With the election coming up in a few short months, it's about to heat up.
I don't have a TV, so maybe there is a lot of debate about Proposition 19 going on inside the idiot box, though I doubt it. This here diary is a collection of what's new on the interwebs, however.
The recent PPP and Field Polls are getting attention, and there'stalk of Bradley Effects and....the Broadus Effect? (hat tip to nate silver for the "broadus effect"term coinage...well done, sir)
In other news, booze drinking in the USA is at its highest level in 15 years. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
(flip and dip)
A Rasmussen pollfinds 43% in favor of legalizing, 42% opposed in its poll. Also, 65% of respondents expected that cannabis will be (re)legalized within the next decade.
Great news:
Thanks largely to years of work by a disabled Virginia US Air Force vet who uses medical marijuana, the Veterans Administration (VA) has formally clarified its policy on medical marijuana and will allow patients in its system to use it in the 14 states and the District of Columbia where it is legal. Under VA rules, veterans can be denied pain medications if they are found to be using illegal drugs, and until this policy clarification, there was no exception for medical marijuana use.
The California ACLU has endorsed Proposition 19.
Proposition 19 has a growing coalition of support. The three California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union recently announced their endorsement of the initiative and join a broad coalition of this common sense approach to controlling marijuana, including former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, the California NAACP, labor unions, and law enforcement officials from around the state.
Robert Cruickshank of Calitics and the Courage Campaign put in some work on Prop 19 at the California Democratic Party Executive Board meeting:
I'm here at the E-Board meeting (I'm a member) to support Prop 19. There's a lot of support here for Prop 19, as well as some people who are more skittish about the proposition. Over at FDL Michael Whitney did a good job debunking this, and several E-Board members I've talked to agree that Prop 19 is likely to help Democrats, not hurt them.
After all, rank and file California Democrats support Prop 19 - clear majorities of Dems back it, according to recent polling such as the Field Poll. With 20,000 signatures on the Courage Campaign petition, which I'll be bringing to the Resolutions Committee tomorrow afternoon and the floor session on Sunday, we should be able to win this fight.
In a post after the vote, Cruickshank gave anupdate:
Yesterday the California Democratic Party Resolutions Committee took up the question of November ballot initiative endorsements. After some debate, the committee narrowly rejected Tom Ammiano's proposal to endorse Prop 19, and then unanimously approved the original plan to remain neutral on that initiative.
The speakers in support of Prop 19 - Ammiano and Alice Huffman of the California NAACP - made powerful arguments in support of the measure. Ammiano cited the more than 20,000 signatures we at the Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) gathered in support of the initiative, the stack of which you can see at right, alongside the strong case for Prop 19 on the merits - to provide prison reform, help fix the budget, and to admit that our policy of prohibition has failed.
Huffman's case was even more powerful. Rejecting claims that Democrats should be skittish of Prop 19 out of concern for their candidates on the November ballot, she called on delegates to "show courage" and endorse Prop 19 for the sake of ending the devastating war on drugs that has hit young African Americans and Latinos so hard, and seek a more sensible and rational regulatory policy of cannabis.
However, the more skittish view prevailed on the committee. In spite of the evidence showing that California Democratic voters support Prop 19 and their own party chair's view that Prop 19 will boost turnout for Democrats, these folks worried that Democrats running in purplish or red areas would be hurt if the party endorsed Prop 19, even though some candidates in those kinds of districts already have gone on record in support of Prop 19.
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I think it also misreads the 2010 election. This is a turnout election, not a persuasion election. Democrats win by driving our people to the polls, plain and simple. Prop 19 will bring Democratic-friendly voters to the polls. If the CDP were to be on record in support of Prop 19, those voters might also be willing to cast their vote for Democratic candidates. If the party is neutral, then that might not occur at the levels we'd like.
A couple of thoughts, as I am prone to put at the end of these diaries: I understand the common logical fallacy of "Well, I do not smoke marijuana. So this issue is irrelevant". While I don't expect that voter to GOTV or donate, it is illogical to vote against or choose not to vote for Prop. 19 simply because one does not inhale...that's like saying that only those who DO smoke should vote for it.
This is not an election to decide the single issue of whether human beings should be allowed to grow and smoke a cannabis plant. Prop 19 isn't about letting people get high. If you want to use ANY type of recreational drug, there is a black market to supply it, and no drug war has stopped that. This is to decide whether we should help correct our state budget deficit by spending billion$ less on the prison-industrial complex, and billion$ more on schools, healthcare, state parks, and infrastructure. To date, I have seen no evidence that the prison sentence that I served for marijuana has : made the world any safer, increased tax revenue, hired teachers or public servants, protected anyone's children, or even reduced the supply of marijuana on the street. But if you believe in marijuana prohibition, then you support the deluded fantasy that locking people up for weed achieves ANY of those outcomes.
"Hurry hurry, rush rush, world on the move
Marijuana illegal but cigarettes cool
I might LOOK kinda funny but I ain't no fool"
-andre3000, poet/visionary/member of legendary Southern group OutKast