Adult Smokers Angry Because of Marijuana New Legislation
In November, prosecutors in Columbia dropped charges of marijuana possession against Wilson Nixon, Gov. Jay Nixon’s son, citing a lack of evidence. When Wilson Nixon was first cited for possession in September, the governor released a statement calling Wilson “a fine young man” and the incident “a private matter that will be handled through the municipal process.”
I have no reason to doubt Gov. Nixon’s estimation of his son, but I cannot help but wonder if the manner in which the municipal authorities handled this “private matter” was influenced by Nixon’s position.
Nevertheless, the governor and I are in agreement that marijuana possession is a private matter — or at least it should be. Unfortunately, the State of Missouri considers marijuana possession a very public matter. In fact, it’s a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison and a $1,000 fine for possession of less than 35 grams and seven years in prison and a $5,000 fine for larger amounts.
Guilty or not, Wilson Nixon did not deserve that fate, but tens of thousands of Missourians are not lucky enough to escape it. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, more than 23,000 people were arrested for marijuana offenses in Missouri in 2007 — 21,000 of them for simple possession.
However, these arrests serve little purpose, as they do not appreciably deter people from using cannabis. When cannabis was first criminalized in the United States in the 1930s, the number of users was vanishingly small. Now, according to a 2008 study from the World Health Organization, 42.4 percent of America’s adult population has used cannabis. That’s more than twice the rate of the Netherlands, where cannabis use is almost fully legalized.
Moreover, young adults are more likely to use cannabis than any other age group. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that in Missouri nearly a quarter of adults ages 18 to 25 used cannabis in the past year, and nearly 15 percent of young Missourians break the state’s cannabis laws at least once a month. Cannabis prohibition has utterly failed to keep Americans — and young people, in particular — from using the substance.
Contrast the explosion of cannabis use under prohibition with rates of cigarette smoking — a habit that is treated as a truly private matter for anyone over 18 years of age since public health campaigns first began highlighting tobacco’s dangers in the 1970s. According to Gallup polling data, 40 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes in the 1960s and 1970s, but by 2008, only 21 percent of Americans reported lighting up in the past month.
That was all accomplished without the government ever arresting a single person, putting them in a cage, or fining them thousands of dollars for ingesting a politically unpopular substance. A combination of higher taxes and greater awareness of tobacco’s harms have persuaded people to voluntarily give up the habit. When presented with accurate and convincing information, the vast majority of people will make responsible decisions for themselves.
But that is not the approach our country has taken with cannabis policy. The complete ineffectuality of our prohibitionist policy is reflected in the fact that in 2010, more high school seniors smoked cannabis in the past month than smoked cigarettes, a product that is completely legal for many seniors. Moreover, as a 1988 report by then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop noted, cigarettes are as addictive as heroin and cocaine. Our success in reducing the use of such an addictive drug without criminal sanctions demonstrates that we could deal even more effectively with the problems associated with far less habit-forming cannabis use if we removed it from the criminal market and regulated it legally.
It is past time that we accept reality and treat cannabis possession the same way we treat the possession of alcohol and cigarettes: as a private matter for informed adults.
About The Author
Comments