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On Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 10:00am in Room B2 at the State House in Boston, the Joint Committee on Revenue in the Massachusetts legislature will hold a public hearing on bill H. 2929, An Act to Regulate and Tax the Cannabis Industry. If passed, the new law would repeal existing marijuana prohibition laws at the state level and replace them with a system of regulation and taxation, similar to how wine is sold. The law, in fact, is largely modeled after the alcohol control laws. According to Northampton attorney Richard M. Evans, a former DRCNet board member and the petitioner whose Representative presented the bill, Wednesday will mark the first time a state legislature has considered a full legalization bill. The moment is also propitious because Massachusetts this year implemented its new, voter-enacted decriminalization law, and because Gov. Deval Patrick, while not prioritizing it, is on the record as being very comfortable with the idea of legalizing marijuana. So while we don't expect that H. 2929 will be enacted this year, it is a rare and important opportunity to forward the debate on alternatives to prohibition. And you can help: by showing up Wednesday if you can; by spreading the word and getting others to come out; by suggesting to your local newspaper that they cover the hearing; and by contacting your state legislators to express your support for H. 2929. Directions to the State House are available here. Please let us know what you're able to do to support H. 2929, and visit http://www.cantaxreg.com for further information about it. Visit http://www.masscann.org to find out about extensive activist opportunities in Massachusetts.

Wow, if the drug czar was annoyed with The Washington Post last week, I wish I could see the look on his face when he reads this:

Cartels Face an Economic Battle
U.S. Marijuana Growers Cutting Into Profits of Mexican Traffickers

ARCATA, Calif. -- Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico. 

Medical marijuana laws have legitimized enough of the marijuana economy to begin vividly illustrating the long-term impact of regulated distribution. The hypothesis has been proven: people don't buy from drug cartels if they don’t have to.

This simple and obvious fact demolishes any attempt to argue that legalization won't work. It's already working. Just watch.

In August, The Washington Post ran a superb op-ed from LEAP members Peter Moskos and Neill Franklin, which called for full drug legalization. The piece was so good that it actually upset the drug czar.

From an October 3rd address at the 2009 International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference:

But I must underscore how important your help on this issue is – on the streets, within the criminal justice system, and in the court of public opinion.  Recently, Peter Moskos and Stanford Franklin, members of a group called "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition," published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for the legalization of drugs.  They claimed that legalization would increase officer safety.   
 
Chief Laine, as President of IACP, responded with a letter to the editor.  The Washington Post did not print it.  This letter, which I am holding in my hand, should have been printed.  As Russ appropriately put it, "The simple truth is that legalizing narcotics will not make life better for our citizens, ease the level of crime and violence in our communities or reduce the threat faced by law enforcement officers. To suggest otherwise ignores reality."

Wait, did Kerlikowske just name-drop LEAP at a major law-enforcement conference? Really? Might as well tell us their url while you're at it, boss. Thanks. I'm surprised, honestly, because mentioning LEAP to a big group of potential future LEAP members strikes me as kind of a bad idea.

I can't think of a better measure of progress in the drug war debate than to find the drug czar uttering the words "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" at a police chief's conference and insinuating that The Washington Post is treating drug warriors unfairly. That's just beautiful.

As the media's longtime love affair with drug war propaganda appears on the verge of collapse, you can't blame the once-proud drug war cheerleaders for lamenting the unfamiliar territory they now find themselves in. But I hope the drug czar and his friends realize that there's a lot more to this story than the fact that LEAP has a fantastic media department. The inescapable reality here is that the drug war's apologists have been spouting the exact same nonsense for several decades now and the returns are diminishing. On the rare occasion that they think of anything new to say, it's a lie.

Meanwhile, the movement for reform is bringing new arguments to the table on a daily basis and it's not just that we're clever, but rather that the drug war itself actually causes new and worse problems constantly. We'll never run out of material. The urgency of our cause becomes more apparent and our credibility continues to grow because the problems we describe are plainly visible to the naked eye. Our job is merely to lay the blame for something everyone already agrees is a disaster.

It took the drug czar's office many years of profound dishonesty to destroy its reputation with the mainstream press, so if Gil Kerlikowske doesn’t like the way his side is being treated in the press, maybe he should be blaming John Walters and not The Washington Post.

Okay, everybody stop, take a breath. Perhaps smile. Reforms to New York state's draconian Rockefeller drug laws have gone into effect today. State authorities have identified about 1,100 inmates who are eligible to apply for resentencing now -- I've also seen the figure 1,500 cited. The Legal Aid Society is already working with 270 of them. It isn't nearly enough. Our article published just before the legislation passed last April outlines some of its deficiencies. If all of those 1,100 gain earlier release than they would have gotten, that will leave another 13,000, and resentencing doesn't mean they'll all get out right away. Of course, the limited scope of the reforms passed by the legislature didn't stop prosecutors from trying to block their implementation. But they failed. This is the second time the legislature has modified the Rockefeller laws -- the first time was in 2004 -- and yet most of the work still lies ahead of us. But 1,100 people, potentially, will have their lives transformed, and another chink has been made in the drug war wall of injustice. To once again make use of a Churchill quote that drug reformers have used before: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." In the meanwhile, watch this video:

Long-time marijuana legalization activist Dana Beal was one of three men arrested October 1 in Ashland, Nebraska, after they were pulled over in a traffic stop and police seized 150 pounds of marijuana. He and the other two men, Christopher Ryan of Ohio and James Statzer of Michigan, are being held in the Saunders County Jail, with bail set at $500,000 for Beal and $100,000 for Ryan and Statzer. Beal, an erstwhile Yippie activist from the 1970s and permanent fixture on the counterculture scene, heads the New York City-based organization Cures Not Wars, which advocates for the use of ibogaine as a treatment for drug dependence. But he is more widely known for acting as an information clearing house for the annual legalization rallies held each May in more than 200 cities around the planet known as the Global Marijuana March or Million Marijuana March. The men were traveling from California, where they had attended the annual conference of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) the previous week. According to local media reports, police stopped the van in which they were riding for "driving erratically," and when the police officer approached the vehicle, he saw "several bags of marijuana in plain view." He then called for assistance, and police then found multiple duffel bags of marijuana, totaling 150 pounds, throughout the vehicle. Last year, Beal was arrested in Illinois on money-laundering charges after police there seized $150,000 in cash and a small amount of marijuana from his vehicle. The money-laundering charges were later dropped, and Beal pleaded guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession. The state of Illinois kept the money. Beal's supporters have begun a fund-raising drive to raise the $50,000 cash bail needed to free him and to pay his legal expenses. See the Free Dana Beal Facebook page, web page, or blog for information on how you can help.

The Texas district attorney accused of participating in an egregious asset forfeiture scheme in the East Texas town of Tenaha now wants to use the very cash seized to pay for her legal defense in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by victims of the practice. The ACLU of Texas, which, along with the national ACLU, is representing the plaintiffs in the case, filed a brief last Friday with the Texas Attorney General's office seeking to block her from doing so. Lynda Russell is the district attorney in Shelby County, where Tenaha is located. She is accused of participating in a scheme where Tenaha police pulled over mostly African-American motorists without cause, asked them if they were carrying cash, and if they were, threaten them with being immediately jailed for money laundering or other serious crimes unless they signed over their money to authorities. Representing a number of victims, attorneys from the ACLU of Texas and the ACLU Racial Justice Project filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in June 2008. According to the suit, more than 140 people, almost all of whom were African-American, turned over their assets to police without cause and under duress between June 2006 and June 2008. If a federal judge agrees that assets were in fact illegally seized, they should be returned to their rightful owners, whose civil rights were violated. In one case, a mixed race couple, Jennifer Boatwright and Ronald Henderson, were stopped by a Tenaha police officer in April 2007. According to the lawsuit, they were stopped without cause, detained for some time without cause, and asked if they were carrying any cash. When they admitted they had slightly more than $6,000, a district attorney's investigator then seized it, threatening them with arrest for money laundering and the loss of their children if they refused to sign off. There was never any evidence they had committed a crime, and they were never charged with a crime. The town mayor, the DA, the DA's investigator, the town marshal, and a town constable are all named in the lawsuit. While they claim to have acted legally under Texas asset forfeiture law, the lawsuit argues that "although they were taken under color of state law, their actions constitute abuse of authority." The suit argues that the racially discriminatory pattern of stops and searches violated both the Fourth Amendment proscription of warrantless searches and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. While either the county or the state would normally be expected to pony up for the DA's legal expenses for a lawsuit filed as a result of her performance of her duties, neither has done so. That's why Russell—with a tin ear for irony—requested that she be allowed to use the allegedly illegally seized money stolen from motorists. She has asked the state attorney general's office for an opinion on whether using the funds for her defense violates the state's asset forfeiture law. "It would be completely inappropriate for the district attorney to use assets which are the very subject of litigation charging her with participating in allegedly illegal activity to defend herself against these charges," said Lisa Graybill, legal director at the ACLU of Texas. "Texas has a long history of having its law enforcement officials unconstitutionally target racial minorities in the flawed and failed war on drugs and it is of paramount importance that those officials be held accountable." "The government must account for the misconduct of officials who operate in its name," said Vanita Gupta, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program, who represented African-American residents of Tulia, TX in high-profile litigation challenging their wrongful convictions on drug charges. "The state of Texas has seen egregious examples of racial profiling that result from poor oversight of criminal justice officials." The ACLU of Texas is using the Tenaha case to push for asset forfeiture reform in the Lone Star State. One such bill stalled in the state legislature this year. "The misuse of asset forfeiture laws by local officials is exacerbated by inadequate oversight," said Matt Simpson, policy strategist for the group. "The legislature must squarely address these reported civil rights violations via reform of forfeiture laws that strengthen protection against unconstitutional conduct and racial profiling."