By Steven T. Jones
At a time when the recession is forcing tax increases and deep cuts in government spending — and when California is being ordered by federal judges to substantially reduce its prison population — this would seem to be the ideal moment to end the costly, wasteful war on drugs.
That’s the hope of Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who tells the Guardian that next week he will introduce legislation to decriminalize and tax marijuana, a move that might instantly turn a huge drain on the public treasury (at least $17 billion a year nationally, and closer to $50 billion once related costs are figured in) into what saves the state from financial ruin, given that pot is California’s number one cash crop.
“This is long overdue,” said Ammiano, who will work on the measure with John Vasconcellos, who represented the Silicon Valley in the Legislature for 38 years and was the last legislator to really carry the banner for legalizing marijuana. In fact, Ammiano says he’s basically reintroducing Vasconcellos’s bill from 2004, which went nowhere.
Meanwhile, another former member of the Board of Supervisors, Carol Ruth Silver, this week resigned as director of SF’s Prisoner Legal Services program out of frustration with the large number of nonviolent drug users in the San Francisco jail, joining a new Law Enforcement Against Prohibition campaign for the legalization of all drugs.
As she told the Guardian, “The jail is full of people who should not be there.”