Alaska Update
The Drug Reform Coordination Network has more on how law enforcement agencies are responding to the appeals court ruling that restored (from the court's perspective, clarified) Alaska's status as the state with the nation's most tolerant marijuana laws.
Alaska Chief Assistant Attorney General Dean Guaneli tells DRCNet: "When police come into a home, whether on a domestic violence call or something else, and see marijuana, we are not in a position to tell them to turn their back on it….We are telling the police it is not legal to possess. We will continue to do as we have done. We will file charges and leave it up to the courts."
Guaneli seems oblivious to the fact that the state's second highest court already has said police should not be filing those charges to begin with. "Alaska citizens have the right to possess less than four ounces of marijuana in their home for personal use," a unanimous Alaska Court of Appeals declared last week, citing the Alaska Supreme Court's interpretation of the state constitution's privacy clause.
Greg Wilkinson, a spokesman for the Alaska Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Enforcement, sounds less defiant than Guaneli. "We are approaching this from two angles," he says. "One feeling is that it will be business as usual. That other [is] that it will not." Thanks for clearing that up.
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So what the attorney is saying is you have a better chance of beating the shit out of your wife and getting away with it if she smokes pot than if she doesn’t. ‘Cause she won’t want to get caught with the stuff and go through the legal beating.
Alaskans may have a right under the state constitution (the subject of the judge’s statement), but they do not have that right under the federal Constitution (at least, according to the relevant decisions). Cops, at least where I’m from, take an oath to uphold and defend the constitution of the state and the United States.
“We will continue to file…” I wonder if he means, file in federal court.
The cop’s oath to uphold the federal Constitution imposes no obligation to bring federal charges; the federal laws on pot are not part of the Constitution.
If the local authorities want to make a decision to bring all minor pot possession cases to federal court as federal cases, I guess they can, but my further guess is that the federal judges will be having a private chat with them about how they do not wish to see federal courts and prisons clogged with folks who got caught with a joint.
R.C.
Are you fucking high!? Where have you been the last 30 years. That is EXACTLY what they want.
Good point, Mr Guither. I’ve always held that the forces against med pot are exactly right on their own terms: marijuana must be evil-in-itself in order to be banned, because the actual damage it does is too low. It must be firmly “evil”, and admitting any use of it that would be nearly universally acknowledged as “good” or “very good” would constitute a crack in that dam.
Indeed, the quote from the cop is telling.
“What if we discovered tomorrow that pot was as dangerously addictive as cocaine and heroin?!?”
“Then we could for sure prosecute because we would have evidence of how bad it is” (so bad that caging someone is thus in their best health interest).
But translated, that means TODAY, we don’t have such dire evidence of pot’s risks, but we’ll continue to prosecute anyway, just in case.
It’s fun to hear normally level headed police have to spontaneously defend marijuana prohibition laws.
Youse might be interested to know that there’s a 2 year old organization that is made up of over 500 (and counting) current and former police officers, judges and DEA agents who believe the drug war should end.
http://leap.cc
We saw a similar confusion among law enforcement agencies in Ontario when the courts there declared the marijuana possession law unconstitutional.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that many law enforcement agencies have so bought into the propaganda of the “evil” of drugs/marijuana that they just can’t deal with changing gears and allowing it. (Ontario police suddenly had to deal with citizens asking the police to investigate the theft of their pot!)
There is also an underlying law enforcement fear that pot will be legal and people will use it legally and the sky won’t fall. This could eventually result in a public reaction of: “Why have we been spending so much money and destroying so many lives for something as harmless as marijuana?”
Pete Guthier,
And they’ve got a strong vested interest in the “evil” of something, when the war against that “evil” enables them to steal at will through civil forfeiture, and then sell the loot to buy themselves lots of goodies like military equipment for keeping the occupied enemy (aka citizenry) in check. That is, when some especially attractive loot doesn’t just “disappear” or get sold for pennies on the dollar to someone on the police force.
The people who say the drug war has failed are all wet. It has enabled the cops to virtually suspend the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. That’s what I call success!
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