Marijuana.com

Plainsman1963

Hawaii's Pending Criminal Classification Of Cannabis Is Unwarranted
02.08.07|Hawaii Reporter|By Paul Armentano

Legislation pending in the Hawaii legislature that seeks to reclassify the possession of less than one ounce of marijuana from a petty misdemeanor to a civil violation is a step in the right direction for those who value civil liberties and fiscal responsibility.

To date, 11 states – California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon – have ‘decriminalized’ the use of cannabis so that possessing the drug yields only non-criminal penalties, such as payment of a small fine.

One state, Alaska, has legalized the possession of up to one ounce of cannabis within the privacy an adult’s home. According to numerous government surveys, these long-standing state laws relaxing pot penalties have not led to an increase in marijuana use, nor have they negatively altered adolescents’ perception of the drug.

By contrast, criminal marijuana prohibition has had no discernable long-term impact on marijuana’s availability or use, especially among young people. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, teenagers report that pot has surpassed tobacco and alcohol as the easiest drug for adolescents to obtain.

This result is hardly surprising, given that annual federal data compiled by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project reports that an estimated 86 percent of 12th graders say that marijuana is “fairly easy” or “very easy to get.”

This percentage has remained virtually unchanged since the mid 1970s – despite remarkably increased marijuana penalties, enforcement, and arrests since that time.

Otherwise law-abiding citizens who smoke marijuana responsibly are not part of the crime problem, and the law should stop treating them like criminals.

In 2005, the last year for which nationwide data is available, law enforcement arrested over 786,000 persons for marijuana violations. Of these arrests, 88% were for simple possession only. According to US Department of Justice figures, US taxpayers now spend over $1 billion incarcerating Americans for violating pot laws.

Locally, law enforcement arrest approximately 1,300 Hawaii citizens each year for marijuana violations at a cost of nearly $5 million to taxpayers.

This misguided law enforcement effort wastes limited police resources and distracts personnel from focusing their efforts on more serious public safety activities.

Moreover, criminally classifying cannabis is disproportionate in relation both to its inherent harmfulness, and to the harmfulness of other substances – particularly alcohol and tobacco.

In general, population studies have failed to document demonstrable deficits in neurocognitive performance in long-term pot smokers compared to non-users, nor have they identified many of the significant negative health consequences typically associated with tobacco smoking – such as increased incidences of lung, upper aerodigestive tract, and oral cancers – in cannabis-only populations.

A pair of recent case-controlled studies reported that past use of marijuana, unlike alcohol use, is not associated with an increased risk of injury, including both violent injuries and non-violent injuries such as burns. Self-reported use of cannabis is also associated with a substantially decreased risk of injury requiring hospitalization compared to self-reported use of alcohol and/or other illicit drugs.

Finally, removing criminal penalties for the possession of small quantities of marijuana enjoys support from the majority of Americans. According to the latest CNN/Time Magazine poll on the subject, 76% of Americans favor a fine over criminal penalties for the possession of marijuana.

Marijuana isn’t harmless and the proponents of cannabis law reform do not claim that it is. However, pot’s relative risks to the user and society are arguably less than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the continued arrest of thousands of Hawaii's citizens every year.

According to government statistics, approximately 94 million Americans self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. Senate Bill 1296 and House Bill 1711 reflect this reality rather than denying it. Paul Armentano is the senior policy analyst of NORML and the NORML Foundation in Washington, DC. Reach him via email at mailtoaul@norml.org