OBAMAJUANA

Let's Get Really High on Change. Let's End the Drug War.

How pleasant, to be alive as the old regime gasps its final breaths!
No, no, no, nurse, the morphine drip won't be necessary. I'm enjoying
every last painful second of it. Not that the Obama landslide marks
the final end of the ancien regime. The president-elect remains
deeply indebted to Wall Street aristocrats, as evidenced by his
enthusiastic support for the taxpayer-funded $750 billion bailout of
the very same banksters who crashed the world economy with their $500
trillion pyramid scheme. Still, to borrow Obama's primary campaign
themes, we can hope his relentless move to the center this summer was
simply a ruse to get elected and real progressive change is just
around the corner.

There'd be no better place to start and achieve immediate results
than dismantling America's disastrous drug policies and the prison
industrial complex along with it. Since Nancy Reagan just said "no,"
California's prison population has more than doubled. Thanks in part
to mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, there are currently 30,000
Californians incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses, a
disproportionate number of them people of color. Our prisons are
operating at double their designed capacity. The response by federal
and state officials, Republican and Democrat? Build more prisons. Get
tougher on crime.

Proposition 5 aimed to change all that. Which is why every public
official with their fingers in the prison industrial complex's pie,
from the drug czar John Walters to Sen. Dianne Feinstein to
Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully, vehemently opposed it.

Forgotten amid the controversy over Prop. 8, the patently
unconstitutional anti-gay marriage initiative, Prop. 5 would
decriminalize marijuana use and offer more rehabilitation services to
nonviolent drug offenders, substantially altering the state's
approach. As SN&R reported last week, after an initial outlay of $2.5
billion, the program would pay for itself. But you'd never guess that
watching Feinstein's commercial against the measure.

Feinstein must take her fashion cues from the same geniuses who
dreamed up the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System. Here's
Diane in her powder-blue blouse advising us to vote against Prop. 8,
because all discrimination is bad. Here's Diane in her fire-engine
red blazer advising us to be tough on crime and vote against Prop. 5,
even though the ongoing prosecution of the drug war is inherently
discriminatory.

Never mind the commercial was paid for by the prison guards union.
Never mind that her husband, billionaire war profiteer Richard
Blum--who along with CEO Ronald Tutor holds 75 percent of the voting
stock for Perini Corporation--has made a fortune building military
bases, prisons and casinos. Perhaps the latter explains why the
state's American Indian tribes also sponsored the commercial.

On the home drug-war front, Sacramento took a back seat in its quest
to become a world-class city in September, when the Fresno County
Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the state's medical-marijuana
I.D. card system, the 41st county to do so. By remaining one of only
17 counties that have declined to adopt the system, the Sacramento
County Board of Supervisors is not only potentially endangering the
lives of patients by limiting their access to medicine, it's making
the lives of local law enforcement more difficult, since they have no
way of easily validating a patient's medical recommendation.

Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed at the Sacramento Police
Department. According to SPD spokesman Matt Young, "We encourage our
officers to consider the 'spirit of the law' vs. the 'letter of the
law,' and handle each event on an ad hoc basis."

Federally, possession of over 28.5 grams is a misdemeanor; less than
that is an infraction. However, Young says, "If we stop a person with
what an officer can articulate as an amount a user would have--there
are no indication of sales--and they have a doctor's recommendation,
whether or not they are on their way from a dispensary, we have the
discretion not to cite or arrest. Our tendency would be to do nothing
and send them on their way, with their marijuana, since if it is
later determined that the person was entitled to the marijuana, the
police department is liable for its return. If we can't return it,
then we can be responsible for the monetary loss."

Pity a majority of the county board of supes can't share the same
enlightened views of our local constables. Before his move to the
center this summer, Obama indicated that he favors reforming our drug
laws, including the decriminalization of marijuana. Let's hope change
really is in the air, and we're not just all smoking dope.