CALIFORNIA MIGHT OVERTURN ODIOUS HISTORY OF MARIJUANA LAWS

Close to 40 years after Richard Nixon sparked America's "war on
drugs," California voters this November get to vote on the war's
biggest challenge ever.

It's a ballot proposition making it legal for any Californian 21 or
older to grow or use marijuana. If passed, there will be no more
requirements to prove medical need (today's law in California and 13
other states). Cannabis would be subject to taxes, potentially
yielding billions of dollars in state, county and city levies.

California will be voting in the wake of Gallup polling that shows
nationwide support for legalizing marijuana now at 44 percent, an
eight-point jump since 2005. Support is higher in California --
recent polls show the legalization initiative leading by margins of
56 percent to 42 percent and 49 percent to 41 percent.

But that doesn't ensure passage: Historically, a modest poll lead for
an initiative can melt away, especially as opponents wage fierce
negative campaigns close to Election Day. Stiff opposition to the
marijuana measure is likely from California's "prison-industrial
complex" including police chiefs, prosecutors and prison guards.

Still, the California stage is set by the state's early approval of
medical marijuana and the Obama administration's key decision last
year to reverse earlier policy to shut down marijuana dispensaries
even when countenanced under states laws.

Voters will likely debate social impacts of legalization versus
potential state and local tax gains. But waiting in the wings is a
deep moral issue: How marijuana prohibition laws were written in part
to subjugate minority populations.

Last week, the California State Conference of the NAACP issued an
"unconditional endorsement" of the legalization initiative. Alice
Huffman, the group's president, attacked the current marijuana laws
as a de facto way to criminalize young black men.

She cited a Drug Policy Alliance report showing that while total
marijuana arrests in California spiraled from 20,000 in 1990 to
60,000 in 2008, arrests for "youth of color" rose four times faster.
Federal surveys have consistently shown that young whites are more
likely to use marijuana than young blacks. But in every one of
California's largest 25 urban counties, arrests of African-Americans
for possessing marijuana exceed those for whites. In Los Angeles
County, blacks are 10 percent of the population but account for 30
percent of marijuana arrests.

"It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,"
Huffman said.

And it's not just a California phenomenon. New York City's marijuana
arrests are also racially skewed, reports Harry G. Levine, Queens
College sociologist. Arrests for small amounts of marijuana in New
York City have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, he reports, with
blacks (26 percent of the city's population) making up 52 percent of
arrests, and Latinos (27 percent of the population) 31 percent.

For the cops, this is good business, notes Levine: "Narcotics and
patrol police, their supervisors and top commanders" benefit from
arrests that "are comparatively safe, allow officers and their
supervisors to accrue overtime pay, and produce arrest numbers that
show productivity."

But for youth -- nearly all handcuffed, put into the back of a police
car or van, taken to a local station to be photographed and
fingerprinted, and most often held one or more nights in jail -- it's
a traumatic experience. Often they can escape longer incarceration by
pleading guilty -- but then have a felony conviction likely to haunt
them for life.

Yet New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asked in his first campaign if
he'd ever used marijuana, replied: "You bet I did. And I enjoyed it."
One in three Americans, and two recent presidents, has also tried the weed.

Small wonder. Marijuana has been used by humans for more than 10,000
years. President Nixon's hand-picked commission on marijuana found
that its health impacts are minimal and that the 'gateway" drug
theory has no basis. Yet Nixon, as part of his cultural war on black
militants, hippies and campus revolutionaries, made marijuana a chief target.

He wasn't the first. As Mexican workers brought marijuana across the
border in the early 20th century, local prosecutors and editors
publicly decried the "loco weed." One critic associated it not only
with Hispanics but "Negroes, prostitutes, pimps, and a criminal class
of whites." States began outlawing the drug, one Texas state senator
asserting that "all Mexicans are crazy, add this stuff (marijuana) is
what makes them crazy."

In the 1930s, Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, spearheaded the campaign to make marijuana possession a
federal crime because of "its effect on the degenerate races" -- not
only Hispanics but blacks whom he suggested were deluded by "reefer"
to "think they're as good as white men."

Ironically, polling shows Hispanics as the only California ethnic
voter group leaning against the fall initiative. A refresher on the
odious history of marijuana prohibition ought to be enough to shift that.