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  Date / Time: 11/10/2009 11:52 AM UTC

  The Marijuana Decriminalization Debate Heats Up
  

  

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  By Scotty Reid
  
  While the national health care reform debate is front and center on the national stage, another debate is quietly heating up. This debate centers on whether or not marijuana should be decriminalized. The State of California, which already has legalized use for medicinal purposes, has at least three initiatives that are collecting signatures to qualify for the ballot in 2010. If these decriminalization initiatives make it onto the 2010 ballot and approved by voters, decriminalization could become the centerpiece of national debate. On August 24, 2007, a medicinal marijuana user asked then Senator Obama, if States moved to legalize marijuana, would it be wrong for him to go to prison for using something his State has decriminalized. President Obama’s answer was that he would not direct the Justice Department to prosecute or conduct raids on medical marijuana facilities, as “it’s not a good use of federal resources”. While then Senator Obama said he would not use federal resources to go after facilities, he did not say if individual medicinal users would be prosecuted. With the very strong possibility of total decriminalization in California coming possibly in 2010, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have a federal policy decision to make.
  
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  President Bill Clinton admitted using marijuana, but disingenuously claimed he did not inhale, President Obama has also admitted that he smoked and inhaled marijuana in attempts to self medicate. With America leading all nations in incarceration of its citizens, a large majority have been convicted of simple drug possession. The cost to taxpayers to house these prisoners has been tremendous and the War on Drugs, which has been raging since the Nixon administration, has done nothing to reduce marijuana use or stop it from entering the country. With hundreds of billions spent during the past three decades, if law enforcement was under a results oriented contract, I suspect they would have long ago had those contracts canceled.
  
  Sherwood Ross reports that 800,000 Americans are busted annually for possessing marijuana alone. This is a huge drain on law enforcement, the court system and taxpayers. Ross wrote that “every 36 seconds” someone is arrested “on marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made in 2007”. One thing should be pointed out that he does not cover in his article and that is the fact that the private prison industry is booming in America with many politicians owning stock in these corporations.
  
  In 2008, Dick Cheney was named in a criminal indictment reported as a stockholder in the Vanguard Group, a private prison company. Members of Congress were found to be invested in companies that were awarded military contracts and I am sure that many who are against decriminalization of marijuana hold financial stake in the prosecution, conviction and incarceration of citizens under current state and federal laws. I believe before any honest debate on the issue can be had, public officials must reveal any such ties to the prison industry.
  Census 2010 PSA
   
  
  Scotty Reid is the founder and president of the Black Talk Media Project and the Black Talk Radio Network. He can be reached at scottyreid[@]blacktalkmediaproject.org
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