October 27, 2010 – By GEORGE SOROS – Our marijuana laws are clearly doing more harm than good. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.

Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition. The roughly 750,000 arrests they make each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana represent more than 40% of all drug arrests.

Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually. It also would reduce the crime, violence and corruption associated with drug markets, and the violations of civil liberties and human rights that occur when large numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens are subject to arrest. Police could focus on serious crime instead.

The racial inequities that are part and parcel of marijuana enforcement policies cannot be ignored. African-Americans are no more likely than other Americans to use marijuana but they are three, five or even 10 times more likely—depending on the city—to be arrested for possessing marijuana. I agree with Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, when she says that being caught up in the criminal justice system does more harm to young people than marijuana itself. Giving millions of young Americans a permanent drug arrest record that may follow them for life serves no one’s interests.

Racial prejudice also helps explain the origins of marijuana prohibition. When California and other U.S. states first decided (between 1915 and 1933) to criminalize marijuana, the principal motivations were not grounded in science or public health but rather in prejudice and discrimination against immigrants from Mexico who reputedly smoked the “killer weed.”

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade—and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity. Some claim that they would only move into other illicit enterprises, but they are more likely to be weakened by being deprived of the easy profits they can earn with marijuana.

This was just one reason the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy—chaired by three distinguished former presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico—included marijuana decriminalization among their recommendations for reforming drug policies in the Americas.

Like many parents and grandparents, I am worried about young people getting into trouble with marijuana and other drugs. The best solution, however, is honest and effective drug education. One survey after another indicates that teenagers have better access than most adults to marijuana—and often other drugs as well—and find it easier to buy marijuana than alcohol. Legalizing marijuana may make it easier for adults to buy marijuana, but it can hardly make it any more accessible to young people. I’d much rather invest in effective education than ineffective arrest and incarceration.

California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize the recreational use and small-scale cultivation of marijuana, wouldn’t solve all the problems connected with the drug. But it would represent a major step forward, and its deficiencies can be corrected on the basis of experience. Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws. And just as California provided national leadership in 1996 by becoming the first state to legalize the medical use of marijuana, so it has an opportunity once again to lead the nation.

In many respects, of course, Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on Election Day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.

These are the reasons I have decided to support Proposition 19 and invite others to do so. By GEORGE SOROS. Source.

Mr. Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and founder of the Open Society Foundations.

September 28, 2010 – At precisely 4:20 PM last Saturday, proponents and foes of legalizing marijuana in California were scheduled to hold a debate at the International Cannabis and Hemp Expo (abbreviated as INTCHE—TCH being pot’s most popular active ingredient) inside the Cow Palace arena just outside San Francisco. Things didn’t go as planned. “The whole debate thing was just a disaster,” organizer Susan Soares later told me. For one thing, the debate’s starting time posed a logistical problem. While 20 past 4 is stoner culture’s designated hour to light up, the debate room was not within the official pot smoking area where anyone with a medical marijuana card—which meant just about everybody in attendance—could freely sample marijuana-infused fruit smoothies, lollipops, and beef jerky, in addition to joints proffered by busty cigarette girls in tight-fitting nurses outfits.

But no matter: While everyone was still partaking, Dennis Peron, a fervent medical marijuana activist who opposes legalization on arcane legal grounds, held the stage hostage for several minutes in an effort to be added to the speakers list. The actual debate didn’t start until 4:48, at which point the crowd of red-eyed pot growers, suppliers, and smokers was standing-room only.

At the center of the heated showdown was Proposition 19, a November ballot initiative that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of weed for recreational use. As an emcee tried to introduce the first speaker, Prop. 19 architect Richard Lee, he was overwhelmed by boos and jeers. Some pot farmers, doctors, and pot-dispensary owners fear that legalizing the drug will eliminate their jobs or expose them to competition from industrial-scale growers. “I need everyone in the crowd to act like an adult. Right now!” the emcee yelled fruitlessly. He then asked “the adults” in the crowd to raise their hands. The room grew quieter.

But not for long. Lee, the founder of Oaksterdam University, a marijuana cultivation school in Oakland (“Quality traning for the cannibis industry”), wore aviator sunglasses that made him look like a fighter pilot about to strafe the crowd. “We’re all for legalization here, right?” he began, mildly enough, before exploding: “We’re all for fucking legalization! So fuck these guys who want to keep fucking up out of Mexico!” He went on, a bit cryptically, “Thirty thousand people are dead! We’ve got to move to legalization, it’s that simple. This is the best we can do right now.” Applause and cheers clashed with cries of “You suck!”

“I’m hiding behind you if a fight breaks out,” Derek Oppedisano, a Prop. 19 supporter and co-owner of weGrow, an Oakland hydroponics store, told me. “I’m too stoned to throw punches.” I pointed out that pot smokers are supposed to be peaceful. “I’m telling you, man, when economics gets involved, it changes everything,” Oppedisano said. A year from now, he predicted, the pot business “is gonna be as ruthless as Wall Street.”

The No on 19 side was represented by George Mull, an attorney for cannabis companies. He agreed that “we are all in favor of legalization” but argued that Prop. 19 is so brazen that it could provoke the federal government to bust California’s entire marijuana industry. “I don’t know which ones of you want to step up and risk not going home to your families for the next 20 years,” he said. “But I never tell my clients to and I’d never wish it on any one of you.”

Next up, Chris Conrad, the publisher of West Coast Leaf, argued that everyone should stop being paranoid and vote yes on legalization. He was loudly booed. “Oh wow, listen to the little children crying!” Conrad sneered as he curled up in his chair and made as if to suck his thumb. “They are so afraid to hear the truth.” “Prop. 19 kicks ass over Prop. 215,” he said, referring to the 1996 voter initiative that legalized medical marijuana. “If you are so stupid to vote no on Prop. 19, you are taking that message around the world.”

Nobody in the hemp expo crowd seemed upset when Bishop Ron Allen, head of the International Faith Based Coalition and the final No on 19 speaker, cited a study that legalizing pot in California would increase usage by 100 to 150 percent. But he soon alienated both sides of the crowd when he equated pot dealers with snake handlers. The decision to smoke pot, he explained, is like saying, “So why don’t we go get a rattlesnake or a cobra?”

“You’re the rattlesnake!” chanted Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the Harborside Health Center, an Oakland medical marijuana dispensary. Several others joined him. It might have been the only thing said during the entire debate that everyone seemed to agree on. Source.