BRATTLEBORO — I attended my first drug-reform conference in Washington, D.C. in 1987. I am a bit ashamed that I started so late in life.
Since then, it seems that my (and our) efforts did very little to help. Today, the U.S. incarcerates more of its young people than any other country, much of the time for drug-related crimes. The proportion of our non-white prison population incarcerated for drug-related offenses is off the scale. Our total prison population per capita is unmatched by any other country (including China and Russia). Too many of our people are imprisoned for so-called “victimless crimes.”
People who contribute to our prison culture have no shame or conscience. They have headline opinions that dumb people down, or they crave getting elected, or they have a big-bucks vested interest in “steel and concrete.” Many of the antidrug freaks from back then are still around now and doing even more harm.
After 25 years of combating the same mindless intransigence, it's possible that you, the reader, would do better and communicate your advocacy with sugar and spice. But, in fact, my problem back then was being too nice. Maybe if I and others had been more aggressive and less passive, we might have saved hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, innocent people from the horrors of our American Gulag.
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Our once-beautiful country is now a penal colony for people who engage in personal, private behavior that is largely innocuous and doesn't hurt others.
There is no wholesale evidence of wrongdoing or bodily harm from marijuana, people. The majority of marijuana consumers are hardworking, taxpaying, responsible adults who do not belong in prison, any more than alcohol drinkers do.
In this state and others, we need to see harm reduction as our primary goal while we reform and change the laws concerning marijuana for adult consumption.
There should be an immediate moratorium on all marijuana arrests that do not involve DWI or public smoking. Private behavior should be protected in the absence of any real crime.
We need protection from the law as much as we need protection of the law.