September 7, 2007
10th Annual Hempfest prompts look at weed
Tomorrow is Missoula’s 10th Hempfest – the largest pro-cannabis event in the northern Rockies. It starts at noon at Caras Park, with an array of vendors and live musicians who rock the day – and night – away, up until 10 p.m. It’s a great event, and we hope to see you there.
The 2007 Hempfest makes this a fitting day to assess the effects of Missoula County’s “lowest priority” marijuana initiative, adopted by voters last November. The Kaimin carried an article about this last week – but completely botched it, sorry to say.
The Kaimin article claimed that the Missoula initiative has had little or no effect – which is flatly wrong! The truth is that our initiative already has accomplished more than we expected, more quickly. Meanwhile, we’ve hardly yet begun the wider effort the initiative started; much remains to be done, locally and statewide. But already, Missoula’s initiative has helped set the stage for important opportunities to achieve meaningful drug policy reform in Montana.
Kaimin readers and reporters should care about this, whether they use marijuana or not, because our laws are so extremely unfair. Montana is a state where a minor marijuana arrest shuts off your federal student loan; eliminates you from veterans’ benefits; costs your future eligibility for federal housing or home loans. Most everyone agrees that current marijuana laws are draconian and horribly wasteful of tax dollars. Chasing and jailing marijuana users shouldn’t be a law enforcement priority (as it seemed to be in Missoula, before last November) when so few reported rapes, assaults and burglaries lead to an arrest.
The Missoula marijuana initiative created a citizen oversight committee that will report several months from now on the initiative’s first year. We haven’t yet compiled all the information. Neither the sheriff nor the county attorney has yet provided all the data—but they will. Regardless of how imperfect, no matter how much progress will remain unmade, it already seems clear that the voter decision is producing positive effects.
This is good. After several generations of uninterrupted, factually wrong alarmist rhetoric from the federal government about “reefer madness,” voters everywhere realize that the so-called “drug war” focuses almost entirely on demonizing marijuana and punishing those who use it, unfairly, while achieving no positive results and tons of negative ones in the process.
Missoula County is not alone in this; voters all over the country are more enlightened than people think. After all, more than a third of the adult population in America has used marijuana and knows from experience that it isn’t a “gateway” drug, doesn’t cause violent crime, and that it makes no sense to lock up adults solely for having it.
Last year, Missoula was one of four communities that followed in the footsteps of Seattle and Oakland by adopting “lowest priority” marijuana initiatives. More will follow. How about the city of Missoula, where the vote was overwhelming on the county initiative? How about other Montana communities? Every voter decision of this kind produces more fairness and sensible spending on crime priorities, while sending a loud signal to elected officials that drug policy reform makes political sense.
Over the next year, the Montana Legislature’s interim Law & Justice Committee will study a very important, closely related question—the concept of “alternatives to prison” for nonviolent offenses, including simple possession of any drug. This is an idea whose time has come—the idea of spending less public money to achieve superior results that also are more humane.
People addicted to meth and other dangerous drugs need help and treatment, not prison, and giving them help will be cheaper. Adults who merely choose to use marijuana in the privacy of their own homes ought to be left alone — a smarter policy for all of us. No one can convince those of us working on the front lines of these issues that the Missoula County initiative has had little effect — quite the opposite. Every step in this process counts; every bell of truth and voter wisdom rung anywhere is heard everywhere else.
Come see me at the Citizens for Responsible Crime Policy booth at Hempfest tomorrow. Get involved. You can make a difference for the better, just as the Missoula County initiative has.
Angela Goodhope
Field Director
Citizens for Responsible Crime Policy
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