The War on Drugs Is Burning Out
By Tim Dickinson | January 8, 2015
Leading at the ballot box from Alaska to Washington, D.C., Americans are charting a path to a saner national drug policy
The conservative wave of 2014 featured an unlikely, progressive undercurrent: In two states, plus the nation's capital, Americans voted convincingly to pull the plug on marijuana prohibition. Even more striking were the results in California, where voters overwhelmingly passed one of the broadest sentencing reforms in the nation, de-felonizing possession of hard drugs. One week later, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD announced an end to arrests for marijuana possession. It's all part of the most significant story in American drug policy since the passage of the 21st Amendment legalized alcohol in 1933: The people of this country are leading a dramatic de-escalation in the War on Drugs.
November's election results have teed up pot prohibition as a potent campaign issue for 2016. Notwithstanding the House GOP's contested effort to preserve pot prohibition in D.C., the flowering of the marijuana-legalization movement is creating space for a more rational and humane approach to adjudicating users of harder drugs, both on the state level and federally. "The door is open to reconsidering all of our drug laws," says Alison Holcomb, who led the pot-legalization push in Washington state in 2012, and has been tapped to direct the ACLU's new campaign against mass incarceration.
On the federal stage, the Justice Department continues to provide what Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, calls "a discreet form of leadership" on state experiments in drug reform – giving tax-and-regulate marijuana laws broad latitude, and even declaring that Native American tribal governments can also experiment with marijuana law, opening a path for recreational pot on reservations in, potentially, dozens of states. Congress, in the same legislation that sought to derail D.C. legalization, carved out historic protections from federal prosecution for state-legal medical-marijuana operations. And in November, in a signature reform for outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the Obama administration lightened prison sentences for federal drug offenders. This reform, modest on its face, nonetheless marks a striking- departure from three decades of ever-harsher federal enforcement. For the first time since Ronald Reagan took office, the federal prison population is shrinking. "We are witnessing a historic sea change," Holder said in a speech this fall, "in the way our nation approaches these issues."
The trajectory of the citizen-led drawdown of the Drug War is clearest in California – where four years ago the pot-legalization movement's biggest stumble, ironically, helped clear a path for one of the anti-Drug War movement's most transformational successes this past November.
Pushing the envelope back in 2010, California activists qualified a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. At the time, Holder warned the Justice Department would "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana prohibition in California. Eager to pre-empt a constitutional crisis over fully legal weed, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger steered passage of a half-measure – an October 2010 law decriminalizing marijuana use.
Continued here http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-war-on-drugs-is-burning-out-20150108
By Tim Dickinson | January 8, 2015
Leading at the ballot box from Alaska to Washington, D.C., Americans are charting a path to a saner national drug policy
The conservative wave of 2014 featured an unlikely, progressive undercurrent: In two states, plus the nation's capital, Americans voted convincingly to pull the plug on marijuana prohibition. Even more striking were the results in California, where voters overwhelmingly passed one of the broadest sentencing reforms in the nation, de-felonizing possession of hard drugs. One week later, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD announced an end to arrests for marijuana possession. It's all part of the most significant story in American drug policy since the passage of the 21st Amendment legalized alcohol in 1933: The people of this country are leading a dramatic de-escalation in the War on Drugs.
November's election results have teed up pot prohibition as a potent campaign issue for 2016. Notwithstanding the House GOP's contested effort to preserve pot prohibition in D.C., the flowering of the marijuana-legalization movement is creating space for a more rational and humane approach to adjudicating users of harder drugs, both on the state level and federally. "The door is open to reconsidering all of our drug laws," says Alison Holcomb, who led the pot-legalization push in Washington state in 2012, and has been tapped to direct the ACLU's new campaign against mass incarceration.
On the federal stage, the Justice Department continues to provide what Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, calls "a discreet form of leadership" on state experiments in drug reform – giving tax-and-regulate marijuana laws broad latitude, and even declaring that Native American tribal governments can also experiment with marijuana law, opening a path for recreational pot on reservations in, potentially, dozens of states. Congress, in the same legislation that sought to derail D.C. legalization, carved out historic protections from federal prosecution for state-legal medical-marijuana operations. And in November, in a signature reform for outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the Obama administration lightened prison sentences for federal drug offenders. This reform, modest on its face, nonetheless marks a striking- departure from three decades of ever-harsher federal enforcement. For the first time since Ronald Reagan took office, the federal prison population is shrinking. "We are witnessing a historic sea change," Holder said in a speech this fall, "in the way our nation approaches these issues."
The trajectory of the citizen-led drawdown of the Drug War is clearest in California – where four years ago the pot-legalization movement's biggest stumble, ironically, helped clear a path for one of the anti-Drug War movement's most transformational successes this past November.
Pushing the envelope back in 2010, California activists qualified a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. At the time, Holder warned the Justice Department would "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana prohibition in California. Eager to pre-empt a constitutional crisis over fully legal weed, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger steered passage of a half-measure – an October 2010 law decriminalizing marijuana use.
Continued here http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-war-on-drugs-is-burning-out-20150108
