A Pathway Towards Marijuana Legalization: The Significance of the Democratic Platform

[bluedigger]

by Keith Stroup, NORML Legal Counsel

Among all the speeches and balloons and revelry of the recently completed Democratic National Convention — a convention that has already made history by nominating a woman for president – was a far less obvious, but important change in the Democratic Party platform. For the first time since marijuana was made illegal on the federal level in 1937, a major party platform has embraced a strategy they describe as a “reasoned pathway for future legalization.”

That’s right. While many mainstream elected officials remain skittish of endorsing or embracing potentially controversial social issues, the 2016 Democratic Party finally could no longer ignore the changing attitudes towards marijuana legalization reflected in the national polls, and evidenced by the growing number of states that have already moved in this direction.

The precise text of the history-making marijuana amendment was as follows:

“Because of conflicting laws concerning marijuana, both on the federal and state levels, we encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from its list as a Class 1 Federal Controlled Substance, providing a reasoned pathway for future legalization”

In other words, the Democrats endorsed the strategy legalizers have been following since 2012, when we first legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington, despite the continuation of federal prohibition.
http://blog.norml.org/2016/08/02/a-pathway-towards-marijuana-legalization-the-significance-of-the-democratic-platform/

[Warren DeMontague]

1. It's important.

We need to get Prop. 64 passed in CA, though. That will do more to move the ball forward on legalization than anything else.

[jtuck004]

2. Now that the Cannabis Board has done it's work in WA state, black folks

are still getting locked up for dealing, but the rich white applicants that had the money to meet their qualifications are making money hand over fist.

Black folks and others) who had opened up their mmj shop, were employing people, being responsible, got a letter, told them to shut their shops, because the approved owners were coming.

I remember watching solid, lifelong Democrats show up at the high school many years ago to teach their kids to turn over the black kid's bus, or exhort their kids to beat them. I heard an important Democrat tell us recently that "hearts don't change, not really". She has it nailed.

I guess you can get DWS to quit, but you can't get rid of her support for filling prisons at a profit from their hearts.



******************************************************************************************************

"Black people are arrested at four times the rate of whites for dealing pot, even though whites are up to 32 percent more likely to sell the drug." - From the first link below.

************************************************ ********************************************************
The Failed Promise of Legal Pot

New laws on marijuana were supposed to boost tax revenues and free up cops to go after “real” criminals. But underground sales—and arrests—are still thriving.
It’s just after for dealing, but the rich white applicants that had the money to meet their qualifications are making money hand over fist.four o’clock on a hot Seattle afternoon, and Thomas Terry is standing in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box. Known for fights that end with police sirens and sometimes ambulances, it’s a spot some locals half-jokingly call “Stab in the Box,” but today the scene is quiet.

A man is walking up the street toward Terry and a few other young men who are gathered in the shade of a brick wall where the parking lot meets the sidewalk. As he draws near, one of them opens his mouth, and the words tumble out:

“Kush? You want some weed?”

Whether the man does or not, he says nothing, and keeps walking. It’s the middle of August, two years and eight months after voters in Washington passed an initiative to permit both the possession and sale of recreational marijuana—making the state the second in the nation to do so. In large part, the law was aimed at eliminating the black market for marijuana and redirecting those sales from parking lots and living rooms into stores, where the state could monitor and tax the transactions. Yet, although legal marijuana has generated real declines in arrests, the presence of Terry and the young men on the corner points to a hitch not just in the nuts and bolts of marijuana sales but in one of legalization’s most touted goals.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/legal-pot-and-the-black-market/481506/


Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison

By April M. Short [1] / AlterNet [2]
March 16, 2014
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Ever since Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented move to legalize recreational pot last year, excitement and stories of unfettered success have billowed into the air. Colorado's marijuana tax revenue far exceeded expectations, bringing a whopping $185 million [3] to the state, and tourists are lining up to taste the budding culture (pun intended). Several other states are now looking to follow suit and legalize.

But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, you'll find that the faces of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people [4] who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for possession of the very plant that's making those white guys on TV rich.

“In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [5] in a public conversation [6] on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance [7]. “Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”

http://www.alternet.org/print/drugs/michelle-alexander-white-men-get-rich-legal-pot-black-men-stay-prison