as the recent Gallup Poll which found support for legalization was highest in the Western US, with moderates and independents nationwide about split on the matter, California activists are not waiting around for the legislature or the governor to act.

Instead they’re going directly to the ballot. TaxCannabis.org is the headquarters for the effort to put an initiative on the November 2010 ballot to treat marijuana much like alcohol. The initiative would legalize possession of up to one ounce for all adults over 21, and give local governments the ability to determine whether to more broadly legalize and tax marijuana themselves. It would essentially create a “local option” instead of a statewide free-for-all.

It’s not yet clear if they have the money or the volunteers to put this on the ballot. And the fact that local governments would be the ones implementing the policy, instead of a single statewide standard, might limit the savings in prison spending and the overall tax revenues created. But it’s a clear step forward for sensible drug policy, one whose time has clearly come.

(One possible reform to consider. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

With less and less time left to resolve the now-$26.3 billion deficit, California continues its march towards insolvency.  Instead of contemplating the relatively moderate savings to be had by cutting such “frills” as health care for the state’s uninsured children, lawmakers should consider a simple measure that would free up over $1.5 billion annually.  It is time to get rid of the “wobbler.”

Under California law, some nonviolent offenses (petty drug possession being the most common) can be charged either as a misdemeanor or a felony.  These offenses, known as “wobblers,” can carry a sentence of up to one year in county jail or years in state prison, depending on whether the prosecutor decides to charge the conduct as a misdemeanor or a felony.  For the taxpayers of California, the difference in sentencing represents billions of dollars in additional spending for what is essentially the same offense.  Making these offenses straight misdemeanors punishable at the county jail level would free up precious resources now wasted housing such offenders in the state prison system.  

Wobblers undermine the integrity of the state criminal justice system in more than just a fiscal sense.  The discretion wobblers grant prosecutors produces vast disparities in the treatment of equally culpable offenders, with the severity of a defendant’s sentence potentially depending less on what crime was committed than where it was committed.  In addition to the geographically arbitrary and inconsistent treatment of wobblers, defendants in wobbler cases are subject to the whim of a prosecutor’s personal principles or professional ambitions.  More insidiously, such open-ended sentencing practices enable extra-legal factors like racial bias to influence the choice between harsher punishment and a more proportionate sentence.  For example, a black defendant is more likely to be sent to state prison for a wobbler offense than a white defendant convicted of the same offense.

But it’s money, not mores, that commands the attention of the state’s lawmakers at the moment.  More pragmatically, then, it costs taxpayers $49,000 per year to keep someone in state prison according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).  The state Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) reports that over 30,000 Californians are in state prison for simple drug possession and other nonviolent wobblers.  That means that treating these offenses exclusively as misdemeanors would save the state almost $1.5 billion a year.  This figure does not include the additional millions of dollars in collateral savings that would result from a smaller parole population and decreased spending on inmate health care.

The LAO has endorsed converting wobblers to misdemeanors as the best way to cut costs by reducing state prison populations while also maximizing public safety.  By relieving the overcrowding of state prisons that results in part from prosecuting wobblers as felonies, not only would the state save billions, but what limited resources remain could be properly focused on actually violent and serious offenders.  

Governor Schwarzenegger has also recognized that changing sentencing options for low-level offenses would reduce the number of people housed in the state’s costly prisons.  However, unlike the early release and summary parole programs the governor has proposed, which the LAO says would cost tens of millions of dollars and require an already overstretched CDCR to complete thousands of case file reviews, converting wobblers to misdemeanors and eliminating state prison as a sentencing option for these offenders would cost next to nothing to implement.  

Almost every other possible response to the budget crisis seems to be on the table, from closing over 75% of the state’s parks to the wholesale gutting of crucial social services such as health care for children.  Converting wobblers and keeping petty drug offenses at the local government level (though not as sensational or “sexy” a topic as marijuana legalization) is one simple cost-saving measure that has received little press but which should appeal to a broad spectrum of the public.  Supporters of drug policy reform can take heart that people convicted of low-level drug-related wobblers will no longer be sent to state prisons and will have greater access to county level probation-supervised addiction treatment.  Those with a more socially and fiscally conservative bent can be satisfied that such offenders will remain under the supervision of the criminal justice system at a cost greatly reduced to the taxpayer; and less money spent on petty drug offenders means expensive state prison beds can be prioritized for violent and serious offenders.

It’s absurd that we are being asked to consider cutting health services for people with HIV and AIDS and programs like Healthy Families, which provides health insurance for 1 million California children.  At most, such drastic measures would save the public $400 million-a fraction of what we could save by simply recategorizing non-violent drug and property offenses and converting wobblers to misdemeanors.

A state that thinks locking up 30,000 petty offenders in state prison instead of county jail is more important than the health of a million of its children faces the prospect not only of financial insolvency but moral bankruptcy as well.



Zack Wiley is a legal intern at the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of Legal Affairs.

This morning on CNN Rep. Loretta Sanchez (CA-47) endorsed Tom Ammiano’s call to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in what Sanchez calls “an experiment” (hat tip to OC Progressive):

“Well, certainly, I have seen in my own state of California people over and over voting a big majority the whole issue of marijuana and possession of that,” Sanchez said this morning on CNN. “So maybe it would be a good pilot program to see how that regulation of marijuana might happen in California since the populous, the majority of Californians believe maybe that’s should happen.”

Taking a page from a number of those who favor the reform of pot laws, Sanchez likened the issue to the prohibition of alcohol in the early 20th century.

“Well, certainly there is one drug – it’s called alcohol – that we prohibited in the United States and had such a problem with as far as underground economy and cartels of that sort that we ended up actually regulating it and taxing it,” she said. “And so there has always been this thought that maybe if we do that with drugs, it would lower the profits in it and make some of this go away.”

All of this is eminently sensible public policy, and it’s good to have someone widely viewed as a moderate selling this to the public. She is absolutely right to compare marijuana to alcohol (even though alcohol tends to be the more dangerous drug) and remind us what we did when the Prohibition policy failed by creating widespread evasion as well as massive crime – we repealed the 18th Amendment and legalized alcohol.

The Hill article notes that Sanchez’s subcommittee, Border, Maritime, and Global Counterterrorism, has jurisdiction over the American side of the drug war that has brought parts of northern Mexico into chaos. Drug policy reform advocates have been pointing out for decades that the best way to encourage more stability in Latin America, and to cut down the power of the cartels, is to end America’s prohibition policies.

Let’s hope this sparks a broader level of political support for marijuana legalization in California. It’s been the right move for a long time. It’s also now a necessary move if we’re to have any hope of starting to fix our budget mess.