Pubdate: Thu, 6 Nov 2008
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Column: Race to the Bottom
Copyright: 2008 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: R. V. Scheide
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Obama
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark:   http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Marijuana - Popular)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Marijuana - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)

OBAMAJUANA

Let's Get Really High on Change. Let's End the Drug War.

How pleasant, to be alive as the old regime gasps its final breaths! 
No, no, no, nurse, the morphine drip won't be necessary. I'm enjoying 
every last painful second of it. Not that the Obama landslide marks 
the final end of the ancien regime. The president-elect remains 
deeply indebted to Wall Street aristocrats, as evidenced by his 
enthusiastic support for the taxpayer-funded $750 billion bailout of 
the very same banksters who crashed the world economy with their $500 
trillion pyramid scheme. Still, to borrow Obama's primary campaign 
themes, we can hope his relentless move to the center this summer was 
simply a ruse to get elected and real progressive change is just 
around the corner.

There'd be no better place to start and achieve immediate results 
than dismantling America's disastrous drug policies and the prison 
industrial complex along with it. Since Nancy Reagan just said "no," 
California's prison population has more than doubled. Thanks in part 
to mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, there are currently 30,000 
Californians incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses, a 
disproportionate number of them people of color. Our prisons are 
operating at double their designed capacity. The response by federal 
and state officials, Republican and Democrat? Build more prisons. Get 
tougher on crime.

Proposition 5 aimed to change all that. Which is why every public 
official with their fingers in the prison industrial complex's pie, 
from the drug czar John Walters to Sen. Dianne Feinstein to 
Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully, vehemently opposed it.

Forgotten amid the controversy over Prop. 8, the patently 
unconstitutional anti-gay marriage initiative, Prop. 5 would 
decriminalize marijuana use and offer more rehabilitation services to 
nonviolent drug offenders, substantially altering the state's 
approach. As SN&R reported last week, after an initial outlay of $2.5 
billion, the program would pay for itself. But you'd never guess that 
watching Feinstein's commercial against the measure.

Feinstein must take her fashion cues from the same geniuses who 
dreamed up the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System. Here's 
Diane in her powder-blue blouse advising us to vote against Prop. 8, 
because all discrimination is bad. Here's Diane in her fire-engine 
red blazer advising us to be tough on crime and vote against Prop. 5, 
even though the ongoing prosecution of the drug war is inherently 
discriminatory.

Never mind the commercial was paid for by the prison guards union. 
Never mind that her husband, billionaire war profiteer Richard 
Blum--who along with CEO Ronald Tutor holds 75 percent of the voting 
stock for Perini Corporation--has made a fortune building military 
bases, prisons and casinos. Perhaps the latter explains why the 
state's American Indian tribes also sponsored the commercial.

On the home drug-war front, Sacramento took a back seat in its quest 
to become a world-class city in September, when the Fresno County 
Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the state's medical-marijuana 
I.D. card system, the 41st county to do so. By remaining one of only 
17 counties that have declined to adopt the system, the Sacramento 
County Board of Supervisors is not only potentially endangering the 
lives of patients by limiting their access to medicine, it's making 
the lives of local law enforcement more difficult, since they have no 
way of easily validating a patient's medical recommendation.

Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed at the Sacramento Police 
Department. According to SPD spokesman Matt Young, "We encourage our 
officers to consider the 'spirit of the law' vs. the 'letter of the 
law,' and handle each event on an ad hoc basis."

Federally, possession of over 28.5 grams is a misdemeanor; less than 
that is an infraction. However, Young says, "If we stop a person with 
what an officer can articulate as an amount a user would have--there 
are no indication of sales--and they have a doctor's recommendation, 
whether or not they are on their way from a dispensary, we have the 
discretion not to cite or arrest. Our tendency would be to do nothing 
and send them on their way, with their marijuana, since if it is 
later determined that the person was entitled to the marijuana, the 
police department is liable for its return. If we can't return it, 
then we can be responsible for the monetary loss."

Pity a majority of the county board of supes can't share the same 
enlightened views of our local constables. Before his move to the 
center this summer, Obama indicated that he favors reforming our drug 
laws, including the decriminalization of marijuana. Let's hope change 
really is in the air, and we're not just all smoking dope. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake