MARIJUANA BILL WOULD OVERWHELM POLICE

At the request of Gov. Frank Murkowski, Alaska legislators are
considering twin bills that would put nonviolent marijuana users on a
par with adults who possess child pornography or commit incest. Worse,
these bills -- House Bill 96 and Senate Bill 74 -- attempt to
steamroll Alaskans' right to privacy, while potentially making our
state's violent crime problem worse.

These unconstitutional bills are intended to subvert last September's
decision by the Alaska Supreme Court, which affirmed that the Alaska
Constitution protects the adult possession and use of up to four
ounces of marijuana at home. As a result of this decision, Alaska's
busy police cannot make arrests unless they have reasonable cause to
believe that more than four ounces of marijuana are involved.

But now the governor and certain state legislators are attempting to
circumvent Alaskans' right to privacy and drastically increase the
penalties for a host of marijuana-related offenses.

According to the Alaska Public Defender Agency, of the 500
marijuana-related misdemeanors that it handles every year, more than
half would become felonies if these bills pass. That means
overextended police and prosecutors -- and eventually jailers -- would
spend a lot more time and money on these cases.

Marijuana's felony status would divert valuable police resources from
violent crimes, which we can't afford. Alaska has six times the
national average of reported child sexual assaults and 2.4 times the
national average of reported rapes. In Anchorage alone, overworked
police cannot investigate almost 25 percent of rapes and about 40
percent of crimes against children.

Our state has a serious problem with violent crime, yet Gov. Murkowski
and his legislative allies want to divert even more police resources
away from investigating and prosecuting these crimes. This proposed
legislation would let people who commit rape or assault children go
free in order to send the police after nonviolent marijuana users in
their own homes.

Does this make any sense to you?

Not only are these bills draconian and illogical, they violate
Alaska's constitution, which guarantees the right of privacy that
Alaskans hold dear. So Gov. Murkowski is trying to do an end-run
around our constitution. To justify this dishonest scheme, he's
concocted a completely phony set of justifications, based on the
scientifically discredited claim that today's marijuana is so much
more potent than what was available 20 or 30 years ago that it's
essentially a different and more dangerous drug.

Such a claim is simply preposterous. These assertions about potency
and danger -- actually written into the language of the bills -- fly
in the face of mountains of scientific data showing that high-potency
marijuana has always been available and overall potency has increased
only mildly, posing no discernible public health risk. Experts on
marijuana and substance abuse, some whom will be heard during the
first legislative hearing on the bills March 23, regard the governor's
claims as laughable. Unfortunately, the governor seems to have even
less interest in facts than he does in Alaska's constitution or our
citizens' right to privacy.

Alaska needs marijuana policies built on facts and common sense. We
don't need a reckless assault on our privacy based on phony arguments,
and we certainly don't need to divert even more of our already
overstretched police, court and correctional resources away from
prosecuting violent crimes. We can do better than HB 96 and SB 74.