I-502 OFFERS BETTER APPROACH TO MARIJUANA

A ground-breaking marijuana law reform proposal recently began
gathering signatures to be placed before the state Legislature in
January. Initiative 502, supported by New Approach Washington,
replaces marijuana prohibition with a public health approach that
allows adults 21 and over to purchase limited quantities of marijuana
from state-licensed and -regulated stores.

The initiative taxes marijuana and directs new revenue estimated in
the hundreds of millions of dollars annually to drug abuse
prevention, research and education, as well as the state general fund
and local budgets. If the Legislature does not pass it, I-502 will go
onto the November 2012 ballot.

We are two of I-502's sponsors. The others include a former U.S.
attorney, the current Seattle city attorney, the two most recent
presidents of the Washington State Bar Association, a state
legislator, a prominent businessperson, and a University of
Washington professor who is also a marijuana dependency treatment
professional. Some of us are parents and some of us are churchgoers.
We come from different walks of life and all of us care deeply about
our communities.

As public health physicians, the two of us view I-502 through a
medical and public health lens. Our goal is to improve the health of
our patients and communities. And from our perspective, marijuana
prohibition does more harm than good.

The United States now incarcerates more of its population than any
other country in the world. We put one in every 100 adults behind
bars. We represent just 5 percent of the world's population, yet we
house 25 percent of the world's inmates.

As recently noted by Josiah Rich, M.D., and colleagues in the New
England Journal of Medicine, the "war on drugs" has transformed the
land of the free and brave into the world's No. 1 jailer. Twenty
percent of the people in state prisons and local jails, and more than
half of federal inmates, are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses.

In the last two decades, the war on drugs has become a war on
marijuana. In 1991, 29 percent of drug arrests nationwide were for
marijuana; by 2009, that number had increased to 52 percent. And of
those marijuana arrests, 90 percent were for simple possession.

What has the huge cost of incarceration bought us? Broken families,
reduced earning capacity and homelessness but not a reduction in
marijuana use. More than 40 percent of all Americans have used
marijuana at some point in their lives. Few of us believe all users
will be caught or that they deserve to go to jail, have a criminal
record, or lose their rights to a scholarship or an organ transplant.
The 760,000 arrests made nationwide for marijuana possession in 2009
represented less than 5 percent of the 16.7 million Americans who
were current (i.e., past-month) marijuana users. Prohibition isn't working.

But marijuana prohibition isn't simply failing; it's actively hurting
us. Government budgets are a zero-sum game. Every dollar spent
arresting, prosecuting and jailing a person for marijuana use is a
dollar that could have been better spent on schools, family support
services, community development or health care. I-502 recognizes that
investment upstream in preventive services that build healthy
families and communities pays much greater public health and safety
dividends than handcuffs and jail beds.

Moreover, time behind bars compromises the physical and mental health
of inmates. As Rich and his colleagues point out, "Locking up
millions of people for drug-related crimes has failed as a
public-safety strategy and has harmed public health in the
communities to which these men and women return. A new evidence-based
approach is desperately needed."

New Approach Washington's Initiative 502 is such an approach. We
encourage you to sign the petitions to put I-502 before the
Legislature and to support its passage.