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Faith and War: What Would Jesus, the Ultimate Progressive Radical, Do? by Cindy Sheehan
Multiply Smallnesses - American Agriculture from Consumption to an Ecology of Hope The InnerView with Gary Holthaus by Peter Moore
Spilling the Beans on Soy by Heidi Sopinka
Nuggets, Hummers & Fish Sticks, Oh My! - Vegetarianism & Environmentalism by Bruce Friedrich
10 Million Americans Busted for Pot - Enough is Enough by Paul Armentano
Moral Breaking Point - Address to People of Conscience by "Rocky" Anderson, Mayor, Salt Lake City
Osama on 9/11: What the Perp says re: Empire, Capitalism & JFK by Michael Dickenson
A Brief Update on Globalization by Russ Beaton
Physicians' Perspective: - Healthcare & Presidential Candidates by Dr. Rick Bayer, MD
Metaphysical Prescription for Better Health - The InnerView with Dr. Steven Hodes by Laurie Sue Brockway
Winter Solstice Blessing by Stacy Anne Murphy
The Turning Wheel - Astrology for rEvolutionaries Winter, 2007/08 by Rhea Wolf
Life Advice from Catherine Ingram
10 Million Americans Busted for Pot - Enough is Enough by Paul Armentano
Since 1990, over 10.4 million Americans have been busted for pot. When will we recognize it’s time to stand up to the war on harmless pot smoking?
What would cops do without weed? For one thing, they’d sure spend a lot less time arresting and processing petty pot violators. How much time? For starters, however long it took to bust the estimated 739,000 Americans arrested for minor pot possession in 2006.
That’s according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/index.html), which recently reported that a record 829,625 Americans were arrested for violating marijuana laws last year. Of those arrested, 89 percent were charged with simple pot possession—the highest annual total ever recorded and nearly three times the number of citizens busted 15 years ago.
Yet to hear local law enforcement spin it, busting small-time potheads isn’t their priority. The record number of busts, they claim, is simply a reflection that record numbers of Americans are now smoking pot.
But don’t tell Drug Czar John Walters that. After all, the czar just claimed—at a press conference announcing the release of the federal Office of Applied Studies (OAS) 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health—that pot use has been declining for the better part of the past five years. (www.alternet.org/drugreporter/61842)
Predictably, both the cops and the drug czar are playing fast and loose with the facts. Yes, in fact more Americans are now admittedly consuming pot today than in 1991 (so much for the past 15 years of the so-called “war on drugs”), but this increase is hardly proportional to the dramatic spike in overall pot arrests.
As for Walter’s comments, while the survey did indeed report a minor decline in adolescents’ self-reported use of pot, it further reported a minor uptick in the total number of Americans who report using marijuana regularly, from 14.6 million in 2005 to 14.8 million in 2006.
Of course, a less than 2 percent increase in pot users from ‘05 to ‘06 doesn’t explain why pot arrests jumped more than five percent from a then-record 786,545 to today’s total. Or why the overall number of annual pot arrests has gone up every consecutive year but two for the past 16 years.
Perhaps the explanation is two-fold. It’s plausible that the federal government is—and always has—greatly underestimated the number of Americans who use pot. (Does anyone really believe that cops are busting—on average—five percent of all pot smokers each year?) It’s also plausible that an outgrowth of the ever-growing number of cops on the street (and citizens’ increasing number of interactions with them) is inevitably leading to more and more pot arrests. However, regardless of the explanation, it seems remiss for police and politicians not to acknowledge this growing trend and its burdensome fiscal and even cultural implications.
The bottom line: Since 1990 over 10.4 million Americans—predominantly young people under age 30—have been busted for pot (www.alternet.org/rights/58346). Thousands have been disenfranchised, tens of thousands have been unnecessarily sent to “drug treatment,” hundreds of thousands have lost their eligibility for student aid, and perhaps an entire generation (or two) has been alienated to believe that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection. These are the tangible results of the government’s stepped up war on pot—results that go beyond the FBI’s record numbers, and it’s high time that politicians and the general public began taking notice.
Paul Armentano has become one of the leading experts on the subject of marijuana use and psychomotor impairment. He is the author of the 2005 report You Are Going Directly To Jail: DUID Legislation: What It Means, Who’s Behind It, and Strategies to Prevent It, the first comprehensive report published by the drug law reform community to address the issue of cannabis DUID law enforcement. He is also respected as a leading authority on the subjects of drug testing as well as the medicinal properties of cannabinoids. In 2007, Armentano authored the booklet: Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids: A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, which reviewed more than 140 clinical and preclinical studies, and is one of the first publication to assess the potential use of cannabis to moderate disease progression. (This publication is available online at: http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7002.) He can be reached at: [email protected]