Just wanted to go a little more in depth into the pot politics of this last election. I see the discussions about cannabis often go in circles like water circling a bathtub drain, and there's a need to elevate the discourse on ALL levels- traditional media, in our communities, and right here on dkos (ppl logged into this site nov.3 to say that "no one in CA cares about gay marriage or pot so stop putting it on ballot and STFU" or "who cares about legalization? the right to get stoned means nothing". )We spend more on prisons than colleges in California, so pot politics is no joke, friends.
So let's take a deeper look at how the politics of this issue are progressing. Whether it's been local city initiatives or state ballots, cannabis has marched forward in almost every battle the last few elections. But on paper, it would look like we "lost" this year, even though an all-time high of 46% of Americans support full-on relegalization.
In what can obviously be considered a "GOP" year in comparison to 08 and 06, one has to consider that all cannabis efforts in this election were up against a VERY caucasian and conservative electorate at the ballot box compared to our prior election. So with that handicap in mind, how did we do?
Well, weed gotmore votes than 160$ million-dollar Goliath Meg Whitman. [insert lame , played-out joke about something going "up in smoke" here.]
Given the conservative "wave" in this election, you'd expect congresscritters and politicians to get scared and run away from progressive positions on marijuana? Well, they certainly did here in California. Boxer, Brown, and Harris all opposed prop 19 for political expediency. And they still won, which is great. But did every politician nationwide do that to protect themselves?
Not Connecticut’s Dan Malloy. He's on record for support of decriminalization, the first step forward towards re-legalization. It's great to see a Democrat stand up for themselves even when the political map/CW says that they should back down and be fearful.
The only two gubernatorial candidates in the entire country who were vocal advocates of decriminalization and medical marijuana – Vermont’s Peter Shumlin and Connecticut’s Dan Malloy – were both declared winners, despite running as Democrats in a year when voters overwhelmingly favored Republicans.
(via MPP)
Although it's been declared dead, keep in mind: the state ballot initiative in Arizona for medical marijuana is not dead yet...they are still counting provisional ballots and we won't know until next week what the final outcome is. I know "almost" doesn't count, but in THIS election in freaking ARIZONA...there shouldn't have even been such a thing as 'almost'. It should have been a blowout loss just like the medical mj ballot in South Dakota (dammit). But it wasn't, and that's heartening. It shows what we've been saying for years:
This issue is NOT a losing issue, and it's only a matter of time, not a matter of "if" . We've pleaded with Democrats to work with cannabis ballot initiatives in '12, if they want to win battleground states out West and possibly in the Northeast as well.
Let's reduce the terrorism in Mexico and border states. Let's spend money on schools, not prisons. Let's take money from cartels and give it to state governments (CA, that is...no one else will be ready to cash in on cannabis for some time save for Nevada perhaps or Oregon/Washington). Let's stop disenfranchising millions of youth and minorities, and encouraging job/housing discrimination for immoral cannabis felony convictions. And let's do this one state at a time, just the same way that we ended alcohol prohibition. Those who say we have to do whatever the DEA tells us to do and get federal law changed first are simply supporting the status quo. Basically, they're being concern trolls.
In local elections in many states, voters overwhelmingly backed saner marijuana laws by rejecting dispensary bans and endorsing proposals for further reform. In Massachusetts, for example, voters in 18 out of 18 legislative districts (comprising nearly 13% of the state’s population) widely approved non-binding measures calling on state lawmakers to pass medical marijuana legislation or a bill to regulate marijuana like alcohol. That support will be crucial to future efforts to improve marijuana laws in Massachusetts – and it lets officials know such change is popularly supported.
So where do we go from here? For starters, I’m advocating for a pair of legalization initiatives in 2012 in California and Colorado – states where support for ending prohibition is highest. And — keeping in mind that marijuana initiatives tend to do better in presidential election years — MPP still hopes to place medical-marijuana initiatives on the statewide ballots of Arkansas, Idaho, Missouri, and North Dakota in 2012. (We also remain optimistic about our chances for passing medical marijuana bills in Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, and New York before then.)
In terms of Congress, we got the most important thing we wanted from the 2009-2010 Congress — the lifting of the federal ban on the local medical marijuana law in the District of Columbia. The 2011-2012 Congress will be more hostile to marijuana, but it won’t have any immediate impact, because we aren’t planning to pass marijuana-related legislation anyway.
Basically, let's stop being the idiotic Prohibitionist Puritan society that our founding fathers like Jefferson would have deplored. (not that tea partiers understand this, they love their nanny state)