From WFPL News:

The leader of Indiana State Police says he has no objection to legislative efforts to ease penalties for marijuana possession in the Hoosier State.

When asked about the drug in a budget committee meeting, ISP Superintendent Paul Whitesell said he’s spent some 40 years trying to enforce various marijuana laws.

“It’s here, it’s going to stay, there’s an awful lot of victimization that goes with it. If it were up to me, I do believe I would legalize it and tax it, particularly in sight of the fact that several other states have now come to that part of their legal system as well,” he said.

There is a wonderful organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) that keeps growing  and growing.

Yesterday’s New York Times reports that Governor Cuomo will be asking the state legislature to change state law in a way that will sharply reduce the number of people who are arrested in that state each year for marijuana offenses.

Some background–Thousands and thousands of young males in New York City are stopped and frisked by the police each year.  A remarkable number of those stops are illegal at the outset because there was no real reason for the person to be briefly detained.  But once the involuntary encounter begins, an officer might direct the person to “empty your pockets!”  If the stopped person brings out a plastic bag of marijuana, he gets busted for “possession of marijuana in public.”  So the government that does a lousy job with the school system has been making matters worse by giving thousands and thousands of minority males a criminal record, making it even harder for them to establish themselves in the mainstream economy.

Drug warriors like to say “we’re not locking up marijuana users–that’s a myth.”  Some truth in that because there is no longer any room in the prison system.  Most of the marijuana prisoners are involved with the black market trade in some capacity.  Still, tens of thousands of  users do get busted and go thru the system.

 Officials in the Cuomo administration said the marijuana-possession arrests were problematic in part because they subjected New Yorkers, many of them young, to the process of being booked, retaining a lawyer and carrying the stigma of having been arrested. And they argued that the arrests were harming the relationship between the police and young people.

According to Harry Levine of Queens College, there were 400,000 low-level marijuana arrests in New York City between 2002 and 2011.  Prof. Levine presented some of his research findings at a Cato drug policy conference last year.

Mayor Bloomberg’s aggressive stop and frisk policy in New York City is an on-going scandal.  Governor Cuomo deserves credit for this move to scale it back.

The New York Times has an article today about how city officials take children away from parents because of marijuana use.  Here is an excerpt:

Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.

The article explains that even if a child is not immediately removed a “neglect finding” can kill prospects for certain jobs involving kids, such as a daycare assistant, and will make it easier for judges to order a removal down the road.  Even though marijuana use is very common among whites, the neglect and removal cases are mostly brought against minorities.

When drug warriors are challenged about criminalizing marijuana use, they typically deflect the question by saying, “we’re not locking up nonviolent marijuana users.”  Well that’s only because our prisons are overflowing already and they can’t convince enough lawmakers to build enough prison space to escalate the war further.  Second, below the prison numbers a low scale war continues apace–tens of thousands of arrests and court appointments and, as this article shows, child removal proceedings.

New York should follow California’s approach to this issue–if the state can demonstrate actual harm to children from marijuana use, then a neglect case can be brought.  Reporters should ask Mayor Michael Bloomberg whether his past drug use makes him unfit to be a parent or grandparent or to be in an occupation affecting the well-being of kids.