WHAT'S NEXT FOR MARIJUANA REFORM?

New Year's Day marked the first anniversary of marijuana
decriminalization in the Commonwealth. The statistics aren't in yet,
and when they emerge different spins will be put on the impact of the
new law. However, a glance out the window assures us that the sky
hasn't fallen, despite the warnings of the 2008 initiative's shrillest
critics, mostly self-serving career "public servants."

To their great credit, 65 percent of our fellow citizens saw through
the old bromides and found the courage to declare that we gain nothing
by wrecking people's lives for small amounts of pot, and we can't
afford to waste scarce law enforcement resources that ought to be
focused on real, predatory, crime.

But that was last year. What's next?

Nationally, all eyes are on California, where an initiative is headed
to the November 2010 ballot that would allow localities to control,
tax and regulate marijuana cultivation, distribution and sales.
Organizers have collected well over the required signatures, assuring
them of a place on the ballot. The most recent Field poll puts voter
support at 56 percent.

If the initiative passes, it will not legalize marijuana; rather, it
will merely repeal the state prohibition laws, leaving marijuana
illegal under federal law. Thus California voters will have deftly
ceded sole responsibility and burden of suppressing marijuana to
federal authorities.

A splendid kerfuffle will erupt. Prohibitionists will howl about a
federal-state "conflict," and maybe even a "constitutional crisis,'
but it will be no such thing. There's very solid historical and legal
precedent for this state of affairs.

In 1923, three years after alcohol prohibition went into effect under
both federal law and the law of most states, New York repealed its
prohibition laws, and for the remaining 10 years of Prohibition, only
the "feds" pounded on speakeasy doors. Notably, New York City escaped
much of the prohibition-related crime and violence that plagued other
large cities, like Chicago and Detroit.

Bills to legalize, regulate and tax the cannabis industry at the
statewide level have been introduced in California, Washington and New
Hampshire (and Massachusetts, if you include a petition from one of
the authors). A special commission of the Rhode Island Senate is now
studying the efficacy of marijuana prohibition and the options for
significant reform. Expect a bill to be introduced there too.

As three-quarters of the states now face a serious fiscal crisis, and
the search for new taxes and economic opportunities intensifies,
turning our collective back on the revenue prospect of a taxed,
regulated cannabis market, and the jobs that it and a liberated hemp
industry would produce, seems imprudent and irresponsible.

Marijuana prohibition, in short, is a luxury taxpayers can no longer
afford.

In Massachusetts, there is no expectation that the legislature will
join the mix, as marijuana law reform has long been perceived as the
third rail of politics: touch it and you're dead. Why that perception
endures after fully 65 percent of voters declared their support for
decriminalization, representing 349 cities and towns out of 351, is
baffling.

When politicians shrink from an issue, citizens must lead, as they
proudly did in the abolition of slavery, ending the Vietnam war, and,
in Massachusetts, with marijuana in 2008. By passing the initiative,
voters not only protected families from unnecessary entanglement in
the criminal justice system, and stopped wasting law enforcement
resources, but legitimized debate on this subject.

No living person is responsible for inventing marijuana prohibition.
It was conceived almost 100 years ago in a cultural and racial climate
very different from our own, and very different from that to which we
aspire. Prohibition's collapse is unstoppable. Preparing to replace it
will be the test of leadership in the new decade.