Pubdate: Tue, 23 Oct 2012
Source: Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)
Copyright: 2012 The Daily Camera.
Contact:  http://www.dailycamera.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/103
Author: Christopher N. Tennis

ESTABLISH LEGAL MARIJUANA USE AND REGULATION

The time has come to legalize and regulate marijuana use and 
commerce. It is time to:

1) Start managing and regulating the widespread marijuana commerce to 
actively serve the public, just like we do with alcohol, including 
taxation, ensuring safe ingredients, limiting what is sold, when, 
where and to whom.

2) Stop funding the insanity of the illegal drug trade that brings 
dangerous criminals into our communities and generates violent 
anarchy in Mexico and elsewhere.

3) Accept that the replay of our Puritanical obsession with 
prohibition utterly ignores reality and is impossible to enforce -- 
recreational use of marijuana is simply part and parcel of our 
culture, even if many of us, myself included, don't participate.

4) End the drug war quadrupling of incarceration in our country that 
is bankrupting state and local governments while we pay commissions 
to police departments for every inner-city kid they aggressively 
stop/frisk and arrest for simple possession, generating enormous 
negative impacts of discriminatory policing, insatiable growth of a 
prison-industrial complex, and long-term destruction of families, 
employment prospects and chances for productive citizenship.

Doctrinaire arguments against using a constitutional amendment miss 
the main point. A "perfect" vehicle for significant new law is a 
fantasy that never appears. In the last 50 years, we have 
unfortunately learned that this is exactly the kind of law that must 
be generated by citizen constitutional initiative because state 
legislatures utterly lack the backbone to enact and uphold this kind 
of structural change.

The time has come. Vote 'yes' to establish legal use and regulation 
of marijuana.

CHRISTOPHER N. TENNIS

Boulder
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom