#LegalizeIt! A modest proposal
Harris County inched closer to ending drug prohibition in Houston last year
Have you heard the name Kim Ogg? If you’re in/around Houston (aka Harris County), you might have — she is the new Harris County District Attorney, and she has some pretty progressive ideas about marijuana and drug law reform.
Here’s the Houston Chronicle, ABC13 and KHOU reporting on the Feb. 16, 2017 press conference in which Ogg announced that — effective March 1, 2017 — possession of marijuana in Harris County (less than four ounces) would not be punishable by confinement or arrest.
That’s huge. It’s not ‘legal weed’ huge, but it’s a major step forward for a city that has not traditionally been at the forefront of drug prohibition repeal.
Prohibition is an interesting concept. We tried it with alcohol in this country, from 1920 to 1933. The effort has ultimately come to be considered a resounding failure, and it’s easy to see why. In fact, a prescient Abraham Lincoln, in response to Illinois’ statewide prohibition of alcohol in the 1840's, once famously declared:
“Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” — Abraham Lincoln
Yet prohibition is essentially the same policy we have today in America for so-called ‘controlled substances,’ which include marijuana. Federally speaking, marijuana is still illegal in the strictest sense, though federal law enforcement — acting on rhetorical cues from the Obama administration — largely gives individual states and communities leeway in terms of the attitude towards marijuana and policing.
How marijuana came to be targeted by the federal government is an even more interesting story, and one we know in great detail, thanks to some late-in-the-game sharing from Richard Nixon’s domestic policy adviser John Erlichman (who, in 1994, told Harper’s Dan Baum the honest, unabridged origins of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’). Baum writes:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” — John Erlichman, Nixon domestic policy adviser
Baum goes on to write:
Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another.
Political utility is no justification for innocent men and women — who have not violated the rights of other citizens in their ‘crimes’ — to lose days, weeks or years of their lives to incarceration and all its attendant consequences.
Consider these sobering (bad pun) articles and statistics: Over 50 percent of inmates currently in federal prison are there for drug offenses; 46,000 People in State Prisons in the US Whose Most Serious Offense was Drug Possession; or, as Time put it: 39% of prisoners should not be in prison.
It’s important to acknowledge: this country’s record isn’t perfect. We love our city, our state and America, and we want to see the U.S. be the best version of itself. That means shaking off the injustices of the past, as we’ve done before. It’s never easy, but it’s always worth it.
Fortunately, Mystiq isn’t alone (far from it!) in wanting what is right for Houstonians, Texans and Americans. Folks at organizations like NORML are working hard to lobby legislators and lawmakers every day. From NORML’s “About” page:
NORML’s mission is to move public opinion sufficiently to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults, and to serve as an advocate for consumers to assure they have access to high quality marijuana that is safe, convenient and affordable.
That’s a mission I think many reasonable people can get on board with.
And, ultimately, these are the reasons we’re proud to serve Houston’s smoking needs. We’re not seedy or shady — our storefronts are brightly lit and our sales floors are welcoming and clean. We don’t operate on the fringes or in the shadows, because we’re proud of what we do.
When we say, “Mystiq is for smokers,” we mean it.
