By James P. Gray
The election in California is over and the results are in: Proposition 19 won the election, but implementation will be delayed for two years. Wait, let me explain.
Yes, I know that the election results showed that only 46.1 percent of the voters favored Prop. 19, and 53.9 percent voted “no,” but nevertheless the proposition won. Why? Because this issue received such a large amount of favorable discussion statewide, nationwide and even worldwide that the subject is now mainstream. And our present policy of marijuana prohibition simply cannot stand public scrutiny.
Once prohibition is banished, California will soon strictly regulate marijuana like alcohol for adults. By doing this, large amounts of money will be diverted away from criminal enterprises like juvenile street gangs and Mexican drug cartels, and instead will be placed in the coffers of state and local governments to be used for education, drug treatment, salaries for schoolteachers and firefighters and fixing potholes.
And that is not even beginning to discuss the financial benefits for our merchants and agricultural industries that will be realized by revitalizing the industrial growing of hemp, which will be treated just like cotton. One could go on forever discussing this multi-use crop, but suffice it to say that farmers can get four times the amount of paper pulp from an acre of hemp as they can an acre of trees, and it takes 20 years to grow the trees, but just one season of 7 to 9 months to grow the hemp.
In addition, during the past election while I was on a radio talk show from Iowa, a farmer came on the line and said that, although he grows corn, he could get more ethanol fuel from an acre of hemp than he can from his corn. Furthermore, the hemp will not clog carburetors nearly as much as corn does.
Today, we do use hemp for a number of products, but we import the raw material mostly from countries like England and Canada, which costs our farmers almost a billion dollars per year. So we are literally punishing ourselves by keeping the cultivation of this highly productive crop illegal.
With all the attention cannabis received because of Prop. 19. for the next two years, this will still be a topic of discussion. And during that time, people will continue to see that marijuana is more available for children than alcohol, that children are not selling Jim Beam bourbon to each other on their school campuses, but they are selling marijuana to each other all the time, and that police authorities are still finding well-engineered tunnels coming across our border with Mexico—making large numbers of bad people frightfully wealthy. All the while government budget deficits will continue to grow.
And then there will be another initiative on the California ballot in November of 2012, and it will be successful. Why? For several reasons. First, during many of the debates I was involved with this past election, large numbers of my opponents, including several chiefs of police, stated both privately and publicly that they had no problem with the regulation and control of marijuana, they just had problems with some of the specific provisions of Prop. 19. Those problems will be addressed and modified in the next initiative.
Second, as stated above, people will continue to see the futility of our present policy, and that the violence and corruption caused by illegal marijuana money in Mexico is now coming into our country. Thus, they will rightfully vote to change away from this failed and hopeless policy. And third, younger voters tend to favor the regulation and control of marijuana, and it is a documented fact that younger voters tend to turn out in larger numbers for presidential elections than in off-year elections.
So as long as we do our homework and come up with a shorter, less ambiguous and more straightforward initiative, the measure will pass in 2012. Then implementation of a new and more effective regulated program will begin.
Your participation in keeping the honest and full discussions going continues to be critical, so keep it up. When you have the opportunity to be on a radio talk show, bring up this issue. Similarly, if you hear people erroneously saying that marijuana is a “gateway drug,” tell them the truth that all studies have exploded that myth.
Finally, when it comes down to it, this is not just a question of finances or even corruption or crime. It really is a question of liberty for adults not to be told by the government what they can and cannot put into their bodies. When the criminal justice system again reverts to doing what it was designed for, which is to control people’s actions and not what they put into their bodies, everyone will come out ahead.
James P. Gray is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court in California, the author of A Voter’s Handbook: Effective Solutions to America’s Problems (The Forum Press, 2010) and can be contacted at JimPGray@sbcglobal.net or through his website at www.JudgeJimGray.com.
