COURT'S MARIJUANA RULING A BOON FOR LIBERTY

In its April 24 editorial, "Court ruling helps protect drug dealers,"
The Standard-Times turns the state's constitutional protections
against unreasonable searches and seizures on its head, because some
criminals will escape detection. The newspaper ignores the fact that
the vast majority of citizens who possess marijuana are not now, and
never were, deserving of criminal prosecution and punishment.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Supreme Judicial Court twice
rejected constitutional challenges to marijuana prohibition, telling
proponents of limiting the state's exercise of power to change the
law. This they did in 2008 and the court recognized that, in voting
for Question 2, the people recognized that, going forward, marijuana
possessors would not be committing a crime.

Therefore, in the absence of "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of
criminal activity the marijuana possessor, if encountered by the
police, reasonably expects to pay a fine, as Chief Justice Ireland
explained in a footnote: "We do not expect a significant intrusion
into our privacy and liberty." This decision, issued on Patriots'
Day, should remind all that in our state and nation, the purpose of
government is "to furnish the individuals who compose it with the
power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and
the blessings of life."

It should also remind us that our rights exist independent of the
state. In Massachusetts, our rights are set out in part in a
Declaration of Rights and for the nation in the Bill of Rights.
Finally, it should remind us all that when the smell of gunpowder
lingered over battle road, the Spirit of 75 burned brightly.

Steven S. Epstein

Georgetown

Editor's note: Stephen Epstein is one of the authors of the friend of
the court brief submitted by the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws in the Benjamin Cruz case and a longtime advocate
of ending the prohibition of marijuana possession.